Chapter 11: Fire Force - A Steep Learning Curve

If you thing that Fire Force was a brilliant concept that happened in a couple of days – dream on ... In fact it didn't develop fully until 77/78 when we all completed our para training and we were then an effective machine ... I am not saying we were useless in those years but shit we battled ... Having only 3 G Kars meant only 3 sticks of 4 on the ground ... OK the K Kar orbiting above held things together but we lost many gooks as they simply ducked through the holes ... One of the things we did was to send another 6 to 9 sticks out toward the contact area on vehicles before the choppers lifted off ... This became an absolute nightmare as we started hitting land mines and having accidents ... Our first tragedy happened when we were responding to a Catholic Mission Church being attacked by a lrge gang ... I was still a Troopy and let me tell you it became one of my worst nightmares...

We were still driving the old Bedford RL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_RL) and let me tell you we could make those old cows fly ... That straight six petrol engine would sing and most of the guys could give Shumaker a lesson on how to drift...

The siren went on that fateful day and CSM came charging out and gave the lead RL driver his instructions and the senior stick leader on the back got the maps ... we took off with a roar and really flew down the road toward our destination ... We heard on the radio that the choppers were being diverted to follow up spoor but we were to get to the Mission ASAP as we were to base off from there ... Man Vawn drove like an ace ... We were the lead RL with the Chopper fuel behind us and the rest of the guys in the last RL ... As we were nearing the Mission there was a long concrete causeway across a river that made us all a little nervous ... The water didn't look very deap but it was over 50-60m wide with the water flowing quite fast ... Vawn slowed up and he drove across but about half way we could feel that things were not to clever ... the RL started sliding to the right and we went over the edge of the causeway ... The RL tilted over at around a 25deg angle to the right with the truck cab ½ filled with water ... We couldn't see Vawn but our Cpl, Fingers, shouted that Vawn was under water ... We dropped our kit and dived in to the water and desperately tried to free him ... Vawn was in a total state of panic and thrashing around with his head barely below water level ... We were desperate as we tried to lift the fender off his foot that was jammed against a rock ... One of the guys was trying to breath into Vawn's mouth but was nearly drowned himself as Vawn grabbed at him ... We tried to rip off the exhaust pipe but it was still to hot ... Vawn died, drowned, in front of us and there was nothing we could do to save him ... We were all devastated and were very, very unhappy little bunnies ... To this day I still have nightmares about that scene even though its 40 odd years on...

We were all bummed out and our LT sent us up to the mission so that the back up MT guys from Bat HQ could recover Vawn and the RL ... SB sent us to a nearby village to question the locals as they were a little suspicious of the goings on ... O Boy, was that a wrong move ... Can you imagine, 10 very, very, Very pissed off guys wanting information about the gooks that had contributed to our friend drowning ... Without saying to much we handed over a couple of the locals to the SB and they talked for hours ... Every time they stopped talking the SB guy said he was going to fetch the "Boys in the short shorts" and the captures carried on talking ... The information retrieved was solid and lead to follow up OPS that netted most of the gang...

Just an idea as to what a Troopy looked like after a hard days work...