Buckshot Bear
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Posts posted by Buckshot Bear
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I went to the doctor yesterday, and she wanted me to get some bloodwork done. While the phlebotomist was readying the vials, she asked me, “are you able to give a urine sample?”
I responded, “urine luck!”
Apparently, she never heard that before.
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The AN/PRC-25 radio on Warrant Officer Class 2 Michael Gill's back weighed twelve pounds. In the wet heat of Kontum Province it might as well have been an anvil.
He had carried radios his entire career. Started as a linesman with the 7th Signal Regiment in Queensland, learning to string wire across country, to read terrain for antenna placement, to keep a signal alive when the jungle wanted to swallow it. The Royal Australian Corps of Signals had shaped him into a technical tradesman of the first order. His mates called him Mick.
What the Signals Corps had not trained him for was walking at the front of sixty Montagnard fighters through bamboo so dense a man couldn't see five metres in any direction, in rain that had been falling for two days without pause.
The Australian Army Training Team Vietnam had a way of rewriting a man's job description.
The AATTV was the longest-serving Australian unit of the Vietnam War. It was also the most decorated. It consisted almost entirely of senior NCOs and warrant officers, men with fifteen or twenty years of professional soldiering behind them, posted in small groups to advise and command indigenous forces in the most remote and contested terrain in Southeast Asia.
Signallers made up perhaps two percent of the Team's strength. When one was posted forward, his radio skills were valuable. But the Mobile Strike Forces didn't always have the luxury of functional specialists. They needed men who could lead.
On 6 May 1969, Temporary Warrant Officer Class 2 Michael Gill was commanding a platoon of the 232nd Company, 3rd Mobile Strike Force, operating out of Kontum. The company commander was Warrant Officer Class 2 Ray Simpson, a Queensland soldier who had been in more firefights than most men have hot breakfasts.
The mission was a battalion-scale search and clear operation near the tri-border junction where South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia met. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through this country. The North Vietnamese Army used the border sanctuaries to stage and resupply. They were very good at it and they had been doing it for years. The jungle here belonged to them in a way it never quite belonged to anyone else.
Gill checked his radio, checked his platoon, and moved out into the bamboo.
The enemy position was prepared. That was the first thing you noticed, the absence of panic in the incoming fire. These weren't men caught by surprise. They were in bunkers, well-camouflaged, in ground they had chosen for exactly this kind of engagement.
Gill's platoon hit the contact line at close range. The bamboo reduced visibility to metres. The volume of fire coming back was intense. In the first exchange, Gill was seriously wounded.
As he went down, the platoon stalled. The assault lost its forward momentum, that brief, brutal window when aggression and confusion work in your favour. Without the man at the front, the Montagnard fighters held their ground but could not advance against the fortified positions ahead of them.
Ray Simpson heard it. Any veteran knows the sound of a firefight that has stopped going forward. He brought the rest of the 232nd Company up at speed.
What he saw when he reached the forward edge was his platoon commander on the ground in heavy fire.
Simpson went and got him.
He crossed the open ground between his position and Gill's under direct fire from entrenched NVA positions. He reached Gill, lifted him, dead weight, a fighting man's full kit, and carried him back to the company lines. The rain came down. The fire came in. Simpson kept moving.
Despite everything that followed, the extraction, the immediate treatment, the wounds were fatal. Michael William Thomas Gill died on the ground in Kontum Province. He was twenty-eight years old.
Simpson then realised the position could not be held. He ordered the 232nd to withdraw. To cover their movement, he and five indigenous soldiers stayed behind. Simpson crawled forward to within ten metres of the enemy bunkers and lobbed grenades directly into them, breaking up the counter-attack and buying the company time to break clean.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross. Simpson story was posted earlier today.
The news reached the Sergeants Mess at 104 Signal Squadron on the same afternoon.
Mick Gill had been a regular visitor. The linesmen and operators knew him, his manner, his habits, the way he talked about his time in Queensland before all this. He was one of theirs. A signaller who had gone as far forward as the war would take him, into a province most of them would never see, leading men whose language he had learned in pieces and whose trust he had earned through the one currency that counts in combat.
He was posthumously awarded a Mention in Despatches, one of the few Imperial honours the system permitted to be given to the dead. The United States military awarded him the Bronze Star with V for Valour.
His body was repatriated to Australia.
He is buried in the Toowoomba Garden of Remembrance. Wall 11, Row H.
The twelve-pound radio he carried into the bamboo at Kontum is long gone. The wall is still there.
Lest We Forget.
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Today is May the 8th Mateship Day.
May 8 is celebrated in Australia as "Mates Day," a day to check in with mates, combat loneliness, and celebrate the spirit of mateship.
People are encouraged to grab a meal, coffee, or a drink at the local pub, which often host, and include special offers such as 2-for-1 steaks.
The day highlights the Australian cultural value of "mateship," which emphasizes loyalty, mateship, and supporting one another.
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People wonder how I can keep my ice house in one piece.
Igloo it together.
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Rayene Stewart Simpson was forty-three. It was his fourth war. The province was Kontum, in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. The date was 6 May 1969.
His company had been heavily engaged from deeply entrenched bunker positions, and a fellow Australian advisor, Warrant Officer Gill, lay seriously wounded in the open ground forward of the line.
Simpson moved out under concentrated fire.
He drew the enemy attention onto his own position, reached Gill, and carried him back to safety.
He then crawled forward to within ten metres of the bunkers and threw grenades at the enemy positions.
As darkness fell he ordered a tactical withdrawal under smoke, carrying out a wounded platoon leader.
He had grown up at Redfern, in inner Sydney. His father Robert was a labourer. His mother Olga deserted the family during the Depression.
At the age of five he was placed in the Church of England Home for Boys at Carlingford. He was educated there and then at Dumaresq Island Public School near Taree.
He had cut sugar cane in Queensland. He had worked as a builder’s labourer. He had sailed the routes around Papua New Guinea. He had collected fares on the running boards of the Sydney trams.
He enlisted in the AIF on 15 March 1944, aged eighteen. On 5 August he manned the number one Vickers machine-gun at the Cowra POW camp during the mass breakout of Japanese prisoners.
He served with the 2/3rd Pioneer Battalion at Morotai, Tarakan and Rabaul. He was demobilised in January 1947. He re-enlisted in January 1951 and went to Korea with the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. He fought at the Imjin River.
On leave in Tokyo he met Shoko Sakai. They were married at Kure on 16 January 1953. Shoko stayed in Japan to care for her mother, and the marriage ran for the rest of his life across the routes between Australia, Southeast Asia and Tokyo.
He served in Malaya from 1955 with 2 RAR. He was posted to the newly formed 1st Special Air Service Company at Perth in November 1957. In July 1962, promoted to Warrant Officer Class 2, he was selected for the original thirty-man contingent of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam.
On 16 September 1964, near the village of Ta Ko, his patrol was ambushed by a numerically superior Viet Cong force. The South Vietnamese patrol leader was killed in the opening volley. A rifle round broke Simpson’s right leg. He took command, rallied the men, and refused medical evacuation until the position was secure. He spent eight months recovering in a hospital in Tokyo. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
He discharged in May 1966. The discharge did not last. By May 1967 he had re-enlisted and returned to Vietnam for a third AATTV tour.
That brought him to Kontum in May 1969. Five days after the action of 6 May, on 11 May, his battalion was ambushed at close range.
The American commander, Captain Herb Green, was killed trying to reach a wounded Australian, Warrant Officer A.M. Kelly. Kelly and a group of indigenous soldiers were pinned down.
Simpson led two platoons forward. The indigenous troops fell back under the fire. Simpson kept going alone. He made repeated attempts to reach Captain Green’s body and was driven back each time.
So he placed himself in the open ground between the advancing enemy and the wounded, and held the fire on his own position until Kelly and the casualties were lifted out by helicopter.
For the actions of 6 May and 11 May 1969 he was awarded the Victoria Cross. Queen Elizabeth II invested him at Government House in Sydney on 1 May 1970.
He discharged from the Army on 4 May 1970 and went to Japan to live permanently with Shoko. In 1972 he took a position as an administrative officer at the Australian Embassy in Tokyo. He gave no memoirs and few interviews. He kept a small life.
He died at the University of Tokyo medical clinic on 18 October 1978. He was fifty-two years old. His ashes are interred in the post-war section of the Yokohama War Cemetery.
It was his fourth war. He came home to Shoko.
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Nui Dat, Vietnam, 1967. Lieutenant Peter McGuiness of Broken Hill, New South Wales (left), a platoon commander with B Company, 7th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (7RAR), points out the features of the F1 Sub-Machine Gun to Malcolm Fraser, Minister for the Army.
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Slim Dusty
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LUNCH IN THE BUSH - Warwick -1893
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4 hours ago, Larsen E. Pettifogger, SASS #32933 said:
Hmm. Seems to me I suggested replacing that spring in a question you asked last March.
As mentioned
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10 hours ago, Boggus Deal #64218 said:
Depending on the safe, you may be able to go online, print the original owners manual and get manufacturers master code to open it. I was able to do that on one I picked up that the owner did not know the combo.
What stops a bad actor from doing that?
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Dave these are some examples of the most common new build for sheds down here, lined inside and insulated they are pretty good.....with a reverse cycle A/C even better.
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5 hours ago, Forty Rod SASS 3935 said:
What a pretty little darlin' that one is.
Have you considered putting out a DVD, or something similar, with each of your engines having four or five minutes of its own time?
It could be a seller and would be even better if you had a booklet of details and still photos of each one to accompany the videos, as well.
Just a thought. I'll take a package of that if you ever decide to do it.
Forty.....mate you're wayyy to kind!
They are all here (I have to give credit to my dear understanding wonderful wife ❤️) -
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5 hours ago, Eyesa Horg said:
Bear,
Off topic a little but pretty cool. Amazed how well it runs!!
https://www.gasenginemagazine.com/gas-engines/engines-a-z/1929-ford-model-a-open-engine/
* Link shared by Gas Engine Magazine
Thanks for that link Eyesa!!!!!!
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After 20 years, my Dillon XL650 feels brand new again......the last 'X' amount of months I have had some major frustrations.
Today I Googled how to take apart the Case Insert Slide and found the below problem. Took my spare parts kit down off the shelf, found the replacement spring and wow am I happy! Feel like a goose though, should have done more detective work months ago
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Dad Jokes (Groan)
in SASS Wire Saloon
Posted
What kind of bees give milk?
Boo Bees