Brigadier O’Brien’s Long Tan is the most important account of our iconic battle in 40 years. The book spins 23 short chapters around a short exclamatory order.

At 15.57 hours on 18 August 1966, Major Harry Smith, commanding D Company, 6RAR (Royal Australian Regiment) in a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy Province, southern Vietnam, ordered his forward platoon to ‘Go for it!’

The platoon had bumped a small enemy patrol, which fled, and the platoon’s commander, Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp, radioed Smith back to company headquarters: “Want me to follow up?”

Going for it with 29 men, Sharp’s 11 Platoon advanced to the east in pursuit of the enemy. Company headquarters and 10 and 12 platoons stopped and awaited developments.

Then, suddenly, at 16.08, after 11 Platoon had moved 700-800 metres, heavy enemy machine gun fire ripped into its left flank. Within two minutes, five men were killed and two wounded. Dangerously dispersed because of 11 Platoon’s extended move, D Company was caught in a “mobile ambush” set by main force 275 Regiment of the 5th Division of The People’s Army of Vietnam supported by provincial D445 Battalion.

By 1800 hours, D Company, 107-men strong, had lost a total of 17 killed and 17 wounded, some seriously. One member of the force that relieved D Company was also killed. As almost always, the Australians could still claim a favourable “kill ratio”. The accuracy and power of the Anzac artillery at the nearby First Australian Task Force (1ATF) base at Nui Dat largely saved D Company.

The number of enemy soldiers killed in action is unknown. Fantasists have claimed figures as high as “1632” killed. Neither was it ‘245’, which 1ATF maintained after the battle and the Australian Official History followed.

Pathfinding research by former 1ATF intelligence officer Ernie Chamberlain revealed the duplication of some body counts. He also listed the names and personal details of 176 people killed. O’Brien’s analysis reinforces Chamberlain’s.

Formerly an artillery forward observer with Australian infantry battalions in Vietnam, O’Brien’s eye for the whole battle space — some 600 X 400 metres — plus the gun positions back at 1ATF enables him to manage with sharp insight the great complexity of what was going on. For two hours, 10 and then 12 Platoons manoeuvred to extricate 11 Platoon without success. The artillery saved it from being overrun. Inescapable issues include the disordered “withdrawal” of the remnants of 11 Platoon; the shifts in defensive artillery fire; the fraught ammunition resupply; the consolidation of the company; and the relief column. Supporting comment details the enemy’s doings.

A technical narrative clearly dissects the battle. Still, its author knows it has no shape without soldiers’ memories of it.

These include many that Terry Burstall’s benchmark book The Soldiers’ Story (1986) collected and built around his own experience. Mia Martin Hobbes’ scholarship reminds O’Brien how soldiers often package their experience long after the battle in standard tropes – “the noble and skilful digger”, wherein the battle of Long Tan is recycled as a “David and Goliath feat”. Peter Stanley and Mark Dapin provide other scholarly influences. In their lights, O’Brien’s Long Tan realises how myths are made and metastasise in the culture as artists and writers pick them up and uncomprehendingly spread them around.

In relation to historical context, the separation of geopolitical myth and reality begins with O’Brien’s pivotal point: “Go for it!” makes it completely clear that Smith had no conception of the enemy force he faced near Long Tan village that day.

When his over-extended company got into trouble it went into its drills and survived with much help from the artillery. But it had been in real trouble. The question is whether it could have been any other way?

O’Brien thinks Smith could possibly have known better. We learn that soldiers in the small patrol initially bumped by 11 Platoon wore khaki uniforms, and one dropped an AK47 rifle as he fled. Local guerrillas did not wear such uniforms or carry AKs. Importantly, also, the patrol did not carry packs. This almost certainly meant it was a small sentry patrol from a larger force. Independently and together, those factors strongly indicated that a regular PAVN formation was around.

Something even more glaring also indicated that: the very reason for D Company’s operation in the rubber plantation. The night before, an 82 mm mortar, recoilless rifles, and a 70 mm Japanese mountain gun had fired on the 1ATF base wounding 23 people. D Company was thus out in the rubber trees searching for those who’d done it.

But here’s the rub: artillery intelligence had correctly identified those heavy weapons, with which local guerrillas were very unlikely to have been armed. Such weapons almost certainly belonged to regular PAVN main force units. How did Smith miss all this? Because what is clear now was not as clear in 1966.

There were strong reasons why Smith’s order was unlikely to have been any other way. As a gung-ho company commander of his day, one typically brought up on fighting small-scale counterterrorist operations in Malaya, he saw 11 Platoon’s initial contact as an opportunity to do what his superiors expected him to do: his job – get kills for his company.

Second, under operational pressure, no moderating set of attitudes or procedures existed in Australian military thinking that would have been sufficiently strong to jolt him out of the overconfidence that caused him to overlook the real signs of danger before him. Third, Smith was obviously not the only one to do that.

Confirming that key point, O’Brien establishes the political context for the military problem. In fact, official miscalculations surrounding the Vietnam commitment, which the book discusses, were such that 1ATF was bound to find itself fighting to fend off strategic incoherence in Phuoc Tuy Province.

Burstall, A Soldier Returns (1990) was already showing that the government had been unable in 1966 to provide the army with basic information about the situation in the province. This included a large divisional size victory that PAVN and local forces had won at Binh Gia in December 1964.

The government and, by extension, 1ATF were even unable accurately to name their enemy. The name 1ATF used, as many still do, was “NVA”, North Vietnamese Army. The profound political as well as military problem with using that name, however, was one that has exercised me: no state of “North Vietnam” and, therefore, no “NVA” ever existed.

Realising that 1ATF’s enemy had called itself PAVN from 1944, O’Brien’s Long Tan identifies its culturally specific political-military mode of operations known as “armed propaganda”. According to that routine, PAVN rubric, 275 Regiment’s “mobile ambush” on D Company was more than a military operation; it was primarily designed to impress the local population. PAVN’s message was that it was protecting the people, who would then be unwise to get close to the Australians.

Meanwhile, 1ATF itself limited the chances of that. In June, for reasons which Burstall raised in 1986 and 1990 and on which O’Brien now dwells, 1ATF had alienated many locals with its destruction of Long Phuoc village. The 275 Regiment ambush of D Company was, then, the PAVN political as well as military response to that counter-productive 1ATF operation.

Nailing all this, O’Brien emphasises that 275 Regiment was recruited outside the province. This is because the villagers inside it were unlikely to believe the casualties, either inflated or real, which the Australians inflicted on that unit. The battle people heard ringing around their villages was from their perspective a PAVN victory. 1ATF historian Bob Hall also emphasises that meant a strategic political as well as military victory.

The book’s later chapters on the politics of, and awards for, the battle point towards Australian war commemoration. These might also have specified the salience of Long Tan in remembrance culture; the fact that Long Tan is the only Australian battle besides Gallipoli that has its own national day. Why? Partly because the battle of Long Tan was a dangerously close shave.

Like Gallipoli, Long Tan is iconic, because it sits in Australian culture as a narrative that involves the mythical transformation of disasters into heroic achievement. O’Brien’s Long Tan is an important book because, in geopolitical context, it illuminates with unusual clarity the perils of that cultural self-deception.

Kevin O’Brien, Long Tan Memory, Myths and Reality, 309 pages, Edmund & Alexander, Maitland, 2025, $39.95 www.longtanbook.com

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.