Death at High Noon

The first heavy downpours of the new wet season had just set in…I was drenched…and cold …and miserable.

 

I leaned out of the side door of the chopper and watched the trees flash past the runners of the Huey…we were at tree top level and hightailing it back to Nui Dat.

 

Why was I miserable?  My mate, my mentor, my friend, my teacher, was dead.

 

Morrie Manton was our first killed in action. It was a mine on the outskirts of a VC camp.

 

We had loaded his body, what was left of it, into a lowered stretcher cradle and added the pieces of legs and guts that we could find.

 

Marsh, one of our scouts, had leg wounds…he was also winched up and taken off on the dust-off chopper. This was before the rain started…it was just after midday…and our oldest and most experienced NCO had stepped on a land mine.

 

What I was really upset about was my own attitude and thoughts…I couldn’t get it out of my head that it could have been me. NO…it was more than that…I was not sorry for poor old Morrie…I was leaping for joy (internally) that it was not me.

 

It bothers me to this day that this was my over-riding emotion, as we flew back to safety…selfish, self-centred…thanking the gods of war that it was not me who died. So much for honouring the fallen.

 

Clichés galore bombard me. Old adages jump all over my mind. “Tried and true” is a phrase that is law and lore in the profession of infantry soldiering.

 

So why was Morrie waxing lyrical to any of us who would listen the other night in the mess over a few beers…?

 

He was worrying about our habit (successful) of infiltrating a VC camp in the same single file that we travelled in while on the patrol that found the camp. “We probably scare off any Charlie that might have been there, no matter how quiet we were in the approach,”  he had said, nodding his large head, wisely.

 

He may have been correct. We often found signs of very recent occupation…fires not put out properly, food prepared but not finished, gear left scattered that Charlie would normally have taken. We learned a lot about how Charlie lived using this method, we argued. “Yeah…but maybe we are letting him get away more often than he should”, Morrie had said, glaring at his dissenters.

 

“So here‘s a better plan that I’ve been thinking about,” he  said. “How about when The Cli (his lead scout) spots the first signs of a camp, we bring up the section in a left or right flanking line so that we are ready for a camp-wide sweep when the contact is made –  instead of a one-on-one firefight with their tail-end Charlie as the rest of them bug out? Huh? What do you say?”

 

“Yep,” we said…”could be something in that”…knowing that changing an engrained battle drill after a discussion with just us few over a beer was most unlikely.

Three days later we were back in the Long Green, the platoon stretched out in single file, four sections long. The only excitement so far had been a turn in the patrol that had me pause and watch in suspicion as the man in front of me suddenly veered hard, 45 degrees left.

 

When I got to his turn point I could see that he had already turned 45 degrees right and was continuing in the same direction as our original line of march.

 

I followed him.

 

He then turned 45 degrees again…first to the right, then after about 6-7 paces,  left again. We were back on the same line of march.

 

And so was the patrol behind me. We were all achieving a square loop-around a particular tree, that now became obvious to me.

 

I saw a thick brown/green vine that wound around the trunk of this tall tree. My eyes followed it upwards…it got thicker and thicker…and then started to writhe and move!

 

The scouts in Morrie’s section (he was travelling as No 3 as usual) in the patrol had cleverly moved our entire line of march smoothly and silently around the largest fucking python I had seen up until that point in my travels in SE Asia.

 

It was a detour we all enjoyed and appreciated.

 

(This was especially appreciated by those of us who had been on an earlier patrol being led by a scout and section commander with a different sense of humour. On that occasion the scout  had spotted a tree seething with red ants which attack when threatened and sting like hell. Having got the two scouts and himself safely past this tree, his NCO gave the last branch a heavy swipe with his hand and quickly moved on.

 Our boring patrol leapt into life as man after man passed under the tree and was pounced upon by thousands of angry red ants. It took a 30 min. rest halt away from the tree, with full deployment of security posts and small patrols for the worst affected to get their clothes off and get clear of the damn things. 

Most of us saw the funny side…although after that patrol, promises were extracted from those responsible never to do it again. Years later, I saw it as an amusing way to keep us on our toes).

 

But this particular day, 2 September 1967, things had not been boring, and were about to go downhill.

 

 

 

One of our scouts, Marsh, had seen some sign and stopped the patrol. He placed two fingers on his left arm, indicating that he wanted the Corporal to come up to his position. Morrie Manton, as section commander, moved forward and crouched beside Marsh and they watched for a few minutes.

 

They decided that there definitely was a camp ahead. Morrie gave the “enemy” signal with his hand to be sent back down the line.

 

Then instead of doing what we had done dozens of times before – carrying on, in single file into the suspicious area,  he took three steps to the left away from the known safe ground of the scouts’ footprints.

 

Maybe he was about to signal a sweep to be set up, as he was discussing doing some days ago. We will never know.

 

A huge explosion rocked us all . I was back in the section behind Morrie’s – about 20-30 yards –and the blast knocked me off my feet. The thick bush absorbed most of the shrapnel and blast…but not for Marsh and Morrie.

 

Marsh was laid low with bleeding wounds in his legs.

 

Morrie was lying 10 yards away from him in a smoking heap. He was moaning and moving his arms feebly.

 

An engineer who was travelling with us on that patrol raced up the line, drew his bayonet and began prodding his way from the line of march to where Morrie was lying.

 

“Hang on mate. I’m coming to get you.”

 

“Stay where you are – all of you” yelled Morrie. “Mines!”

 

We stayed put…terrified to put even our hands down on the ground.

 

The engineer had reached Morrie. He jabbed a curette (we all carried morphine on our dog tags) into his neck.

 

We all started to move forward using our bayonets to prod for mines. We  stayed on the main line of route that had been established. We got up near to where Morrie was.

 

Sentries went out, setting up a perimeter. The mined area was now clear to us…it was an approach to an old camp site. We could move quite freely in the thicker bushed areas.

 

The boss quickly despatched a bunch of us to find a clearer area as close as possible that we could make suitable for a chopper dust-off. As I went past the group of guys trying to help Morrie, I heard him cursing his own stupidity…and also talking to his mother.

 

I could see that there was nothing left of him below his waist.

 

We attacked the small trees in a semi-clearing in a frenzy…in about 15 minutes we had enough cleared to get a chopper overhead in a hover, but not clear enough to land.

 

A chopper arrived and dropped a stretcher on a wire…it contained a cradle and bandages, ropes etc.

 

The rest of the team had placed Morrie on a tent- half and were carrying him to our pickup site.  A couple of the boys were picking up pieces of legs as best they could.

 

Morrie was unconscious as he was carried past me. I later learned that he had died on the ground.

 

His body was winched up, the wire returned and Marsh was winched up to go back to get his wounds attended to.

 

After the chopper had gone, we did a very unhappy sweep of the camp, and found more mines. We moved well away before setting up for a sleepless night.

 

That night the rains came.

 

The bosses rightly read the mood of the men and the rest of the patrol (two more days) was called off. The next decent clearing (an old paddy field) that we came across, we dug-in beside it, just in the tree line. And called in the troop choppers.  We stayed awake all night hoping that Charlie would come back to his minefield and see what good work he had done. He would have received a warm reception.

 

But nothing happened. One night in the rain, misery and frustration of having lost one of our own, and we were picked up and returned to Nui Dat.

 

We were to have two days in camp before our next patrol. I volunteered to help get Morrie’s gear ready for return to NZ. I packed up his personal things and made sure that the trunk of his items collected over many months did not include any items that would cause embarrassment to family or the Army authorities. (Like the M16 rifle that had been skilfully reduced to tiny parts far smaller than a normal field stripping; many pairs of our kangaroo-hide combat boots …and other items of a personal nature.)

I was proud to perform this important service for him.

We discovered later that NZ did not have a smooth operating procedure for returning the remains of our fallen from Vietnam. Decisions had not even been made whether to have burials in Malaysia (our Base) or home in NZ.

 

Family requests and weighty persuasion from our bosses resulted in a very kind offer from the USAF, whereby Morrie was returned to NZ by American military aircraft.

 

We are very grateful.

 

Four more of our mates in V Company were to be killed in action in Vietnam over the next few years.

 

But Morrie was our first…and my closest.

 

 

Morrie Manton rests today in Waikemete Cemetery in Auckland. Four of us from his old platoon raised the money and official approvals to have his old generic headstone replaced with an appropriate “Killed in Action” stone epitaph.

 

We visit him each ANZAC week. We will remember him. Because of his personal mentoring and teaching, I thank him for my life.