On 31 January 1968 the combined forces of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the guerrilla army of the south, the Vietcong (VC), launched a countrywide operation to influence the hearts and minds of the people of the south. The Tet Offensive was intended to overthrow the government of South Vietnam and to oust her allies: the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. The Australian Task Force held Phuoc Thuy province and had already encountered the NVA at Long Tan (1966) and the VC in many skirmishes.

In the first week of Tet, as part of an operation called ‘Coburg’, Australians of Charlie Company 7 RAR attacked a bunker system belonging to the NVA. Windsor compares this battle to those waged on the Somme during World War I. C Company did not fight an unseen, phantom enemy. The NVA and the Australians slugged it out for three days. For want of a better name, this action was dubbed ‘The Bunkers’. Among Charlie Company’s knightly deeds, one officer should have been nominated for the Victoria Cross, but his deeds went unrecognised, and the whole battle somehow disappeared into a chasm of military forgetting.

Enter Gerard Windsor: essayist, reviewer, memoirist, novelist, and former Jesuit. Serendipitously, Windsor met a retired senior army officer and asked him if he knew an old school chum of his from Sydney’s St Ignatius College, Riverview. Windsor’s old friend, Mark Moloney, turned out to have been a lieutenant and platoon commander at The Bunkers. It was he who should have been nominated for a Victoria Cross. Initially, Windsor was galvanised by Moloney’s story and wanted to write about it. ‘You can write about the diggers. But not about me,’ Maloney responded.

Windsor describes his work as an analytical narrative, a forensic account of the events leading up to the three-day battle, an hour-by-hour reconstruction of what happened. To accomplish this formidable task, the author consulted the scant military reports of the time and interviewed almost every Bunkers player who was still alive. Seeking corroboration, he favoured some accounts and discounted others as unreliable. Windsor, aware of the pitfalls of recycling forty-year-old memories, writes in a clear-eyed dispassionate way, but his novelistic skills enliven what might, in lesser hands, have become lugubrious.

Unusually for a work of military history, Windsor pays particular attention to the collective psyche of Charlie Company. Where possible, he also provides psychological insight into some of the individuals involved.

At the beginning of Tet, the bulk of the two regiments of the Australian Task Force had been moved north from Phuoc Thuy, close to the American bases at Bien Hoa and Long Binh. The Australians were asked to intercept any enemy movement on the western flank. The men of Charlie Company, who had been in Vietnam for nine months, were badly depleted, fatigue and various tropical illnesses having taken their toll.

C Company, under the command of Major Graeme Chapman, was given its own area of operations, with artillery support three kilometres to the rear. The platoons were on probing and reconnaissance detail when they encountered NVA soldiers and glimpsed an extensive, heavily fortified bunker system. The Australians could have withdrawn, passing on their information to US and Australian intelligence. A single shot alerted the NVA to C Company’s presence and ‘led to the three most terrible days in most of their lives’.

Windsor describes the ensuing battle and key personalities with great vividness. The extraordinary decision made by Major Chapman to bring rearward artillery support closer and closer to where the men were sheltering in shallow trenches is harrowing to read. Imagine the incessant pounding of shells powerful enough to make ‘cottage sized craters’ no further from you than the bottom of your garden. Imagine the brain shattering noise, the smell and taste of cordite coating everything.

The term ‘shell shock’ was coined during World War I to describe the physiological and psychological effects of unremitting shellfire. Deafness, damaged brain matter, and traumatised psyches were common symptoms. The Vietnam War delivered a new term – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – to describe war experiences, and provided a global set of symptoms thought to be applicable to civilian life. To the detriment of battle survivors, the diagnosis of PTSD concentrates on psychological symptoms at the expense of neurological implications. Windsor’s depiction of those diggers of Charlie Company who were rendered physically and psychologically helpless by the noise of battle is moving. He revives the term ‘shell shock’ here, which heightens the analogy with the trench warfare of an earlier generation.

The key moment in The Bunkers assault belongs to Mark Maloney. Wounded from the base of the skull to his ankles, his clothing ‘drenched in blood’, the twenty-three-year-old lieutenant lobbed grenades and M72 rocket launchers at the enemy from what seems to have been a distance of no more than twenty metres. He did this until the battle was over. But there was no holy grail. The enemy evaporated. The Australians could not claim The Bunkers as part of their territory, for it was beyond their province. They won, but only to return to Nui Dat in order to count their dead and wounded.

There are, of course, reasons for the virtual oblivion into which The Bunkers has fallen. The unusual nature of the battle – an assault rather than a defensive action – and the fact that it was more akin to trench warfare did not suit media perceptions of Vietnam. Windsor concludes that the commanders of 7 RAR were too muted in their praise. The Tet Offensive was a complex series of battles in a war that remains difficult to comprehend. A few weeks later, the actions of another Charlie Company (US 11^th Brigade) at My Lai became public, and a few weeks after that Martin Luther King was killed. These events contributed to the non-recognition of this remarkable battle.

All Day Long the Noise of Battle is a magnificent testament to heroic, mythic deeds. Perhaps it will serve the men of C Company better than any cache of medals.