My National Service experience I remember well in some parts and not so well in others. Strange how some things stick so well and yet not others ― and the things I do remember were not always driven by some momentous event but often were very much more trivial in nature.

I always had problems recalling dates and operations and maybe that is because from my perspective it just wasn’t really relevant to me as a digger ― life in Vietnam was just an ongoing series of operations, scrub bashing, mountains, jungle, contacts and short spells in camp. But I get ahead of myself.

The first time I was outside the wire was while with the Australian Reinforcement Unit (1ARU) at Nui Dat. This was the place reinforcements were put on arrival in Vietnam before being allocated to a Battalion. One late afternoon we went out in platoon strength to ambush overnight and we ended up on the edge of a banana plantation with maybe 50 yards of clear ground before the track/road we were ambushing. Don’t ask me which road or where it was I haven’t a clue. Just a minute or two before curfew lifted in the morning a small motorbike started up and sped down the road. Nobody fired at the transgressor given it was practically at curfew end. Later, the general consensus was that it was someone either getting an early start off to work or an enemy courier who thought he was past the ambush point and was safe to get on the motorbike.

We had gone through the usual stuff of reconnoitring the ambush point and also another area a little further down the road to mislead anyone who was watching as to exactly where we would be in ambush so maybe the enemy courier thing could have been true.