Rodney O’Regan’s parents were both in the Navy when they met during the Second World War. They married and later his father went into the Army as an engineer. Rodney said, “I’ve always had Army in the background.”
Rodney left school at 14 and worked for four and a half years as a stockman on an outback cattle station in Queensland. When work dried up due to drought, Rodney joined the Mounted Police in Sydney. He said, “In the meantime, my father signed me up with the Citizen Military Forces, so I was in Military Police and the civilian police. I did two and a half years in the CMF before I volunteered for National Service.”
“On 9 July 1969 I'm on the bus to rookies and the fellow beside me says, ‘G’day, my name's Rod, what's yours?’ And, I said, ‘I’m Rod’. Now I’m a Rodney and he was a Roderick, and he’s turned out to be a lifelong friend, Rod White. We went through rookies together at Kapooka. He went to Infantry. I did three months with a Corps of Engineers, and then got posted to Victoria Barracks as the boss’s driver because I already had all my Army licences.”
“So here I am as the colonel’s driver, and he asks me what I want to do. I said, ‘I want to go to Vietnam.’ So, I did my three weeks at the Canungra Jungle Training Centre, had a couple of weeks pre-embarkation leave, and away I went.”
“I arrived in Vietnam and went straight to 1 Field Squadron, Royal Australian Engineers. Engineers are on a one-for-one rotation. So, I arrived in country, and I was put with a fellow who'd been there for roughly six months. The idea was you work with a fellow for six months, and then he goes home after doing his 12 months; you are number ones and number twos. That's the way it went.”
“If you had a big job like a bunker system, you’d work in a team with three field engineers, three plant troops, and a lieutenant. But mostly it was the two of us. When you’d go away with the armored personnel carriers (APCs), they put number one and number two on the second and third APCs, because the first was the one that got blown up. And it's no good having an engineer if they get blown up.”
“When the advance party of 3rd Battalion arrived, we worked with those guys. We took them everywhere, opening up fire trails that hadn’t been opened up for years. The officers had never been in action, so they were pretty gung-ho. Somehow, we survived and didn’t get blown up. I don’t know how.”
“I mainly cleared minefields. When I got there, they had already cleared the barrier minefield that ran something like 13 km from Fire Support Base Horseshoe down to the coast. So, I was cleaning up all the hamlets and anywhere the Australians put mines; there were plenty of them.”
“We had the big bulldozer with all the armour and rippers on the back. The dozer would go in and dig a trench, two blade-widths wide and 2 metres deep, across the minefield and the top layer of soil either side of the trench that contained the mines would be pushed into the trench and then covered up, burying any unexploded mines. Really dangerous stuff. Antipersonnel mines would go off at any time. “Boom Boom” was the name of our armoured personnel carrier. We would go in and retrieve any mines that hadn’t exploded. ‘Boom! Boom!’ That was the sound the mines would make when being ripped up. It reminded me of my youth in the field ripping up potatoes. But this time, explosive potatoes.”
“We had to rotate the drivers; I think it was every hour. Because they were in a big steel cabin, we had to fire a bullet on the side to tell them it was smoko time. No way would you go in there to get them with bits of shrapnel flying everywhere.”
“We'd go out with the infantry, out with the tanks, out with the APCs, and mine clearing, just different jobs all the time. And if somebody got in an incident, we'd be helicoptered in to make up the numbers and make sure everything was cleared. So that was basically it. That was the job.”
“I’m a stockman and I know how to track and look for things in the bush. Once I was with D Company 7th Battalion going through scrub, and I put my hand on a little sapling and a bit of dirt fell on me. I saw the sapling was cut off head-high that means there’s a bunker system. The Vietnamese would cut off the top of the tree for camouflage and then cover it with dirt so you couldn’t see it from the air. I called the Louie and told him what we had, and we put down our packs and went straight into the bunker system. It was an empty bunker system, absolutely brand new, no one in it. We would have been blown to bits if it hadn’t been.”
“When I think of Vietnam, my mind goes straight to red soil and sand. The red dirt used to get through our clothes. You’d put on jungle greens, and they'd be red or black red. And most of the mines were in sand, beach sand, black sand. When I walk around in Taree now, or anywhere, as soon as I see black sand, I start looking for a mine or ambush sites. I actually sent a few letters home and I sprinkled sand inside the envelope. I wrote a letter once and I got my Armalite out and I put a bullet through the envelope. I drew a circle around the hole, and I wrote, We're under contact at the moment. I've gotta sign off.”
“The operations in Vietnam only went for about two weeks, but not with us. The infantry operation might last two weeks, but then we'd be put on with the APCs, then we'd be out with someone else. We could be away for six weeks without coming back to base. When we did come back, the thing I loved was you could take your pack off and just put it in your hut. And that was downtime. And you would go down and have a shower; we had hot water too, as engineers. You would get all the dust and mud off and get to the spots that you could never get to in the bush – not that you would wash there anyway.”
“I’d been married before I went away, and I had a little child. I was only in Vietnam about six weeks when I got a Dear John letter that my wife had cleared off with another bloke. I saw the padre and said, ‘I’m having a bad time with this,’ and he made a few calls, and I got flown back to Australia to sort the situation out with my wife. Then I had to report to Victoria Barracks, and the lieutenant there asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to go back to Vietnam because that was what I’d trained for and that was where my mates were. I just want to get back to Vietnam as quick as I could.”
“In Vietnam, they wouldn’t let us blow up our own ordnance. You would call the Engineers Ordnance Depot and they would send an officer and warrant officer to blow up the ordnance. Anyway, before I went back to Australia on R&R, we had these two blokes come out. But they didn’t blow it up on the spot, they took some stuff back to Nui Dat to fiddle with it, which you never do.”
“I’ll never forget, when I came back to Vietnam there were two big aluminium coffins on the plane. We were told not to put our hats on them out of respect. It was the two blokes who had come to blow up the ordnance. That’s something I haven’t thought about for years, getting on that Wallaby Airlines flight and there’s the two blokes dead.”
“When I returned home to Australia at the end of my tour, I think I had three weeks or a month off. You got off the plane, got your pay book and away you went. I finished the Army on Saturday and on Sunday I was back with the Mounted Police. There were three of us, sweeping the stables and collecting the golden eggs, which is horseshit. I started back in the Police Force on the broom with fellows who had never been anywhere and never done anything, after two years in the Army doing all the things I'd done. I'd been on this huge great adventure, for two years, and I've come back to the same section where nothing had changed.”
“On the Monday, I went up to the fish and chip shop on Crown Street and the Greeks there knew me really well. The woman there said, ‘So you’re in Vietnam.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, well I’ve been there but I’m home here.’ And she said no you’re still there and she had paper, The Redfern Gazette, and she opened it up and there was a photo of me in Vietnam: Rodney O’Regan from Redfern in Vietnam … I’d been home for a month and here I was in the bloody paper.”
“In September 1967 I was stationed at Darlinghurst, and I was this 19-year-old kid straight from the outback cattle station. And this sergeant says, ‘Get in the car’ and we drive down to Kings Cross where there’s a demonstration with the American blokes coming out on R&R. He told me I had to talk to the demonstrators and not let them lay down. So, I get out there, ‘Righto fellas, you’re allowed to demonstrate but you can’t stand still. You’ve gotta walk up and down the footpath and don’t block the free flow of traffic.’”
“The sergeant had said to let the people walk through and not to interfere with them. So, there’re all happy, then the next minute there’s little scuffles and stuff going on, and the Special Branch had turned up. And the American Servicemen are getting off the bus, and the tv cameras are there … and Mum’s home watching tv and she recognises me. Here I am on bloody television. I'd forgotten all about that.”
