What US Soldier Radioed During The Battle Of Long Tan In 1966 

What US Soldier Radioed During The Battle Of Long Tan In 1966 

On the morning of the 18th of August, 1966, in a rubber plantation, 4 km east of the Australian base at Nui Dat, 108 men of Delta Company, 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, walked into an enemy force the Australians later estimated at between 1,500 and 2,500 fighters. You have probably heard that story.

The monsoon rain hammering down through the rubber trees, the red mud, the ammunition running out. What you have almost certainly not heard is that parked inside the wire at Nui Dat, behind those Australians, sat six American howitzers with American crews. And when the fighting reached its worst point, those American guns were part of what saved Delta Company.

27 days before the battle, those Americans had never laid eyes on the Long Tan rubber plantation. Their battalion had shipped out from Fort Carson, Colorado, and according to Shelby Stanton’s Vietnam Order of Battle, the 2nd Battalion, 35th Artillery, arrived in Vietnam on the 17th of June, 1966. They set up first at Xuan Loc, a provincial capital about 50 km east of Saigon, under the 23rd Artillery Group.

So, how did an American gun battery end up living inside an Australian base? The Australian Army Research Center lays out the answer plainly. The Australian Task Force at Nui Dat had no medium artillery of its own. Australian and New Zealand batteries were equipped with the 105 mm pack howitzer, a light gun designed to be moved fast.

What the Australians wanted was reach and weight of shell. So, they went to the American 2nd Field Force Headquarters, the core-level command running the southern half of South Vietnam, and asked for a 155 mm unit to be stationed at Nui Dat permanently. The request landed at a strange moment. The battery’s incoming executive officer, Lieutenant Chuck Heindricks, a West Point graduate, happened to be sitting in that Second Field Force Headquarters when it came through.

His own guns were still somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, the Americans sent him south to Phuoc Tuy province alone as a liaison officer to work out how this was going to function before a single howitzer arrived. On the 22nd of July, 1966, a battery rolled into Nui Dat with six M109 self-propelled howitzers and dug in on the southwest corner of the task force perimeter.

They called themselves the Huskies. And according to the Australian Army Research Center, the Second Battalion, 35th Artillery, holds a distinction no other American unit in the entire Vietnam War can claim. It was the only American unit to serve as a regular, integral component of a foreign combat force.

That is not loose wording, by the way. Not attached for an operation. Not loaned for a week. American soldiers under Australian command and control permanently. The man commanding that battery was Captain Glenn Eurich. And here is a small thing worth fixing because it tells you a lot about how history gets copied rather than checked.

Search his name online and you will mostly find him listed as Captain Glenn Eure. That spelling has been copied from order of battle listings into encyclopedia pages and then into video scripts for decades. But, the Australian War Memorial holds a recording made in 1966, cataloged under accession number S03493, of the officer commanding Battery A being interviewed by an Australian major.

On that recording, he is Captain Glenn Yuri. The primary source and the internet disagree, and the primary source was in the room. What Yuri describes on that tape is genuinely strange for a Vietnam war story. His battery was the first American unit to come under Australian command and control.

 It was the first to draw a rum ration through the Australian quartermaster system. It hung a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in the officers mess. Some of his gunners painted red kangaroos on the sides of their M109s and started wearing Australian bush hats. In their own heads, they were not really an American battery anymore.

They thought of themselves as the fourth battery of the first Australian Field Regiment, which, looking back, was either very good soldiering or a quartermaster’s nightmare. Possibly both. None of that would have mattered on the 18th of August if the two armies could not shoot together, and they very nearly could not.

The Americans computed their firing solutions with slide rules and printed tables. The Australians and New Zealanders used a circular wheel chart. The Americans laid their guns using stakes driven into the ground. The Australians used mirrors. Even the radio discipline was different, with Australian voice procedure noticeably more formal and more precise than the American style.

What held it together was a shared standard. Both armies worked to American, British, Canadian, and Australian procedures, and the Australian Army Research Center records that none of those differences stopped the guns from firing together accurately, which is fortunate because on the afternoon of the 18th of August, the entire thing was about to be tested at once.

Delta company made contact in the rubber plantation in the early afternoon in rain heavy enough to gray out the trees. Fire was called not by an Australian and not by an American, but by a New Zealander. Captain Mori Stanley of the 161st battery, Royal New Zealand artillery, was the forward observer attached to Delta company headquarters, and he spent the next 3 and 1/2 hours walking artillery in around men he could barely see.

For a while, the New Zealand and Australian guns already firing were enough. As the light went and the rain thickened over the plantation, that stopped being true. At 19 minutes past 4:00, Stanley asked for a regimental fire mission. That means every gun in the regiment, all 24 of them, firing on the same target.

 12 Australian and six New Zealand 105-mm howitzers, plus the six American 155-mm guns of A battery. The request was initially refused because other batteries at Nui Dat were committed to supporting other units. Then, the fire support coordination center granted it. You will hear it said on podcasts and on a number of websites that the Australian army had not fired a regimental fire mission since Korea and probably never would again.

I want to be straight with you about that one. I could not find it in Ian McNeill’s official Australian army history, and I could not find it in Lex McAulay’s account, either. The escalation to a regimental mission at 19 minutes past 4:00 is well documented. The claim about Korea is widely repeated, and as far as the official record goes, unverified.

So, what did the American guns actually do? McNeill’s official history is specific. The six 155-mm howitzers of A Battery fired 242 rounds during the engagement. Used against targets in depth and in a counter bombardment role against enemy mortars. That’s a smaller number than the Australian and New Zealand guns fired.

And it should be because they were doing a different job. The lighter 105-mm guns were dropping shells almost on top of Delta Company. The American mediums were reaching past the fight, hunting the enemy mortars, and hitting the ground the Viet Cong needed to move through. Total Allied artillery expenditure that day is one of those numbers you will see stated with false confidence.

History Net says almost 3,500 rounds. History Guild says more than 3,000. McNeil records 3,198 rounds from the 105-mm guns alone. While Australian analyses working from unit records land nearer 2,600 because they count the battle and the night differently. The honest answer is a range of roughly 2,600 to 3,500 rounds.

 And anyone quoting you one exact figure is guessing. If this is the kind of history you want more of, the sort where we tell you what the record actually says instead of what sounds good, subscribe. We do this every week. There is one more American on this battlefield. And almost nobody mentions him.

 Partly because we do not know his name. Late on the 18th of August, with the fighting over and Delta Company holding ground in the dark, the wounded needed to come out. The battle timeline maintained by the Long Tan Documentary Project records that the first aircraft into the improvised landing zone around midnight was an American Army air ambulance.

Flying into a plantation full of enemy dead in the dark in monsoon weather, to lift out the three most seriously wounded Australians. And back at Nui Dat, the gun line had a different problem. Firing at that rate had emptied the ammunition stocks, and resupply could not come up the road from Vung Tau because the roads were an ambush risk.

So, American Chinook helicopters flew it in instead. 1,000 artillery rounds delivered to the Nui Dat gun position overnight. Now, this next part is where I have to correct something because the version of the air support story circulating online is not supported by any source I could verify. You will find it stated confidently that three American F-4 Phantoms from Marine Squadron 542 flew over Long Tan and struck in support of Delta Company.

That specific identification appears to trace back to one documentary companion website. It cites no primary source, and it does not survive checking. The squadron in question had finished its first Vietnam tour in December 1965 and flew out of Da Nang, hundreds of kilometers north in a different corps area.

Here is what the reliable sources say instead. Group Captain Chris Clark, in the official Royal Australian Air Force account of Long Tan, writes only of American strike aircraft and records that cloud and rain had cut visibility so badly the pilots could not make out the colored smoke grenades marking the Australian position.

Unable to bomb in support of Delta Company, they were directed to drop their ordnance to the northeast instead. Major Harry Smith, the man who actually made the request, did not call the Marines. He called it United States Air Force combat air support, and his verdict was blunt. The aircraft could not identify his position.

They dropped their bombs and rockets and napalm to the east, and it mattered far less to him than the artillery did. While we are correcting things, one more. The famous ammunition resupply, the helicopters that came in low over the treetops and pushed boxes of ammunition out into the rain to Delta Company, were not American.

Those were two Iroquois of number nine squadron, Royal Australian Air Force. Content farms get this wrong constantly. It was an Australian crew taking that risk. There is one story about the Americans at Long Tan that I want to handle carefully because it is the one that gets repeated most warmly and rests on the thinnest evidence.

The account goes that the American gunners, with their own fire missions in hand, went over to the exhausted Australian 105-mm crews and started humping ammunition to their guns for them. You will find it on the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia site and on Australian analysis pages.

 I could not find it in the official histories. What I can tell you is that it fits everything else in the record. The Australian War Memorial notes that soldiers from around the base were pulled in to unpack rounds and feed the gunners because the rate of fire was beyond what the crews could sustain alone. So, treat it as credible veteran tradition rather than documented fact.

It probably happened. It is not proven. Which brings us to the strangest silence in this whole story. I went looking for the American recognition for Long Tan and could not find it. No decoration, no citation, no mention in dispatches for A Battery or for any individual American gunner specifically tied to that day.

The United States Presidential Unit Citation awarded for Long Tan, granted in May, 1968, went to Delta Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. The Americans who fired 242 rounds in support of them, got what the Australian Army Research Centre describes as special accolades from the task force, which is a polite way of saying their allies thought highly of them, and nobody filled in the paperwork.

The battery stayed at Nui Dat until April 1970, then moved to Long Binh, and left Vietnam in March 1971. Which leaves Captain Glenn Yury sitting in front of an Australian interviewer in 1966 with a running joke he could not let go of. Outside the position of the 1st Australian Field Regiment, there was a sign. Yury wanted it changed.

 He thought it should read, “First Field Regiment, reinforcing Yury’s battery.” It is a gunner’s joke, and it is a small thing, but it is also the clearest surviving trace of what those six American howitzers were doing in a foreign army’s base camp in Phuoc Tuy province in 1966. They were not visitors.

 They thought the whole regiment was theirs. If you want the full story of what happened in that plantation, our video on the Battle of Long Tan itself is on screen now. It is the Australian side of the same afternoon, and it is worth your time.