The Huge Blunder: When the NVA Occupied a Village Next to an Australian Outpost in 1969

The Huge Blunder: When the NVA Occupied a Village Next to an Australian Outpost in 1969

It’s barely 8:00 in the morning and you’re heading north on Route 2 in a 50-ton Centurion tanker.  The town to your right seems to be asleep. Neat brick houses, a small church, a small school. Then, a flash comes out of a door and a rocket-propelled grenade goes straight through your turret.

  Two of your men are hit.  You return fire, move on, and tell yourself that you only surprised a couple of lost guerrillas.  What no one knows yet is that a reinforced force of North Vietnamese regulars is entrenched in that quiet little town waiting for the rest of you to enter. Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam , June 1969.

 5 km to the south was Nui Dat, the base of the 1st Australian Task Force.  Australia had deliberately chosen this province , close to the port of Vung Tau and away from American units, so that the Australians could conduct their own war in their own way.  And stationed within that base on permanent alert was something they called the Immediate Reaction Force.

  An infantry company, a tank platoon, and an armored personnel carrier platoon ready to move in 30 minutes. Ready to respond to any serious threat against the people of the province.  According to the Australian War Memorial, in the years prior to this, the men here had fought mainly in the jungle and open countryside.

  Ambushes, patrols, and bunker systems in the bush.  What was about to happen in the village of Binh Ba would be nothing like that.  It would be street fighting, house by house.  The kind of close-quarters combat that Australians used to do everything possible to avoid.  Tank historian Bruce Cameron, who commanded tanks in Vietnam, would later call it simply “the finest day for tanks in the war.

”  For a while, the situation surrounding Nui Dat seemed really manageable.  That didn’t last.  In early June, the newly arrived 6th Battalion advanced north in an operation and began clashing with large formations of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, one after another.  And on the afternoon of June 5, under the cover of all that chaos, a strong communist force slipped into Binh Ba and simply took it over .

  They expelled the local defenders, raised their flag over the market, and barricaded themselves inside.  Now, a brief correction, because it’s important.  This force is almost always simply called NVA.  That is a fair shorthand term for the regulars of the 33rd North Vietnamese Regiment, who formed the backbone of the defense.

  But both the War Memorial and the Department of Veterans Affairs describe it more carefully as a combined force. North Vietnamese regulars reinforcing the main Viet Cong force and local guerrilla units. Real soldiers, well armed and, according to reports, ready and willing to fight for that town.  And the next morning, that solitary Centurion came rolling down the road.

  The tank wasn’t even looking for a battle.  It was advancing to exchange its position with another tank that was supporting the infantry to the north.  The rocket that hit him came from a house just 20 meters from the road.  It injured one crew member and the tank continued on while the recovery vehicle behind it retreated towards Nui Dat.

  The two men in that tank, gunner Roy Dodd and driver Ray Collins, would be best friends for the rest of their lives.  As Dodd told the War Memorial decades later, it was just two guys in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Here’s a detail that shows how little anyone understood at that time.  The commander of the 5th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Khan, believed then, and continued to believe for more than 30 years, that the shooting was simply poor fire discipline from a wayward enemy soldier.

  A mistake, not a battle.  Two local platoons from South Vietnam entered to investigate.  They were immediately repelled by intense fire.  The district chief asked for help.  The request went up the chain of command until it reached the Australians.  Less than an hour later, the man in command of the rapid reaction force sat down for his briefing.

  His name was Major Murray Blake, Commanding Officer of D Company, 5th Battalion.  And his orders were quite simple: go and clear the town.  Blake, based on the intelligence he had, expected perhaps a couple of Viet Cong platoons.  According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, he told his company sergeant major that this didn’t seem to be a big deal.

  He was so carefree that he brought along six newly arrived reinforcements just to have the new men test the field.  That casual decision would haunt this story before the day was over.  This is where it takes a turn that no one expected.  The rapid reaction force left Nui Dat and lined up at the edge of Binh Ba.  65 men from Company D advanced with the tanks and transport vehicles.

  Understand how small that company really was.  On paper, it should have had around 120 personnel.  It was barely half, and most of its sections were not led by officers, but by corporals and soldiers.  At around 11:30, the district chief told them that the civilians had left.  Go in and do what you have to do.  Then they rode in, with tanks in front, vehicles deployed across the village, and a platoon dismounting to guide the last terrified families out of danger .

  And near the center of the village, around the market, the whole place erupted.  They were not two stray platoons.  Assault rifles, machine guns, and rocket after rocket began to erupt from the houses. It quickly became clear that D Company had fallen to regular North Vietnamese forces fighting from prepared positions, from doors and windows, and from bunkers dug under the floors;  the same shelters that the villagers had built to survive the war.

    Every single tank was hit.  A troop leader, Second Lieutenant Brian Sullivan, was standing in his turret directing his tanks when he saw the smoke trail of a rocket coming straight towards his head.  He had time to shout just one word: “Get down!”  And throw yourself to the ground.  The rocket passed close enough to cut his shirt and graze his shoulder.

  The War Memorial records that Sullivan was one of the lucky ones. Other crew members were not .  Then it got worse.  From above, the helicopter detected a second enemy group.  Dozens more moving to flank and cut off the Australians.  With the tanks damaged, the commanders wounded and bleeding, and a fresh enemy approaching, the assault halted.

  This was no longer a quick sweep by a couple of platoons.  It was a direct fight against an entrenched force that clearly outnumbered the men sent to clear them out .  Gunboats from squadron number nine came thundering down from above.  The vehicles riddled the buildings with everything they had.  And under that cover, the entire force withdrew from the village to regroup, instead of sending men into the fire little by little.

  They had been taken by surprise and had suffered casualties.  But they were n’t finished.  That was just the first round.  Back on the edge of the village, all the machinery went to work.  The helicopters carried replacement crews directly into the fighting, evacuated the wounded, and transported fresh ammunition for the weapons that had been firing almost nonstop.

  More tanks arrived from Nui Dat.  Company B was mobilized to seal off the other side of Binh Ba so that not a single enemy soldier could escape into the rubber plantation.  And command of the escalating battle passed to Colonel Khan himself.  What had started as a task for a small company had turned into a full-blown armored battle.

  And now, the Australians were going to fight on their own terms.  A brief interlude before the second round begins.  The Australians in Binh Ba were fighting the visible war, the one with tanks, flags, and a town you could find on the map .  But a few hundred kilometers away, along the borders of Cambodia and Laos, a very different war was being fought in almost total secrecy by US special operations.

Small reconnaissance teams crossing borders that officially did not exist.  If that hidden half of the Vietnam War is what really intrigues you, I’ve prepared an in-depth archival analysis, and you can find the link in the description.  Now, let’s go back to Binh Ba.  This time, the Australians did not load their vehicles.

  It was slow, deliberate, and much more dangerous.  Infantry on foot , a tank and two transports behind each platoon, clearing the village the hard way, house by house, room by room.  That is where the only Australian casualty of the battle occurred.  Private Wayne Teeling, a national service soldier and one of the reinforcements who arrived that morning, was hit in the neck in the first row of houses and died.

  A tank fired a high-explosive shell at the building from which it had been fired upon, and six enemy soldiers were found dead inside.  House by house, the tanks breached the walls, swept the rooms with shrapnel, and the infantry cleared what remained. By nightfall, the attack had reached the opposite end of the village.

  Binh Ba had been taken and the enemy force was defeated.  So why did they do it ? Why would a reinforced regiment stay and die in a village 5 km from a base full of tanks?  That question remains a subject of debate.  Ashley Eakins, former head of military history at the Australian War Memorial and author of two volumes of the official history, calls the enemy’s reasoning a true mystery and admits that we may never know what they intended.

But historian Ernest Chamberlain, who translated the histories of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units , argues that there was a plan.  The enemy intended to use Binh Ba as a decoy and lure the Australian reaction force into an ambush on the road, an old tactic they called “luring the tiger down the mountain”.

  If that was the case, it was a complete failure.  The ambush was never activated and the enemy was caught out in the open against the type of combined tank and infantry attack for which the Australians were designed.  Which brings us to the figures, and here we must be careful because they do not all agree.  The Australians lost one man and had about 10 injured.

  On the other side, the counts vary.  And honesty means giving them the rank instead of a single number.  The War Memorial puts enemy casualties at 99, mostly from the 33rd Regiment. Gary McKay and Graham Nicholas put them at at least 107. An unconfirmed count reached 126, while modern Vietnamese histories compiled by Chamberlain confirm at least 53 killed from the 33rd alone.

Whatever the true figure, it was a complete defeat.  Chris Coulthard-Clark in his Encyclopedia of the Battles of Australia notes that Bin Ba earned a battle honor, one of only five awarded to Australian units throughout the war.  But a defeat is not the same as a clean victory, and this is where the myths need to be clarified.

  Sometimes you’ll hear that Binh Ba was simply razed.  That wasn’t the case.  Ekins, based on the survey conducted afterwards by Australian Civil Affairs teams, records that approximately one in five homes was completely destroyed and about half were damaged.  As he said, the working group neither destroyed the town nor saved it, but rather severely damaged it.

  It was largely rebuilt in one month. You will also find this portrayed as an atrocity, based on a photograph of enemy dead laid out in the town square.  The War Memorial clearly states that those images were later used to support unfounded accusations of war crimes.  The dead were combatants, killed during two days of real fighting.

  What is certain, and what the veterans have never hidden, is that civilians also died here.  Veterans Affairs states that a large, but unknown, number of civilians died, and notes that some enemy soldiers donned civilian clothing during the fighting, making an already impossible task even more difficult.  That cost weighed heavily on the men who were there.

  Major Murray Blake , the officer who led his small-strength company into that town expecting almost nothing, spoke years later about carrying that burden back home. There was a sense of accomplishment, and you know, a relief in the sense that you were coming home in one piece.  Feelings of sadness for the people who did not return home and for those who had been maimed.

  Without a doubt , there is no question about that.  We had shared that unique experience on the battlefield, and it’s a very unifying experience in the sense that, you know, you’ve shared the danger.  You have shared the camaraderie.  I think I have a very clear understanding of what is important in life and what is not.

  I can let many trivial things slide .  Because the battlefield is a place to sort out what is truly important and what is not. Because that’s the part that the highlights recap always omits. Ben Bau destroyed the 33rd Regiment so badly that it was forced to leave the province.  And it is remembered as one of the great Australian victories of the war.

  But it was won at close range, within someone’s hometown.  And it cost a life.  Private Wayne Teeling never met his son. He was 21 years old.  He died on his first day of combat.  And her son was born months later.  Back home, in Australia.  And he received his father’s name.  Ben Bau is a story about tanks and about a mistake that destroyed a regiment.

  But it’s also about a young man who stepped off a helicopter one quiet morning, walked toward a row of silent houses, and never returned.  If you want more history told in this way—direct, based on sources, and honest about what it cost— subscribe and stay with me.  There’s still a whole war to understand.