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which we were supposed to destroy with a single shot, Audie Murphy style. Most of them looked as though they’d been there forever with no bullet holes to show, which gives you some idea of how effective we were gunna be in the killing fields of Vietnam.

    The sneaker ranges I have to say were a bit more predictable. We’d be sneaking along a path, SLR at the ready, and the instructor would pull at some concealed rope or wire and, lo and behold, a target would be facing us. We were required to put three shots into it in the time it took us to blink. After a while, we could do this. I hasten to say, not because we were any better than before with the shooting galleries but because the bushes and foliage in the area of the target were so shredded by blokes who’d been before us that we could anticipate the enemy before the wire was released and so had plenty of time to get the three shots away.
    Later, in Vietnam, when the same thing happened for real and this VC suddenly appeared in front of me, I seem to remember shitting my greens. No, I mean it, I shat meself. Fortunately I think he did too. I finally got the first three rounds off, all of which missed and the VC scarpered into the jungle before I could get another crack at him. So, Canungra style, I destroyed all the surrounding shrubbery in the direction he’d taken.
    We never found him, not even a blood spot. I guess I missed Charlie with about a hundred rounds fired into a bamboo thicket and, I remember, I had a hard time convincing Shorty I hadn’t imagined the whole
thing. We passed the spot a few weeks later and Spags Belgiovani said, ‘That’s where Thommo shit himself and murdered a perfectly innocent bamboo thicket.’
    But what they really rammed into us at Canungra was contact drills. We did them up yamas and down cliffs, across rivers and any other obstacle that would make our life a misery. There were contact drills for everything. ‘Contact Front’ when the forward scout opened fire. ‘Contact Rear’ if Charlie had a go at the tail-end. ‘Ambush Left’ and ‘Ambush Right’ if the enemy came from the sides.
    We even practised contact drills in trucks. We’d be driving along some jungle track in an army truck packed in like sardines, rifles sticking up in the air to make more space for bodies, when suddenly some joker with blank ammo opens up on the vehicle from the bush with a machine gun. We then had to swing into contact drill pronto, which meant jumping from the moving truck to take up our defensive positions on either side of the vehicle, then lay down covering fire as the troops in the truck following us did a sweep to take out the machine gunner and whoever else represented the enemy.
    It all sounded simple in the lectures but have you ever tried jumping from a moving truck seven feet above the
ground with every bloke in the platoon trying to do the same thing at the same time with their rifle and bayonet, entrenching tool and machete and spare ammunition?
    The driver, often as not, puts his foot on the accelerator in panic when the shots come, then jams on the brakes a moment later, or vicki-verka. You jump and hope for the best and collect a kick in the head from the bloke jumpin’ behind you. Or the bloke in front of you jams his rifle butt into the difference between you and your sister. If you were real lucky you made it with only a couple of dozen nasty bruises and a fair amount of gravel rash.
    At Canungra they drove us until we dropped and then thought of some way else they could persecute us. ‘It’s gunna be a lot worse when you useless bastards come up against Charlie, you’re gunna die and they’re gunna die laughing at your attempt to kill them!’
    Because I was such a big bastard, 6′6″ non-metric, they loved to have a go, ‘Thompson, you big, dumb useless, uncut prick! The Viet Cong are going to drop to their knees and thank Buddha when