John Bryant remembers shooting flares into the screaming night, illuminating what seemed to be thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers charging towards the wire ahead of his position, their bodies falling to the ceaseless fire of the machine gun operated by his mate, Private Paul Donnelly. “We emptied our water bottles on the barrel of the gun to prevent it from overheating,” he says. When the water ran out, Private Bryant of Delta Company, 3RAR, resorted to the desperate measure of urinating on the barrel.
And when he sprinted into the dark to fetch more belts of ammunition, he shouted at his fellow soldiers not to shoot him. It was 56 years ago. The Battle of Balmoral was a furious and bloody action between Australian troops and two regiments of the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) fought on the nights of May 26 and 28, 1968.
The Australians held their position in the treeline overlooking a dried-up swamp, 40 kilometres north-east of what then was called Saigon, as the North Vietnamese charged. Three Australians died on May 28, and uncounted hundreds of Vietnamese were killed. Together with battles at a nearby Australian support fire base known as Coral, the Battle of Coral-Balmoral was hailed in a speech in 2008 by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as “the largest, most intense sustained combat endured by the Australian forces in Vietnam”.
All these years later, Bryant, a rifleman and forward scout in 1968, and Luke Johnston, whose late f.