DANGER CLOSE — °SOUTH

Of all the Commonwealth nations, only Australia and New Zealand put up their hands to send men and materiel to support the U.S. in it’s conflict in Indochina, mainly in Viet Nam. Canada did not although it had a team on the ICC (International Control Commission) that supposedly oversaw violations that both sides claimed had occurred.

However, over 30,000 Canadians volunteered in different U.S. armed forces and served in the ‘Nam. At least 110 were KIA (killed in action), 7 were MIA (missing in action) and should be remembered on this veterans day. One man, Sgt. Peter Lemon won the MOH (Medal of Honour).

And lest we forget, that Canada took in anywhere between 60,000 and 120,000 draft resisters and deserters who integrated into their new society. After the war 60,000 Vietnamese boat were welcomed as refugees.

There were very few battles during the Viet Nam War that did not include massive civilian casualties. It was usually the wars bystanders that suffered.

During WWI 95% of the casualties were military, today that figure is reversed with 97% of the civilian populations bearing the brunt of the so-called ‘collateral damage’.

The Battle of Long Tan was among those rare engagements where few civilians were present and the battle took place more like a Medieval contest on a small battleground, almost set piece like. Virtually the whole action took place in a rubber plantation a mere few kilometers from the newly established Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat, near the coastal resort of Vung Tau at the mouth of the Saigon River.

The battle had all the elements of modern warfare – helicopters, artillery, armour and it pitted a small unit of a company of 108 men against a local hard-core battalion and a newly arrived PAVN regiment (Peoples Army of Viet Nam). Most of it was fought in the attending downpour of the August ’66 monsoons. The battlefield was close enough to the base that a concert featuring Australia’s pop stars of the day, Little Patti and Col Joye & the Joye Boys, could by moments be heard by the flattened diggers fighting for their lives deep in the rubber plantation.

The previous day the local main force V.C. (Viet Cong) battalion had lobbed mortars into the task force, which was still busy digging itself in to its expanded perimeter. Fortuitously, the artillery pits had been the first units up and running – Kiwi and Aussie gunners already responding to the incoming mortars probing the newly established task force.

Finally, the ANZAC contingent had it’s own TAOR (Tactical Area of Responsibility), port, airfield and permanent base near a rubber plantation at Nui Dat. They could still call on American support for air cover and logistical. Initially the Aussies had been twinned with the 173rd Airborne out of Bien Hoa, though it was always destined for the Task Force to be under it’s own command and zone. The Kiwis were mostly in the artillery pits and an SAS squad. The gunners were the lynchpin of the battle, firing at rates seen on the Somme or Tobruk.

Through the tactics that saw success during the Malayan Campaign, the TAOR of the Task Force was well pacified; you could drive around without ambush and travel between outposts at night. Farmers farmed and the markets were open, yet the enemy, the NLF (National Liberation Front) or Viet Cong looked at the Australian digger as ‘green death’. The Aussie tactics honed from their own bush craft excelled. There were no inflated body counts, no computer statistic fudging, down in Phouc Thuy the war was generally quiet. I could ride my Honda 90 from Tu Do Street in Saigon to Vung Tau back beach in 2 ½ hours and not meet a single V.C. and that was just after the ’68 offensives.

I had been with the Aussies on Day One on May 6th 1965 outside of Bien Hoa, the only day we wore helmets. I was given the assignment as I was the only Brit and my boss thought I would get on with the Aussies. It helped being a Pom, it broke the ice and I went back to Saigon with my Aussie bush hat and set a certain style.

‘DANGER CLOSE’ is the new Australian made movie about the Battle of Long Tan. Going down to the set, an open piece of reclaimed swamp now home to a Tiger Moth aero club, was like going back to the ‘Nam; no, not to today’s Viet Nam but the ‘Nam of yesteryear with all it’s fears, fancies and follies. It was both fearsome and awesome, technicolour surreal, which you only get to see as a microcosm to record frame by frame.

I missed the Battle of Long Tan in ‘66; I was on R&R in Singapore recovering from wounds received from a friendly fire incident on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. The invite to revisit the battlefield, to come and take photos on the set, came about in that mysterious Aussie way of half a degree of separation, a mate filmmaker, a backer and producer and then the man directing Kriv Stenders, a dead ringer for my old boss at GIZ German Aid in Cambodia, Volker. I did my homework and watched his movie ‘RED DOG’ three nights before heading to Pimpama. Loved it. An open arm greeting by one and all from the C.O. down to folk serving out the tasty tucker in an old hangar. I decided that to do it justice I had to shoot it on the 1965 Leica M2 that I had used in Viet Nam and shoot it in B&W.

The cast of young actors that made up the ground troops was alarmingly young, and then you realise that we were all young back then. ‘Vikings’ star Travis Fimmel plays Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith, Luke Bracey plays Sgt. Bob Buick, Daniel Webber as Pte. Paul Large and Richard Roxburgh as Brigadier David Jackson - recent army veterans from both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts filled out the ranks of extras; a ‘D’ Company worth, passing on the advice that makes you act like a Digger in the field. And then there were the uniforms / costumes and the weapon craft. The attention to detail, the small visual effects are the key to a reality check. They serve as tripwires to flashbacks and all their attendant emotions.

There was a bustle to the high tech set; it felt like the intent of war, unsaid discipline, the military blending into civilian life, hard to discern who was army, who was crew. And then the drone men, fresh from David Attenborough’s ‘Life On Earth’, swooping over APC’s and artillery and shooting right down the barrel. One of these super toys, set to replace helicopter camera work cost the same as a Huey B model back in the day in ’66 - $250 - $300k depending on the extras.

This was a set with a passion to make it good, to tell the story of a heroic action by a Band of ANZAC Brothers who against all odds came out on top. The passion to tell this story originated with Martin Walsh 14 years ago and with his co-producers John and Michael Schwarz they got the movie over the line. August 8th it will be on the big screen, which is the place to immerse yourself in this story.

The sound of a Huey has a signature like no other and to stand in front of one as it idles, spins me to my last ride on one after a 105mm mine blew up 3 meters away from me, leaving me DOA. It was a heavy flashback. Later I froze over the poncho wrapped mannequin bodies of the 18 dead cinematically lined up for their hot ride. All that waste and your own fragility exposed raw and naked. Yeah, you reiterate ‘its only a movie’ but it still trips the mind back to those days when anything could and did come down on you like you could never imagine.

The set had a historical look. It was a jolt to reload film in the field again as rain both real and effect showered in the long, unforgiving, tuffty grass. The reality is that war is fought by the young, ordered by the old and that the young are sacrificed for gains of which they are never fully aware. War is hard to grasp when you are in the middle of it and it takes the rest of a lifetime to understand. You surfed an incredibly pumped, adrenalin high and hoped you were not hit. You tried to dispel the worst thinking, only a cold one and a grateful smoko and for it all to go away. War is beyond strange yet it attracts us like ‘junkie moths to a flame’ as Mike Herr wrote in ‘Dispatches’.

The weird thing about shooting stills on a war movie is that you can rerun the whole thing, even the dead bits. The reality of war is of course far more brutal, there is no moment to stop action and reshoot. You have to get the frame in the first shot, look up while others hunker down and pray that you won’t cop it. All control of your situation is lost in war, fates decided by split seconds or millimeters.

Maybe it can only be retold in a movie, in all its surrealism, in frozen vignettes of pain and ecstasy, in moments that are almost beauteous. This is the case with ‘DANGER CLOSE’. It will look the part.

Postscript:

When the war ended, the victors removed all the memorials erected by the Americans but they left the cross that the Aussies had erected at Long Tan in place as a mark of respect to the Australian troops who never desecrated their graves.

In 2017 the Vietnamese government permanently gifted the Long Tan cross to Australia and it now sits at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

PPS: After the screening

There were half a dozen times back in the ‘Nam, situations so grievous that you stopped believing you might make it out of there.

When the shit hit the fan, when it appeared you might be overrun or shelled to oblivion, when friendly-fire threatened your existence.

Artillery is terrifying & soul destroying, like a tank clanking towards you.

When you have to call the artillery on to your own head to save yourself, it is doubly frightening.

This is what ‘Danger Close’ means and is a last straw move, that hopefully does not create more casualties but wrecks the enemy’s resolve.

I was invited on to the set of ‘Danger Close’ the movie and thought the only way to shoot this is in B&W on my old Leica M2 from back then.

I was also invited last night to the screening at the Sydney Film Festival - this film puts you right in that predicament, raw & brutal.

Rooted fear with an innate Aussie Digger belief in we’ll make it good.

The power of mateship.

It is close up & intimate, shot wide so you feel the dirt & smoke, the insanity of hugging the ground.

The monsoonal downpour.

You feel the click of an empty magazine, the dilemma of running out of ammo with Charlie only metres away.

All of this is anathmatic to someone who has never been so unfortunate to have been there.

The sheer horror of violent death, the out of world feeling of remoteness & fear, when training and mateship takeover and a small band of brothers emerges victorious.

The odds evened by that ominous radio call of ‘Danger Close’.

Oh, and I got to sit next to the real Little Pattie…