Rodney O'Regan OAM VA - Anzac March Memorial Horse

🌏 www.glhac.org
🇫 / greatlakeshistoricauto...
GLHAC member Rodney O'Regan represents the Great War and Boer War soldiers in the Sydney Anzac Day Memorial Horse March.
Rodney's Full story available at:
www.warmemoria...
Sapper Rodney Stephen O’Regan
1st Field Squadron, Australian Army
Service number: 292697
Rank on discharge: sapper
Honours/awards: OAM VA
"I mainly cleared minefields. It was our job to clear the Australian-laid minefields surrounding some occupied hamlets and forts in the province. The dozer would go in and dig a trench, two blade-widths wide and 2 metres deep, across the minefield and the top layer of soil either side of the trench that contained the mines would be pushed into the trench and then covered up, burying any unexploded mines. Really dangerous stuff.
Antipersonnel mines would go off at any time. “Boom Boom” was the name of our armoured personnel carrier. We would go in and retrieve any mines that hadn’t exploded.
Boom! Boom! That was the sound the mines would make when being ripped up.
It reminded me of my youth in the field ripping up potatoes. But this time, explosive potatoes."
Rodney O’Regan’s parents were both in the Navy when they met during the Second World War. They married and later his father went into the Army as an engineer. Rodney said, “I’ve always had Army in the background.”
Rodney left school at 14 and worked for four and a half years as a stockman on an outback cattle station in Queensland. When work dried up due to drought, Rodney joined the Mounted Police in Sydney. He said, “In the meantime, my father signed me up with the Citizen Military Forces, so I was in Military Police and the civilian police. I did two and a half years in the CMF before I volunteered for National Service.”
“On 9 July 1969 I'm on the bus to rookies and the fellow beside me says, ‘G’day, my name's Rod, what's yours?’ And, I said, ‘I’m Rod’. Now I’m a Rodney and he was a Roderick, and he’s turned out to be a lifelong friend, Rod White. We went through rookies together at Kapooka. He went to Infantry. I did three months with a Corps of Engineers, and then got posted to Victoria Barracks as the boss’s driver because I already had all my Army licences.”
“So here I am as the colonel’s driver, and he asks me what I want to do. I said, ‘I want to go to Vietnam.’ So, I did my three weeks at the Canungra Jungle Training Centre, had a couple of weeks pre-embarkation leave, and away I went.”
“I arrived in Vietnam and went straight to 1 Field Squadron, Royal Australian Engineers. Engineers are on a one-for-one rotation. So, I arrived in country, and I was put with a fellow who'd been there for roughly six months. The idea was you work with a fellow for six months, and then he goes home after doing his 12 months; you are number ones and number twos. That's the way it went.”
“If you had a big job like a bunker system, you’d work in a team with three field engineers, three plant troops, and a lieutenant. But mostly it was the two of us. When you’d go away with the armored personnel carriers (APCs), they put number one and number two on the second and third APCs, because the first was the one that got blown up. And it's no good having an engineer if they get blown up.”