Rebuilding Binh Ba DPR/TV/1116

The constructions sounds of hammering and sawing took over from the sounds of battle in the village of Binh Ba, five miles north of the Australian Task Force, this week. Civil affairs workers and engineers moved in when the fighting troops moved out to resettle the villagers back into their homes. Binh Ba was the scene of pitched battles on Friday and Saturday when two companies of North Vietnamese soldiers and a company of guerillas holed-up in the houses and a ready reaction force of Australians and Vietnamese popular forces were sent in to clear them out. The bodies of 54 enemy were later removed from the village. The big task now is to make the village, part of the French Binh Ba rubber plantation, liveable again. While only 13 of the 162 buildings were totally destroyed in the fighting which involved tanks, over 50 per cent had the roofs holed and 40 per cent had the wall holed. The Task Force decided to reconstruct seven of the houses and do minor repairs on a further 35. The people from the wrecked houses have been resettled into vacant ones in the village by the plantation owner. When a team from the 17th Construction Squadron moved in to begin their task, the infantry moved with them as a protection party. The first aim was to get the roofs repaired as quickly as possible, then clean-up and patch-up and assist the Vietnamese with minor repairs. The team took with them to the village timber, roofing iron and concrete, but they were able to salvage other materials such as tiles from the wrecked houses. These tiles would be given to villagers to carry out repairs on small holes in their roofs. A low-loader was used to push in the houses beyond repair so that there would be no danger to the villagers. The work proper then began and the men worked with a will to put new iron roofs on the houses requiring them. The work is expected to take several days to complete. When the villagers were moved back in the previous day, the Australian civil affairs team was there to hand out food and kitchen utensils as initial assistance. Civil Affairs will now replace the furniture wrecked when the battle developed into a house-to-house grenade fight. About 100 beds, 100 tables and 200 chairs will be purchased. Even while the resettlement work was going on, reports were being received that enemy were still in the area. But the workmen kept to their task, leaving the job of protection to the infantry.