A few members of the survey section had departed early in the year on HMAS Sydney and acted as part of the detachment advance party. The rest flew over on three weekly drafts, flying to Saigon via Townsville and Manilla on a QANTAS Boeing 707 (the way to go to war, if one has to). From Saigon the draft flew to Vung Tau on a USAF Fairchild Provider, a sort of two-engined Hercules transport. At Vung Tau the detachment, with other troops, occupied a holding camp on the edge of the airfield. It was here that the survey section paraded complete for the first time, and where the section commander first met some of his soldiers. It was also the first chance for the section to do some section training and get to know how to work with each other. Some miniature traverses and triangulation schemes were carried out on the sand hills of "back beach" at Vung Tau, amongst the logistics units who were setting up the 1st Australian Logistics Support Group (1ALSG) on the site. This training was far from satisfactory, and it probably revealed more problems than it solved, but it was better than no section training at all.
The section still had no experience whatsoever in dealing with the units and elements it was in the theatre to serve. Would it be fanciful to suggest that there is a sort of code of etiquette for dealings between units in the field, which goes beyond Standing Operations Procedures and the like? It involves knowing with whom one can deal direct with in another unit, and who one does not call upon without reference to the second in command, or the company sergeant major, or whoever. It involves understanding which areas of another unit may be visited without permission, without causing ructions. It involves learning who can help in certain circumstances, and what the price for that help is likely to be in the future. Such wisdom is only acquired by experience - often painful and expensive experience - and a formation entering and about to start operations in a war zone is not the best place to acquire it.
The entry into the war zone proper, that is the occupation of the task force base at Nui Dat, was painful, but not without its humour. The bulk of the artillery elements were moved to Nui Dat on the appointed day. The vehicles were taken up in a convoy under escort of the Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), while the personnel were heli-1ifted from 'Vung Tau to Nui Dat. Lieutenant Colonel A.M.C. Cubis, the then commander of 1 Fd Regt RAA, related in an article later published in the Army Journal how the vehicles left and arrived in due course at Nui Dat without major incident, while many of the troops were left waiting for some hours on the ground at Vung Tau because the US Army helicopters were called off to another task, and the final troops did not finally move until late in the afternoon. Colonel Cubis commented that it was the only time he had seen a regiment of guns take ten hour to fly between two positions which were linked by 25 miles of secure road, much of which was metalled. The survey section commander recalls jumping off one of the last helicopters late in the afternoon and being met by the TFAIO's batman, with his first orders 'in the operational zone' They were words to the effect of, "Sir, Captain Townley's compliments - your driver hit a noggie kid on the convoy up from Vung Tau. You've got to do a vehicle accident investigation".
More important matters awaited us that first afternoon. As stated earlier the position was vulnerable to attack and some defences had to be set up and dug in. This work continued. for some time and the survey section had little actual survey to do during the first few weeks, the bulk of its work being setting up defences and general "housekeeping" tasks. I Fd Regt RAA had its own survey section and they were responsible for putting the three batteries of the regiment onto regimental grid. As the infantry did not operate outside of the range of the gun; at Nui Dat for the first few months, neither the regimental survey section nor the locating battery survey section had meaningful survey tasks to perform and personnel were dispersed to other jobs. The locating surveyors did run a traverse from the regimental area to place the two infantry battalion mortar positions onto theatre grid, (1 Div Topo Svy Tp having by then provided theatre survey to the base area), and a couple of alternate gun positions were surveyed in, but little else was achieved.
The survey section did perform one piece of “good works” very early in the deployment, which was in many ways more durable than some of its other achievements. They were positioned near an old rubber drying shed which the task force headquarters had allocated to the padres for a chapel. Chaplain Bennett, the Anglican padre, asked the survey section commander if his soldiers could find a little time to help him clean the place up a bit and make it suitable for the conduct of church services. Some volunteers from the section spent a few hours cleaning the shed out, then made an altar from a large stores box, a crucifix and altar rails from bound rubber tree branches and kneelers from sandbags. In due course these field expedients were replaced with more respectable fixtures, but the ones put in by the survey section did give the shed the semblance of a place of Christian worship in time for the first Sunday services.
PS Sadler Doc 5 Ch 4 The Survey Sect