A gunner's day

I'm sitting on a balcony on the Gold Coast watching yet another shower move in from the ocean. Forget all that nonsense about Queensland weather – oh, that's right. I'm overlooking the Tweed Heads and I am in New South Wales by about a hundred metres.
This hotel is genuinely in two states. My bed is in NSW and my breakfast was in Queensland.
I'm here for an army reunion, a meeting of old men and their wives, and in some cases their widows, folk who were once young and will always be so to me.
Gane Doyle, over from the west, said I should write down a gunner's day, back in 1967-1968, when we were at the sharp end of the army. He pointed out that in a few years there will be no-one to remember those days, and he was right.
Should you think these two columns are an indulgence, and not really history, you're wrong. This is history that resonates even today in the lives of many Gippslanders.
We had a base at Nui Dat and then at The Horseshoe, an eroded volcanic plug near Dat Do. I was in a Forward Observation party, so I spent only a few short times at Nui Dat and none at The Horseshoe, and even in Nui Dat my first 'home' was in the 2 Battalion lines.
I had a bed in the Battery lines as well, of course. I was in 108 Field Battery, Royal Australian Artillery, a sub-unit that was famous for its speed and accuracy, and between operations looking for 'Charlie' my team of six would try to get back among our own blokes.
Those brief stays left a good few memories, though. Let me preserve a few of them while I can still remember.
I remember being given a Paludrine tablet every morning at the first parade. That kept malaria at bay, which was good, but we swallowed it dry, which was not so good. The word was that we all got malaria but the Paludrine suppressed it. When we were coming home we were given Chloroquine and Primoqine tablets to take over the next 21 days. That was to clear the malaria from our blood, but we were given them loose in our hands. They went into our pockets and for many of us they were lost long before they were taken.
I remember the tin shed we called our mess, which included the open kitchen. It was here we were abruptly exposed to American food habits for the first time. Most of us had never seen sweet corn, or olives, served as vegetables. Most of us saw spring onions on our plates for the first time. This was 1967, remember. We had a few adjustments to make.
Another memory of that mess was that US pilots coming back from missions would blast their F4 Phantoms, usually, over us at tree-top height, which left the steel building vibrating and our ears ringing. They thought that was entertaining and I suppose it was.
They would ask taskforce headquarters where could dump the leftover ordnance they were carrying – understandably they were not to land still carrying bombs and rockets – and we would choose some place a long way from us for that unwelcome attention.
One of the luxuries of being 'home' for a few days was the chance to have a shower. Even that had its difficulties. The water was never cold but that was fine. Once one was clean, a great feeling after a few weeks without a decent wash, there was the problem of getting dry, because the exertion of towelling oneself would cause us to sweat all over again.
Our homes were tents with six or eight beds in them and a wooden floor of packing case timber. Sometimes a snake would seek shelter under these floors, and the Vietnamese folk lived with some very unpleasant snakes. There was a general order issued that we were not allowed to shoot snakes 'inside the wire', inside the perimeter of the camp.
Lest we thought we were on a tropical holiday the tents had walls of sandbags up to just over bed height, and the gap to enter or leave the tent was shielded with another short wall. These were stop shrapnel from mortar attacks and that sometimes reminds me today of the saying that goes something like "We sleep safe in our beds at night because we know there are rough men willing to wreak violence on our enemies". We were not at all rough, but we could wreak violence at times.
Filling these sandbags was not a welcome task. It was one allocated by the Battery Sergeant Major whenever he caught someone doing something other than by the book.
I once made the filling of eight sandbags fill a whole morning before he sent me away in disgust. I was proud of that.
I remember how batteries from our AN-PRC 25 radios were diverted to power lights in the tents, and that was overlooked as there was no real alternative. Whenever we were running short of batteries, or almost anything else, the Americans would deliver more.
I remember my Armalite rifle, one found in a supposedly empty shipping container. There were six of them. From memory they weighed about six pounds when the standard-issue SLR weighed about nine. They also had a lighter, smaller bullet, which saved weight and meant we could carry more ammunition than before. That was a good feeling at night in the bush.
In the mornings and at night we would stand to, in case Charlie wanted to attack us at those times. I can well remember sitting in a two-man weapon pit, looking out over the wire, when Ron Woolfe, right beside me, said "I've always wondered how these things worked". I turned to find that he had dismantled a hand grenade within two feet of my head. You tend to remember things like that.
I remember that in the mornings and again in the evenings we would send a small clearing patrol out through a narrow twisting path through about 25 yards of barbed wire entanglement. The patrol had to step over wires in some places and bend over under others. It was designed to make it hard for Charlie to sneak through, but it made it very hard for the patrol to come and go, with radio aerials, rifle barrels and even feet getting tangled in the wire.
I will carry this on next week, if I may.