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restaurant owned by expatriate Australian Alan Davis and his Vietnamese wife Anh, during which Tony White showed a compilation video from all his 8-mm film that he took during his tour of duty in Viet Nam. It created a terrific atmosphere—and the bar owner’s wife, who came from near Binh Ba, recalled some of the incidents on the film footage and said it brought tears to her eyes when she recognised the Army doctors doing their Medcaps. It was a memorable evening all round.
    Long Son Island
    Not far north up the road from the port city of Vung Tau is Long Son Island. The island is about seven kilometres long from east to west, three kilometres wide from north to south, with a large hilly complex on the eastern end. During the war it was totally isolated, except by boat; today a causeway at the eastern end connects the island to the mainland. Near the causeway is a village, and a hamlet is located at the far western end. Apart from some industrial estate development near the causeway, the island has not changed very dramatically since 5 RAR conducted Operation Hayman between 8 and 12 November 1966, a search and clear operation designed to flush any lurking enemy out of the hilly, scrubby areas into the more open lowland areas where they could more easily be rounded up. During the operation, Australian SAS patrols stood by in inflatable boats to intercept enemy soldiers fleeing the sweep. The insertion was not without incident, as Ron Shambrook recalled:
    We flew into the top of this hill and it was a marginal LZ because the gradient of this hill was very poor; too steep. And anyway the first four choppers landed and they indicated that they were getting some small arms fire. I came in in the second group of four, and so our attention to detail was good at that stage, because nothing rivets your attention more than a little bit of lead flying through the air, but there was none when we landed. Anyway the fourth lift came in and one of the pilots over-corrected and thrashed the plane to bits by running the rotors into the hill. I thought we were being mortared; it made an awful lot of noise and I didn’t know what was happening there for a moment. 19
    In 2005, the 5 RAR group returned to Long Son Island and after some good observation and deduction were able to determine which helicopter pad they had flown into halfway up the hillside—it was virtually unchanged. Having kept their operational maps, the veteran infantrymen were able to locate almost exactly where they had fought and where various incidents occurred. Ted Heffernan had conducted a Medcap in the local village on Long Son Island, and located a monastery close to where he had helped the villagers during the offensive operations being conducted about two kilometres away. Wandering around the small village, Ted was able to recognise buildings and the area where he had worked during Operation Hayman. When he returned to the group he was beaming from ear to ear and telling all and sundry what he had found. The tour bus filled with smiles.
    The Horseshoe
    The Horseshoe was an almost circular hill about eight kilometres south-east of Nui Dat—which was still within artillery range—and less than one kilometre north of a large village called Dat Do. It was a prominent feature that allowed observation over a large area of the flat countryside: with binoculars it was possible to see almost anything that moved to the east of Dat Do village, making it an excellent vantage point and information-gathering site.
    A permanent fire support base was established on The Horseshoe, normally comprising a rifle company, a section or more of 81-mm mortars and three armoured personnel carriers (APCs), providing a ready reaction force to rapidly assist any troops in trouble or to set up quick roadblocks to intercept suspicious traffic. It was also well defended with Claymore mines, barbed wire and fighting bays dug into the rocky soil.
    The Horseshoe was established in