Fuss and bother

Better version of this here.

There was a bit of fuss last week about comments that some soldiers put up on Facebook.

I didn't see what the fuss was all about - they were the sort of things that we used to say when I was running around in a green suit. Some soldiers even manage to be a bit artistic about these things in this day and age:

From here and here.

You are sick

Got a comment the other day where I was called a "sick cunt". Sorry if the language offends - it wasn't me that said it.

Doesn't offend me - been called that before.

Did an exercise back in 1986 or 1987 - middle of summer in WA. Our platoon went out in the afternoon sun, when it was about 40 in the shade, and spent a few hours doing practice attacks up a pile of rocks masquerading as a hill. Each section took turns to attack some gooks (as they were back then) dug in up the top.

The trouble with the plastic blank ammo that we used was that after you'd put a lot of it through the gun, it left a thick residue of gunk in the chamber and barrel, and when that started to smoke (from overheating), it let off a quite disgusting smoke.

Apart from the gun overheating, I also overheated. I got heatstroke. To top it off, on the last attack, I found myself in the middle of a large patch of broken glass. Not grass - glass. The glass and the rocks and the crawling around and the vibration from firing the gun all teamed up to slice me up nicely. Not enough to need stitches, but I had the sort of cuts and abrasions on my arms, legs and abdomen that I get these days from coming off the bike at 40km/h and sliding along the bitumen.

So there I am, sliced up and bleeding, half delirious with heat stroke and then I get a lung full of the yucky smoke from the gun. I start chundering. But the attack hasn't finished, and according to the DS, I haven't been shot, so I keep on going.

I was not in a good way when it was all over. In fact, I was fucked. Fucked enough to get stuffed into an ambulance and carted back to the RAP. The medics were ready for this sort of thing - there were old empty houses on the training range, and they'd raided one and nicked a bath tub. It was full of ice, and in I went.

As I was lying there cooling off, one of them was kind enough to give me some porn to look at.

The ice stopped the cuts from bleeding, but there was enough blood on me to turn the icy slush a nice pink colour. I'd also managed to throw up in front of myself whilst crawling, and then crawled through it. It had been hot all week, and I hadn't had a shower for a week. I was a yucky, stinky mess - typical infantryman really.

One of our old soldiers rolled up - one of our training staff. He'd been out with us. He'd done Malaya and been to Vietnam a few times. He was a tough old bastard - been there, done that etc etc.

He looked at me reading the porno in a tub of bloody ice.

Old digger: "How are you feeling, digger?"

Me: "Much better sir"

Old digger: "Will you be right to go out again today?" Medics start shaking their heads.

Me: "Absolutely sir".

Old digger: "Bike, you are a sick cunt. Possibly the sickest cunt I have seen all week. Keep it up."

Me: "Thank you sir!"

Coming from a bloke like that, that was high praise indeed.

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I've fixed up the spelling errors and linked to the comment. I type like crap at 0600 hrs - should stick to typing at night.

Singing, and swearing, like a trooper

If you want to have a glimpse into the way soldiers think, talk and act then look no further at the songs they sing.

I am a reasonably well educated, well read, artistically inclined individual. I like the theatre, I enjoy talking to academic types and I sometimes think that I have taken in a small amount of high culture and art. In general, when I visit a city, the must see places for me are its museums and cathedral.

But when I wore a giggle hat, I happily went pure animal. This site showcases reams of tunes and ditties - and I've sung many of them in bars and boozers in the company of other grunts when I've had a beer or six. Or ten.

Here's a sample:

Oh they say there's a troopship just leaving Bombay

Bound for old Blighty's shore,

Heavily laden with time-expired men

Bound for the land they adore;

There's many a twat just finishing his time,

There's many a cunt signing on;

You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean,

So cheer up my lads, fuck 'em all!

Chorus:

Fuck 'em all!

Fuck 'em all!

The long and the short and the tall;

Fuck all the Sergeants and W.O.l.'s,

Fuck all the corporals and their bastard sons;

For we're saying goodbye to them all,

As up the C.O.'s arse they crawl;

You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean,

So cheer up my lads, fuck 'em all!

We didn't sing that exact song - the first verse was adjusted a bit, but the chorus always remains the same.

I suddenly feel like a few beers.

Murphy's Law of Combat Operations

Here. It's a long list, but worth a read.

I think I saw a similar list in our boozer in the late 1980's. I'm sure something like this was passed around in Roman times.

Stuff happens

Tony Abbott was stitched up nicely today by a Channel 7 "reporter". For some reason, the tool asking the questions thought that saying "Shit happens" was being insensitive.

Well, putting on my old giggle hat and writing as a rather useless part time soldier, I have only one comment to make - what a load of crap.

Soldiers have a vernacular all of their own, and most of it is incredibly offensive. We use the term "swear like a trooper" instead of "swear like a teacher" for good reason. Soldiering is hard work -physically and mentally harder than just about any other occupation - and it comes with a reasonable risk of death, injury or wounding. Soldiers think, talk and joke in a way that would make many civilians fall over in astonishment. The black humour of soldiers is something to wonder at - shrinks would call it a "coping mechanism".

Soldiers train and train and train and train - and then train some more - because the battlefield is one big bucket of "shit happens". Even though I was just a humble chocko that never had to run around a two way firing range, I was trained quite thoroughly to deal with and handle the wide variety of shit that comes your way on operations. And funnily enough, we used to regularly use expressions like "shit happens", because incredible as this might sound - shit happens in war! War is messy and unpleasant and things rarely go to plan.

Take the ending of the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London by the SAS. You had the best train assault teams in the world doing the work, and they were equipped with the best stuff available at the time. They'd rehearsed the entry many times, yet when they actually started blowing stuff up, one bloke got tangled in his ropes and was nearly roasted alive when flash bangs set the curtains on fire.

Even when you have a well planned op, with highly trained troops, good intelligence and the best equipment, things still go pear shaped. Shit happens - it's how you deal with it that matters.

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PS - the SAS op was called "Operation Nimrod". We used to use the term "nimrod" to denote a complete and utter fuckhead - like Mark Riley. Some crafty sods have been vandalising his Wikipedia entry - at 11.39 yesterday, someone added this to his entry (which has since been locked down):

He is a total fuckface who had [[sex]] with [[Julia Gillard]] in return for a bullshit story about Tony Abbott

Wasn't me by the way. And I don't believe this accusation for one moment. For crying out loud - who would want to screw Gillard?

More on hootchies

Thanks to the movie "Platoon", every man and his dog seems to know the term "hootch" or "hootchie" - although in the movie, it referred to the original meaning of house or village, as in "Burn down all the hootches".

Armies love adopting words from foreign campaigns. Dixie, which I think comes from India, and presumably means "pot". Gook, from Korea, which is a bastardisation of the word for person. There is a whole vocabulary that the military uses which would be completely foreign to anyone that has not been inducted into it. Anyway, hootchie is one of those terms.

Unlike a grass hut, the military hootchie is not much good at keeping the rain out. A hootchie is made up of two "shelter-halves" that are put together with press studs along one edge. Every soldier is issued with a single shelter-half, and they then buddy up with someone else and together they build a hootchie.

You start by finding a spot between two trees, assuming you are not digging in at a spot without trees. With luck, one of you will have managed to snavel some comms cord from somewhere - that is essentially army issue green string that is very strong. It had 1000 uses, but is always in short supply. You use a few lengths of that to attach the hootchie to the trees.

You then either bang in the plastic tent pegs (that you bought yourself in a camping store), or you hunt for some sticks that can be used as tent pegs - the army would never do something as sensible as issue tent pegs to go with a "tent".

A hootchie however is not a tent. A tent is a wonderful piece of kit that has an integrated floor and walls, a door that zips up to keep out the weather and the bugs and a window and vents to let the farts out. It's usually quite warm and dry, and if put up properly, rarely blows over.

A hootchie on the other hand is just two bits of plastic stuck together and erected any old how without benefit of poles. Rain leaks through the seam at the top. There is no floor. There are no walls. There is no door. Wind blows in from four directions, bringing rain if that happens to be falling. If you are on a slight slope, you might find that a stream of water is soon running underneath your sleeping place. Bugs use it as a place of shelter and food.

You often don't get to spend much time sleeping under it anyway (night patrols, radio duty and guard duty take care of that), so it can be much easier to forget about erecting a hootch and to simply wrap yourself up in the shelter-half like a coccoon. Living under one is a miserable experience. Once it starts raining, the only way to avoid utter misery is to huddle in the middle of the hootchie with the mate that you are sharing it with.

If you are cold and wet and shivering and wearing every stitch of clothing that you own (that is, one pair of trousers over the top of the other, one shirt over another), then you huddle together to keep warm. Call it cuddling if you like - I call it surviving. The best hootchie mate I had later came out of the closet - at least he wasn't worried about being close to another bloke in order to share warmth. It's why I am totally unfussed about gays in the military. So long as he didn't want anything more than a cuddle, I was happy.

The big advantage of the shelter half of course is that it weighs close to nothing and folds up into a mess of plastic the size of your fist. You can carry it in your pocket if need be, which guarantees that soldiers will carry it. If someone issued me with a tent, it would be the first thing to be dumped, which would mean no shelter at all. The hootchie, whilst providing crap shelter, provides some shelter rather than none at all.

A dog pen would be a nice place to spend the night

One thing the infantry taught me is that it doesn't matter where you are in the world, it's likely that you will spend at least a few nights being wet, cold and miserable. It's the nature of the places where you operate, the jobs that the infantry has to do and the way the infantry has to operate.

To start with, whilst it was very common in Napoleonic times for the army to accomodate itself in private houses (a practice very much in use during WWII), it doesn't seem to happen much these days. A small unit (such as a squad or a section) might run an OP (observation post) from a private dwelling, but they are only in that dwelling for the purpose of observation, or to use it as a fighting position. They are not using it as a place to cook, wash, eat and sleep.

The most luxurious accommodation I ever had during an exercise was a school hall, which meant that I got to sleep on concrete covered in a very thin layer of the cheapest carpet that the education department could buy. Which of course was then worn to a crisp by years of abuse by thousands of kids.

But it had a roof, which kept the rain off, and walls which stopped the wind whistling in. It had a floor, which whilst hard, was not made up of lumpy rocks and sticks mixed in with mud, and it lacked the creeping and crawling insects and other things that usually found their way into my sleeping bag during the night.

That's because we generally spent the entire exercise living out in the open. We had a few 10x10 tents, but they were not for sleeping in. One of two would be occupied by headquarters and the signallers, another by the RAP (Regimental Aid Post, which housed the medics) and another two by the Q store (quartermaster) and transport (the truckies). If we had some engineers or mechanics, they might rate another tent as well.

The reason those groups had tents is because they had stuff that had to be kept out of the weather, and that stuff was not people. Radios work better when dry. Paperwork is easier to do at night when you have light to work with (and that requires working in a tent that keeps the light in). Stores are less likely to be nicked if they can be held in an enclosed tent. Even though the CO had a tent to work in, he slept like we did - under a hootchie, or in warmer weather, maybe on the ground wrapped in a large plastic garbage bag.

We were light infantry, which meant we walked everywhere, and everything we owned was carried on our backs. We carried as much as possible, but as little of everything as possible. Toothbrush handles were cut down to save weight. A two week exercise would be done wearing one set of clothes, with a spare set in the rucksack. The spares might only be worn at night (because it is more comfortable to sleep in clean clothes), or when the regular set got wet and muddy. When we were issued with rat packs (rations), we'd go through them before packing them away and strip out anything nonessential to save weight.

This of course meant no luxuries, because luxuries meant weight, and too much weight could kill. It meant spending your own money on a good, lightweight sleeping bag, because the army issue ones were bulky and heavy. It meant buying your own lightweight self inflating ground mat, because the army issued inflatable mattresses were a joke. In summer, a sleeping bag might be dispensed with entirely, with the rougher types simply using a few Glad garbage bags as insulation, because garbage bags are lighter to carry than even an expensive lightweight sleeping bag.

Can you imagine going out into your backyard tonight and sleeping in your garden, wrapped only in two garbage bags? You put your legs into one, and cut a hole in the bottom of the other, put your head through the hole and use that to cover your torso. And I don't mean sleeping on your nice soft lawn - I mean sleeping in amongst the plants, in the dirt. Perhaps on the bark or woodchips that you use to keep the weeds down. Your pillow will be the bumpack or waterbottle on your webbing. And don't even think about taking your boots off. If the ground is not too hard, you can dig a small hole for your hip, making lying on your side more comfortable. But you'll be rolling over constantly, because bits of your body will fall asleep as the rough ground cuts off circulation to one part or another.

If it's really cold, you'll be wearing both your clean uniform and your dirty uniform to provide two layers of warmth. You might even have your rifle in your sleeping bag in order to keep it warm and dry. Ever slept with 5 kilos of metal and wood with all sorts of protruding edges? Ever slept for two weeks with your boots on every night? You get to rotate your socks every few days, but you're sleeping with boots over socks that have been worn on and off for two weeks with maybe the odd rinse here and there.

Depending on where you are, there might be clouds of mosquitoes. They army issues you with an incredibly nasty insect repellant, which can also be used as a gun lubricant in a pinch, but it never seems to keep the little biting bastards away. Sleeping with a balaklava pulled right over the head can help to keep them away, but then they just bite you on your eyelids and lips.

If it rains, it's just tough. Gun piquet still has to be done, even if the temperature is just above freezing and the rain is pouring down. We never had time to really dig in properly, so our fighting positions never had overhead cover to keep the rain out. If we were in one place for a few days, we might manage to dig a U-shaped gun pit that was deep enough to stand in and fight from. If we were really lucky, and were supplied with corrugated iron and star pickets and fencing wire, we might get to line the walls with tin (to stop the dirt from caving in) and to put some overhead protection on the arms of the U (ie, a roof to keep out shrapnel from mortars and the like). But the bit where we stood and fought from was never covered due to a lack of time, so we simply stood in the rain like drenched sentinels, willing our two hour stag to be over.

I spent quite a few nights on gun piquet with my upper body draped in empty sandbags, because the hessian cover was reasonably good at keeping the water out and the body heat in. The sandbags had all been filled with sand at some point, so although they kept most of the water out, it meant that I finished the two hour stag covered in a fine layer of mud if it was raining. And of course the bottom of the gun pit would have a few inches of water or mud in it, which would mean absolute misery if your boots leaked.

In short, life in the light infantry could be tough and miserable and cold and nasty. It was not a life for the faint hearted or the weak. I have slept in a shallow trench, wrapped in nothing but sandbags and lying in a couple of inches of cold mud with the rain falling on my face. I have had the misfortune to bed down in a slight hollow for the night and discovered in the morning that it was a kangaroo nest, meaning that it was full of kangaroo ticks, which meant I spent an hour with a mate burning ticks out of my skin. I've slept on the ground in places crawling with leeches, and had to salt them off my skin in the morning. I watched our section commander gently remove one from the end of his cock one morning, much to the amusement of everyone around him.

My experiences of sleeping rough in the bush have conditioned me to sleep just about anywhere. I have slept on a pile of rucksacks in the back of a truck bumping along rough bush tracks. I have slept on the bare metal of a tray ute under a tornau cover (in order to stay out of the rain). I have slept on hay bales in shearing sheds. I can sleep happily on just about any form of couch in anyone's loungeroom. A mattress to crash on in a mate's living room floor is luxury. In my youth, I have made it halfway home from the pub after a few too many drinks and slept the night in the odd garden, happily wrapped in newspapers gathered from neighbouring lawns. I have cuddled dogs for comfort. I have made it home from the pub as a batchelor, only to be greeted by an unmade bed and the sheets in the washing machine, and slept on the bare mattress under a pile of dirty laundry.

Which is why I viewed the whole "dog pen" story with such disdain. If that wanker Bob Brown had actually spent some time serving his country in any of the combat arms, he'd know what it can be like at the pointy end of military service. The infantry do it tough, so their prisoners have to do it tough too, because there is no comfortable place for anyone to spend the night. A patrol base is not a 5 star B&B. Even the homeless bums stumbling drunkenly around Sydney can find a better place to sleep tonight than some of our servicemen in Afghanistan.

That's not because of pennypinching or bastardry on the part of the army - it's because that's what operational conditions dictate, and it's because a good infantryman will sleep anywhere at anytime. I'd rather sleep in a dog pen, which is warm and dry and offers some protection from rockets and mortars, than in a location which is cold and wet and exposed to fire. Any sane person would. Only softcocks who have never spent weeks sleeping rough would fail to understand that.

Almost a memorial once

It's strange where life takes you. Back when I was a chocko grunt, some sculptor friends of my parents were putting in a proposal to do the Australian Army National Memorial.

the central focus of the memorial is two bronze figures representing Australian soldiers facing east towards the rising sun. The figures stand on a raised podium paved in a radial pattern, which refers to the Army insignia.

Seven cylindrical pillars recall the seven major conflicts in which the Australian Army has been involved in the twentieth century. The pillars stand in water, reminding the visitor of the long sea journeys involved in all Australian campaigns.

They asked me in passing if I could pose for them, since I was the only "digger" that they knew. As it turns out, I never did. Don't know why - it was a long time ago now. Probably too lazy to get out of bed (I was a student after all). And it's not like I'd served in any conflicts, or even been overseas on a peacekeeping mission or anything like that.

But if I had posed, these figures would not be wearing slouch hats. They'd have been wearing a giggle hat, and their sleeves would have been rolled down, not up.

I've been to the memorial. I could go on and on about it, but I won't. It's a memorial, not an exact depiction of reality. I like it. I wouldn't change it, nit-picker that I am.

I just wish I'd made the effort to pose for the statues. That would be a cool thing to say to the kids every time we visit Canberra - "Let's see the memorial to Dad".

There's a lesson there for the kids - don't be so bloody lazy. Get out of bed and get cast in bronze.

Swanbourne beach - where nude people get shot at by the SAS

The title for this post is slightly misleading, but Swanbourne is an interesting spot in that some smart cookie decided to site the only nudist beach in Perth alongside the live firing range at Campbell Barracks, home to the SASR.

The sign in the link above brought back memories of being on both sides of the line - lying on the sand with my togs off, and visiting the barracks to borrow some radios from the SAS Q Store.

Why did I have my togs off? Well, back when I was a uni student, I dated a vegan greenie for a while, and one of the things that she liked to do was get her gear off and lie in the sun. I didn't do it very often - body surfing in the nude is just not my thing, and Swanbourne Beach never seemed to get good surf.

The reason I was sent to Campbell Barracks is that it was a given that all radios that we were issued in the Reserves were crap. They were all Vietnam War-vintage, and I guess more than a few of them might have been dragged through the swamps around Nui Dat. The batteries could explode if the drain holes clogged up, the handsets failed on a regular basis and the pins that connected the handset cord to the radio body were a complete dog - the only way to get any sort of connection was to lick your finger and spread saliva over the pins before screwing on the handset cord. They had less range than two tin cans and a bit of string - radio operators had to be adept at climbing trees in order to get reception. Those green piles of crap with aerials attached have long been replaced, and whilst I never got to use the new squawk boxes, I was pleased to see the old ones bite the dust.

Anyhoo, the only people in WA that had half reliable radios were the SAS, so whenever we did an exercise of any import, we borrowed a couple of theirs. An "exercise of import" was where the Minister for Lard, Kim Beasley was likely to show up and have a decko at our kit. It was important to show him stuff that was working, even though the best thing would have been to show him crap that didn't work so that he'd get the idea that we needed new kit that actually worked.

The military mind sometimes works in strange ways.

How did it feel to be wandering around the home of the SAS?

A bit wierd generally. They aren't a bunch of 10-foot tall supermen with arms like Arnie and a brace of pistols on their belt. They're very much like you and me, albeit much fitter. I know of two blokes from my Army Reserve regiment that did the SAS selection course, and one of them obviously made it through because my parents bumped into his parents in the street a year or two ago and they mentioned that he was in Afghanisatan doing nefarious things, and that he remembered serving with me.

With me! Bugger me, I thought it would be the other way around. I don't know if the other bloke made it through or not - I was backpacking around Europe when they were humping around nasty hills on selection, and I never discovered the outcome on my return.

Let me just say that it was a privilege to have shared a hootchie from time to time with such fine men, and I hope that they are safe and well, sitting on their mountaintop zapping Taliban. I'm sure that the nudist beach was put their deliberately so that as they sit there in their freezing abode, they can think back to all those jiggling ladies, and remember the freedoms that they are fighting for. The freedom to bask in the sun in the nude might seem like a frivilous freedom to be fighting for, but to me, it's as good as any.

Predator and the awesome firepower scene

I remember going to see Predator at the cinema - crikey, that was a long time ago. 1987 if IMDB is correct. I am pretty sure that this was the movie that I went to with the Big T, and he came out with an imprint of his watch face embedded in his forearem. The tension was that great, he'd had his arms crossed and had dug the watch well and truly into his other arm.

I have just done a quick search for one of my favourite scenes - where they glimpse the alien for the first time and blast holy hell out of the jungle. For years afterwards, I had to put up with people telling me what a bullshit scene that was. After a while, I gave up trying to explain what bullets do to shrubbery, and used it as a means of sorting out those who have fired an automatic weapon from those that haven't.

I didn't get to participate in that many live fire shoots when I was a reservist - live ammo costs a lot (I was going to say that it costs a bomb, but bombs cost even more), so it's use was rationed. Blanks are much cheaper, but at times the budget for ammo ran out completely and we were reduced to running around the scrub yelling out "bang bang bang". I kid you not. Your defence force in action.

I imagine that sailors are told to stand on deck and go "whoosh" to similate firing a Sparrow missile.

Pilots probably get to run around the tarmac flapping their arms and going, "vroom".

Yes, I still cringe when I think about it.

Live fire shoots were something to look forward to - assuming that such a thing is your cup of tea. They were one of those things that made humping the M-60 around worth it. It was worth humping that damned thing around all year just to give it a run on a live fire and movement.

Why?

Because it was so much fun. Fun with a capital F.

Imagine this. Your section of 9 or 10 blokes is given a scenario of where you are doing a patrol through the bush and you hit an entrenched enemy and you have to clear them out. The target area has already been setup with remote controlled pop up targets set into bunkers, so you load up, patrol into the live fire area and let rip when given the word.

The entire shoot is tightly controlled. DS (directing staff) walk along behind you to make sure that no one does anything stupid, like point their weapon at someone else, and to check on things like your patrol skills, accuracy of your shooting, how you mark targets for the others in the section, how well you conduct your IA (immediate action) drills and so on. [IA is what happens when you pull the trigger and nothing happens. It could be a weapon jam, or your magazine is empty. The drill allows you to quickly determine what has happened and what has to be done to fix it - like stick a fresh mag on the weapon.]

We wouldn't know where the live fire zone was of course. We might patrol for half an hour before hitting it, but once we found it, we really let rip.

I'd be lugging the standard gunner load of 400 rounds for the M-60. My offsider would have his rifle plus another couple of hundred of link for the gun. Other members of the section would also be carrying a bag or two of link, each bag holding 100 rounds. We'd typically try and lug 1000 rounds, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it weighs plenty. Each round weighs 146gm, so a 100 round bag weighed in at 14.6 kilos (I'm not sure if that is correct, as it seems an awful lot - the M-60 itself "only" weighed 10.5kg.

Anyway, we lugged as much ammo as they'd issue us, which was about as much as we could carry without collapsing after 5 minutes.

So we'd be patrolling along, then the DS that had the remote control panel for the targets would flip up a target and the contact would be initiated. "Contact" for any non-Army types reading this means you have contacted the enemy. I'm not talking about contacting them via email or phone - I'm talking about contacting them with a wall of fast moving lead.

Half the time, everyone missed the fact that a target had popped up and the DS would have to flip a few more up to make it obvious. The drill then would be for us grunts to yell "contact front" (assuming it was a frontal contact) and then run a few steps, hit the ground, crawl to a firing position, select a target and open up. Everyone had an arc of responsibility - you don't want people shooting in all directions. A contact is not a wild melee of people shooting in all directions. Bullets kill both types of people - friendlies and enemies, so one does ones best not to zap your mates. Everyone would stick to their arc and blast anything that popped up within that arc.

That's when the fun began. The idea behind having a machine gun is to pulverise the enemy, so people would indicate targets for me to hit - since I was carrying 90% of the section firepower, it made more sense for me to blast a target with sustained fire than to have a rifleman plug a few rounds into it with his SLR.

One reason why I got the M-60 was that I was the master of the 3-5 round burst (the main reason though was that I had the strength and stamina to carry it all day and night). When we went on the range, I was always stunned by how few people could make the thing consistently fire a 3-5 round burst. I could pretty much fire as many rounds in a burst as were called for. If I was asked to fire 4 round bursts, that's what I'd do. If they wanted 5 round bursts, I'd fire 5 rounds, pause, fire 5 more, pause, and repeat until the ammo ran out. I seemed to have a natural feel for the tempo of the gun, and knew exactly when to release the trigger after each burst.

The idea behind the 3-5 round burst is that every 5th round is a tracer, so if you five a 5 round burst, there'll be one tracer in there somewhere to mark where your burst went. You can then adjust the next burst to fall wherever it is supposed to go. If you fire more than that, the gun recoil will probably have your rounds going all over the shop. You fire a burst, check where it went, adjust, fire another, check, adjust, fire another burst etc etc etc. I'm happy to say that I was pretty good at putting those rounds where they were supposed to go. I don't know why - I guess I just had the knack.

Anyway, to Predator.

A section contact would see us fire off maybe 1500 rounds - more if the DS were feeling generous and had given the riflemen extra mags. They carried 3 mags of 20 rounds back then, so 9 of them would blast off 540 rounds between them, and I'd add maybe another 1000 from the gun (assuming it didn't jam or fall apart in the process). By the time we'd finished, every tree under about 6 inches in diameter in the target area would be lying on its side. That much lead going through bush just flattens everything in its path. It was a good lesson in showing us what to hide behind and what not to. If you hugged a tree and your hands didn't meet on the other side, then that was an ok tree to take cover behind. Anything less, well, you wouldn't make it through the contact in one piece.

I watched one bloke shoot down a fairly thick tree. The DS were distracted, so instead of brassing up his designated targets, he put round after round into a selected tree in front of him. About halfway through his third mag, down it came. It gave everyone a surprise, since trees that big usually didn't fall over during a live fire shoot, but he was accurate and persistent, and he beat it in the end.

Nothing would be left standing in front of my gun for some distance. Any grass in front of the muzzle would be completely flattened by the muzzle blast. Any grass growing level with the barrel would be chopped off at that height by the departing bullets. All sapplings, shrubs, bushes and topiaries would be no more. The ground in front of me would be littered with twigs, shrubs, branches, leaves, grass and woodchips, and every now and then, the tracer would set some of it on fire, so we'd finish the contact, clear our weapons, then pick up rakes and water packs and put out a small bushfire.

So next time you are watching Predator, look out for that scene.

Preparing you for all the fun things in life

Yet another snippet from my days of wearing the part time soldier suit.

Join the Army - it'll make a man out of you.

Hmm, not sure if I agree with that statement. Especially since our regiment had a number of very gung-ho women in it, and at least one poof. Plus the odd sprinkling of wimps, dickheads and people who just had to be shot at the first hint of a contact.

I will say this about what it did for me:

I have never been so cold in my life. I have been skiing in Canada when the temperature hit -35, but I have never frozen as much as standing in a gun pit just before dawn during winter at some training ground like Bindoon or Northam. I have done a long swim down a gorge at Wittenoom that was so deep, the sun hit the water at the bottom for 5 minutes per day, resulting in unbelievably cold temperatures, but nothing beats being rained on in the middle of the night and having to lie still in an ambush position in a puddle of mud.

I have never been so hot in my life. I've done some outdoor and farm jobs in some sweltering summers, but I've only had heat stroke once, and that was in the Reserves whilst practicing assaults on a bare hill in the middle of summer. It's the only time I have ever flopped gratefully into a bathtub full of ice and stayed in it voluntarily for way longer than would normally be thought healthy.

I've never been so tired. Parenthood can be pretty exhausting as far as lack of sleep goes, but the infantry was the mother of all sleep deprivation experiences. I have only had one waking halucination in my life, and that was brought on by utter exhaustion in the middle of a two week exercise at Nannup.

I have never worked so hard physically. I was a rower in my youth, so I know all about pushing yourself out to that ragged edge of physical exhaustion and then pushing beyond it. I've pushed myself to the point of throwing up during exercise, but once again, infantry work took the cake.

It also provided me with some of the most mind-numbingly boring experiences that I can think of.

The pain at times was also something else. The feeling of one set of blisters on your feet popping during a route march, and then of another set forming beneath the raw and open blisters. The chafing of pack and webbing. The blisters on the hands from carrying a stretcher over miles of broken ground. The back pain, the shoulder pain... the knees and elbows rubbed raw from hitting the ground and crawling during contacts - and doing it again and again and again.

About the only horrible thing that I didn't have to do was sew myself up Rambo style, although burning ticks out must come a close second.

The end result is that not too many things bother me anymore, because in most cases, I have been through worse. Which is the whole idea of all that training - it's supposed to prepare one for combat, which is about as nasty and horrible and confronting as things get in this life. But I can say that I am usually able to keep my head whilst all about me are losing theirs.

A spot of dune driving

A series of three photos from an exercise at Lancelin, probably around 1989?  A few of us went out in Mogs to practice going up and down sand dunes, which can be more difficult than it looks.  You have to choose the right gear for the slope and size of the dune, and consider the "sinkiness" of the sand, then gun it at the dune, roar up the face and then ease off just before the top - just in case the drop off is really severe and you end up tipping the truck end over end as you go over the top.

The dunes at Lancelin are pretty huge, and a lot of vehicles couldn't make it up them.  The Lancelin range is open to civilians a lot of the time (they usually close it when fast movers are dropping bombs around the place), and we spent half the two week exercise towing civilians out of bogs.  The usual rate of pay for towing someone out was a six pack of beer, but a particularly nasty tow might rate half a carton.  We got drunk a lot without spending a cent on alcohol.

One nasty bastard in a Range Rover was towed out, and then welshed on the deal, refusing the pay the beer tariff.  So we drove down a narrow, boggy track in front of him, went through the worst part with him right behind us, then the driver jammed on the brakes and forced him to stop in a really deep bog.  With no momentum, he had no hope of getting out.  We left him in a worse place than what we pulled him out of.  Hope that taught him a lesson.

The Unimog is a marvelous beast, with 8 gears forward and reverse.  I'm sure one of these photos shows a Mog going backwards up a dune, probably in 5th gear.  You simply flicked a switch and the gearbox went from forward mode to reverse mode - there was no "reverse" gear as we normally know it.

We pulled a Landcruiser out of a dune around here - he was in the fanciest model it's possible to buy, loaded with kids and grandparents and the like, and he was bogged halfway up a dune.  He was digging the car out with a plastic shovel normally used by kids to build sand castles, with all the family sitting in the car watching him work.  I would have walked out and left them there.  I bet he took it back to the dealer and asked for his $70,000 back (about what a flash model cost back then - the 'Safari' I think it was).

It's a long, long way down to the bottom of that dune.

I think we had one person break some ribs around this time - they charged at a dune, but misjudged the point of attack, and dug the front end into a dune at 50km/h.  That's like driving into a concrete block at that speed.  They slammed into the steering wheel, and spent the next few days in hospital.  I think the co-driver broke his nose on the console.  People kill themselves doing this sort of thing.

Ancient times

Somewhere in this photo lurks your heroic blogger, sometime around 1985.  I'm not sure where it was taken - take your pick between Bindoon, Nannup and Northam.  All featured kangaroo ticks, leeches, rock hard ground and boiling by day and freezing by night.

Boots

When was the last time a new pair of shoes gave you blisters? For me, I think it was my last pair of school shoes, for back in the day, school shoes were made of leather, came out of the box as stiff and unbending as iron, and we seemed to do a lot more walking and running around than the current generation of tubbies. My heels always used to become a sea of weeping goo with each new pair, but the shoes were gradually broken in, and I developed thick calouses on the back of each ankle.

Modern shoes don't seem to blister like the old ones did. I don't know if they leather is softer, or whether the fit is better, or they are just cut to a more pliable style, but I have not had a blister in about a decade and a half.

The last time I got blisters is when I was a recruit, and compared to my fellow recruits, I came off pretty well. On our first day as recruits, we were issued a pair of boots. That involved sitting on a bench, having our foot size roughly taken and then having a pair tossed at us. I have bought shoes at the Athletes Foot, where they get you to walk over a machine that scans how your foot interacts with the ground, and they take lots of measurements, and you generally end up with a really well fitting and suitable shoe.

The army could learn a lot from that approach. Some got boots too small, others too big. Mine were about the right size to start with, but your feet swell under certain conditions, and the boots had no give in them, so everyone copped a bushel of blisters. I got off reasonably easy because I took my own pair of boots to camp - a pair that I had broken in long before, so my feet survived better than the rest. I still had to wear the regulation set of boots from time to time, since my old boots looked like crap and refused to gleam when polished, but it was better than blistering from toe to ankle.

There were several different treatments for blisters, but my favourite has always been to pop the blister and then rub lots of metho into it - as in methylated spirits. It hurts like hell, but the metho seems to dry the blister and it heals hard. Another option is to tip Betadine into a popped blister - that also hurts like hell, but it produces a wickedly hard callouse.

I had several seasons of rowing under my belt before I joined the reserves, so I was used to blisters galore. Each season of rowing had produced a crop of at least 20 blisters per hand, with one of my crewmates setting a record with 36 on each hand. We went through a lot of Betadine and metho, and I was well used to the pain of dealing with blisters. But it seemed that for some of my fellow recruits, the blisters that appeared after a day of square bashing were the first they'd ever had, and they whinged and whined and wanted to get a doctor to look at their ankles and they wanted gauze and strapping and all that sort of crap.

Those of us who had been through the blistering process simply sat down and showed them how to pop a blister with a sewing needle and then fill the blister with Betadine. Rough, messy and painful - but it always works. Needless to say, it was common to see recruits hobbling around the base, and reasonably common to see someone with a particular bad case of feet being ordered to sit on the side of the parade ground and watch what we were doing. Some lucky bastards also got dispensation to wear trainers on parade instead of boots.

The thing is though, trainers do not make a lovely "crash" when you stand to attention. You make that loud crashing noise by lifting the knee up high and ramming the foot down into the ground, rather than simply dragging it across the tarmac from the "at ease" position. I spent an awful lot of time ramming one foot into the tarmac, as we practiced whalloping the parade ground with our boots. When a company comes to attention, it should do so with a single loud "crack", and that crack should be audible from one end of the parade ground to the other. You don't need hobnails on your boots to achieve the affect - you just need to get that knee up high and ram it down hard.

We spent an awful lot of time trying to polish and soften our boots. Just as I was preparing to leave in 1991, the army started issuing lovely soft brown boots to replace the old black boot. I never got a pair (the reserves being at the back of the queue, and our regiment at the back of the reserves queue), but someone in the army had finally figured out that we'd be a bit more effective with a modern comfortable boot.

Some tried soaking the boots in a bucket of water overnight, then wearing the wet boot in order to make it mould to the foot. Others swore that urine was the best softening agent, so they urinated in their boots at every opportunity (and yes, the smell is something to behold). The more refined believed that using the right boot polish could make a difference, and they were madly protective of their semi-liquid pots of polish. People would do anything to end up with a comfortable boot.

But no matter how the smelt or how comfortable they were, they had to shine. Much time was spent every morning and evening trying to get the toecap to glisten. Woe betide anyone who accidently trod on the gleaming toecap of someone else - punches might be thrown if a dusty footprint resulted. There are two ways to get a gleaming toecap. One is to have the cap professionally buffed and then varnished, but you can't get that done whilst in camp. Therefore we had to rely on the old method of spit and polish.

Yes, spit and polish. I don't know how spit and polish combine to produce a gleaming shine, but they do, and we did it an awful lot. We had no access to a radio or TV or newspapers, let alone the internet or an X-box. All our free time, of which there was not an awful lot, was spent cleaning, polishing and ironing.

Was it a waste of time?

No. Partly because it kept us busy, and as the old saying goes, idle hands make for the devil's work. And partly because it gave us pride in our appearance. A good soldier is a proud soldier - even being a bit cocky is not a bad thing. There is nothing worse than a soldier who is a bag of shit, and that was an expression that I heard an awful lot during my time in the reserves. Looking like a bag of shit was a no-no, and one way to overcome that was to be starched, ironed and polished.

So we polished like demons. The four of us would sit around in a circle in our room, somewhat like our grannies did when they were sewing I guess, and we polished and polished and polished. We might share a single tin of polish, which we would all dip from with our fingers or polishing cloths, and we'd polish and gossip and yarn and we got to know each other a little better. If we weren't polishing our boots, we were sewing our uniforms (taking them in here or there) or cleaning our rifles or polishing our brass. Yes, we had a few brass buckles on our belts, and we had to polish the belts with boot polish and then polish the brass as well. Even the hardest worked cleaning lady would not polish as much in a year as we did in those two weeks.

And as we polished and ironed and starched and scrubbed, we slowly came to look less like bags of shit civilians, and more like soldiers. You don't create a soldier by simply stuffing a civilian into a uniform - there are hundreds of little changes and adjustments that have to be made to produce a soldier from a bag of shit, and bit by bit, we made the change.

Boots help to make a soldier in various ways. The weight of a boot changes the way that you walk - you can't slob along like you've got thongs or ugg boots on. You walk with deliberation and determination, because it takes more effort to take each step, and the tread is heavier. The weight of the boot provides confidence, such as when a door needs kicking in (trying doing that in thongs or a pair of Nikes). The solidity and roughness of the boot reflects the soldier, and when things get rough, and aggression is required, it's nice to have a big nasty boot on each foot. "Putting the boot in" is an expressive term that denotes a certain frame of mind, and it needs to be remembered that a soldier, particularly an infrantryman, needs to be very aggressive in battle.

I'll cover aggression later, but without it, an army is useless; a hollow shell. No moral fibre. Modern men are not natural killers - we do not seek to bump off our fellow man on a regular basis (except for the psychopathic). Men like you and me actually need a long period of intensive training before we are ready to deliberately pull the trigger on someone else. And I refer to men only, since women are generally kept out of the combat arms. The infantry are issued with bayonets for a reason - to stick them into someone else if the need arises. I don't know about you, but I never liked the idea of bayoneting someone else, and still don't, but the army has to put you into a frame of mind where you'll do it willingly.

You can't reach that frame of mind by slothing about in ugg boots. Heavy, nasty, solid leather boots are just the thing to notch up the aggression level a bit. That's why they have always been so popular with punk rockers and skinheads - it puts them into a frame of mind where they are much more prepared to "kick off" (see, another boot related term referring to violence).

A clear symbol of what boots represent could be seen during the invasion of Iraq. The Iraqi army just melted away when faced with the onslaught that the yanks delivered. In some areas, the roads were littered with boots where the soldiers simply dumped their uniforms and split, heading for home. The shedding of the boots was a clear symbol that they had given up soldiering and returned to civilian life (if only most of them had stayed that way).

There are many other shoe related concepts that I could cover, but I'd be at it all night. Let me finish this topic on this note: as a reservist, you flit back and forth between two worlds - the civilian and military. We used to talk about "putting on our civilian head", or "putting on our green (army) head". For me, I put on my green head the moment I pulled my boots on. Pulling on the uniform never really altered my mental state, but lacing the boots was all that I needed to switch to my military personality.

Don't think that's possible? Are you the same person at work, or do you put on your "work head" when you leave for the workplace in the morning? Do you take it off when you get home, or do you stress out because you can't unscrew your work head at the end of the day?

Boots maketh the soldier.

Recruit camp

These days, the expression "boot camp" seems to have taken over from "recruit camp". More Americanisation of the language I guess, or an example of how perceptions from Hollywood are more powerful than the reality on the ground. More people have seen a movie like Platoon than have served in the army.

We simply referred to it as "recruits", as in, "When did you do recruits?" (once we had gotten through it of course). We were not referred to as "boots", we were recruits. We weren't private soldiers - we were lower than that. Until we passed the course, we were the lowest form of life - "Recruit Bike".

Our recruit camp was held at HMAS Leeuwin, on the banks of the Swan River in Fremantle. You might have noticed the "HMAS" - what was a bunch of army recruits doing at a naval base? Beats me. I guess it just made sense for all the services to share the one facility. It was a reasonably modern place for its time, with three story brick barracks, a proper mess, a large gym and an asphalt parade ground. That was the stuff that faced the road and was presumably shown to visiting VIPs when they were shown around. We actually did most of our lessons in WWII era (or earlier) huts out the back of the base - away from prying eyes. Bits of the base looked like leftovers from the Boer War.

One thing that comes back to me now is the paperwork, or lack of it. Every bit of paper that we got looked like it had been mimeographed, and given that personal computers were extremely thin on the ground back then, we were spared the sight of clerks sitting in offices creating new forms for us to fill out all day. Back then, I thought we were drowning in paperwork, but compared to now, it was a paper free zone. Interesting how the rise of the PC has not created a paperless world, but has instead created a voracious demand for paper. It's simply allowed clerks and beauracrats to easily create and publish forms for everything. If you took away the ability to produce forms, we'd quickly find that we needed fewer of them.

In the leadup to the camp, I was sent or given a 2 or 3 page form listing what I was to bring. Things like a toothbrush, boot polish, laundry powder etc etc. It was very simple and straightforward, having been typed out on what looked like a manual typewriter and then duplicated. It was for all I know the same forms that they handed out to recruits back in 1914. I must go to the War Memorial one day and simply go to the archives and poke around in the files. I'm sure all the paperwork will look familiar.

Like most of the recruits, I was dropped off on day one - mainly because there was no parking for our cars. There might have been 150-200 of us. After gaggling around on the parade ground, we were divided into 6 or 7 platoons of 30 each, and then further divided into three sections of 10. At this point, we were probably assigned to an instructor, and then shown where to drop our kit in the barracks.

The rooms were very simple affairs - four recruits per room, one single bed with plasticised mattress over a wire frame, and a built in wardrobe for each person. Lino floors, brick walls, no curtains and no doors. Who needed curtains to keep out the sun when we got up at dawn? The place was very bare and spartan. No frippery anywhere. Each floor had a fire escape at one end and some communal showers and toilets at the other. The laundry was on the ground floor. It was a simple, well laid out, no nonsense affair. No excess fat or unnecessary stuff.

I think it was one platoon per floor, and I don't think the three instructors per platoon and the platoon sargeant got their own room - from memory, they shared a room just like us. The only person who got their own room was the platoon commander - a lieutenant. I'm pretty sure all the officers were housed somewhere else.

Our instructors were all corporals and lance-corporals. None of this Marine drill sergeant stuff for us. Some had loads of experience and had been in the regular army for years, whilst others were reservists like us, and had probably been in for only 2 years at that point. But we didn't know that - we were wet behind the ears recruits, and we knew less than nothing about military life.

At this point, I will mention Full Metal Jacket. This is one of my top five favourite war movies. There are many aspects of the first half of the movie that any recruit will recognise - the drill, the weapons instruction, the physical exercise, the spartan barracks and most of all, the loud, profane instructors. Regular army recruits go through a much longer course - usually 8 to 12 weeks (depending on which army you are joining), so we got a rather truncated introduction to the army. A lot had to be crammed into that two weeks, and cram is what our instructors did.

Our corporal had seen service in Vietnam in the infantry, had stayed in the regular army after the war and then moved onto the reserves when his time was up. He was short, slightly dumpy and easily the quietest and most humane of all the instructors on the camp. Which made him slightly less loud and less abusive than the rest. Although he had seen longer service than every other instructor put together, he spent the first few minutes of every lesson boning up on the contents from his notebook. Looking back now, I think he was pretty fond of a beer, which might explain why he didn't yell so much in the morning. Sore head and all that.

So we turned up, got split up into our various platoons, had a quick march around the barracks to show us this and that, and then it was time to issue us with kit. That meant marching back and forth from the Q store time and time again to be issued with boots, uniforms, webbing, bedding and all the other stuff that a soldier needs, before finally being marched to the armoury to collect a rifle. Each stage involved completing a bit of paperwork, because the Q store never hands anything over without a signature.

The first day was one of either standing in line, being bored beyond belief, or being yelled at and hurried from one task to another. We were shown all the usual recruit stuff - how to make a bed that the instructor would not destroy on sight, how to put our webbing together, how to lace our boots, how to polish out boots etc etc etc. Once we had a semblance of a uniform on (jungle greens, giggle hat and black boots, along with a web belt), we started drill instruction.

We spent part of every day doing drill. I don't know how many hours - maybe four hours a day? A few hours in the morning and a few more after lunch. It's amazing how difficult it was for some people to even march properly - that is, to keep in step and to swing the arms in the correct fashion. It might seem strange to a civilian, but it actually takes weeks to learn how to march properly. It might seem like glorified walking to some, but it takes a lot of practice to get 30 people to line up in three rows and walk in one direction without bumping into each other and tripping over each others feet.

Marching involves learning lots of little things. The correct way to clench the fist (I can't describe it to you, but the thumb should always be pointing rigidly down). The correct height to swing the arms to (shoulder height). Holding the shoulders back. Keeping the elbows stiff. Getting the right posture involved a lot of yelling and endless marching up and down the parade ground. And that was just the moving in one direction. We also had to know how to start marching, and how to stop. Then came changing direction, being dismissed and all that. And of course the correct way to come to attention and to stand at ease. And you can't forget saluting.

Drill is all about repetition. I know that hippies love to point at soldiers and laugh when they are standing in the hot sun, endlessly being ordered to attention, and then to stand at ease.... it all looks pretty mindless and robotic, and a sane person would wonder why a supposedly intelligent person would voluntarily submit themselves to it. I know that people that like to think of themselves as intellectuals always scoff at the stupidity of the sheep like lower orders that submit to this sort of thing.

Why do it?

Because an army is not a mob. An army is a controlled instrument of terrible violence. Such a terrible instrument needs to be kept on a tight leash - very strong controls are required when you are dealing with a bunch of 19 year olds armed with high powered rifles, machine guns, grenades, grenade launchers, anti-tank rockets and a radio that can call in artillery fire and air strikes. If you want to see what a well armed mob looks like, have a look at footage of places like the Congo and Somalia. Mobs create chaos and destruction and utter ruin wherever they go.

A western army can also create utter devastation - but only when it wants to. In fact a western army will go out of its way to not turn the countryside into a moonscape. With a mob, the provision of arms to 19 year olds allows power to go to their heads, and raping, pillaging and destruction follows as night follows day.

The way to exercise control over well armed 19 year olds (in fact I was 18 at the time, but I'll take my cue from "I was only 19") is to drill them and drill them and drill them and then drill them some more so that they obey orders. Yes, I know that bowing to authority is another thing that hippies love to disdain, but like I said, you don't allow someone to run around with a loaded 7.62mm self loading rifle unless they are going to do what they are bloody well told to do. Not unless you want a hole in your head. The Romans understood the importance of drill, and look where it got them.

So we spent our days marching up and down the parade ground, breaking mid-morning for a cup of tea and a bikkie. Big urns of tea would be wheeled out by the catering staff, and we'd stand around and have a 15 minute break and a biscuit. The smokers would have a fag, and we'd wiggle our blistered feet.

OK, let me try and describe a normal day.

We'd be rousted from our beds before dawn. I can't remember the exact order of things, but in the course of the first two hours or so after being woken up, we'd do a quick parade in our PT gear (to count heads and ensure that no one went over the wall during the night), then do some form of PT. That would vary between put through a series of horrible exercises by an evil PT instructor (like star jumps, push ups, knee bends and the like) or going on a 5k run around Fremantle. Or both. I think we generally did both. But I was young and fit back then, so it wasn't that hard. Some of the older guys (25 year olds) would be a bit stiff afterwards, but us youngsters recovered quickly and felt little pain after a while.

We'd then have to shower, shave, clean up our rooms and change into the uniform of the day for breakfast. All of this was accompanied by inspections to ensure that we were fit to spend all day marching up and down. Several beds would be ripped up by the instructors for failing to meet the required standard.

I don't remember anyone having a problem with the communal arrangements - I certainly didn't. I'd been to boarding school, and it really wasn't that much different - except that the marching was stricter and my housemaster at school never issued me with a rifle.

Breakfast was usually quite impressive, with a good selection of food and plenty of it. An army does march on its stomach, and the Australian army feeds its troops very well. Ok, it's not the sort of stuff that you'd find in a fancy restaurant, and it can be a bit monotonous and there is not a huge menu to choose from, but it did the trick. It kept us marching from sun up to sun down, and I don't remember any whingeing about it. Well, ok, I do remember some whingeing, because someone was always complaining about something. The boots. The marching. The teabags. The giggle hats. The instructors. The short period at night during which the boozer was opened. The PT instructors. All were cause for complaint. Apparently the only time to every worry about an army is when the complaining ceases - that's when the mutiny is about to break out.

More later.

Joining up

Australia has a population of around 20 million. How many of those alive today have served in the armed forces? Given that there are only 51,000 in uniform now (with another 19,000 in the reserves), I would estimate that less than half a million have ever put on a uniform. At present, the ADF needs to recruit 6,500 people per year to maintain current manning levels. If we were to assume that resignations/recruiting had stayed at this level for 50 years, then around 300,000 people would have passed through the military.

So let's assume 500,000 out of 20 million. That's 2.5% of the population. So 97.5% of Australians have little or no idea how the military functions, and what it is like to serve.

I joined the Army Reserve (ARES) in 1985 and resigned in 1991. From now on, when I feel like it, I'm going to write about what it was like to serve as a choco in peacetime (choco, as in chocolate soldier - one that melts in the sun). Many people have written about their combat experiences in many wars, but I don't know of anyone that has written about going nowhere and doing nothing. I doubt it would sell too many copies. A blog however is perfect for telling useless stories about non-events that happened a long time ago.

Why did I join?

Fucked if I know really. I didn't really know at the time, and I still don't know. I told the recruiter a few lies, which he accepted, so it never really mattered to me why I did it. The only reason that ever comes close is simple - duty. If that word strikes a chord with you, then you'll understand why I chose to put on a uniform. If you're scratching your armpit and trying to figure out what duty means (it is not cheap grog that you buy on the way back from Bali), then I am not going to waste my keyboard springs in trying to explain it.

Let's just accept duty and move on.

I really should have joined the Naval Reserve, since Dad was a sailor in WWII. However, a mate at Uni was in the Army Reserve, so that's where I went (thanks Paul). He was doing OCTU (officer training), which sounded like an awful lot of hard work, so I joined as a grunt. Silly bloody decision really - officers have a nicer boozer - but if you're not prepared to put the work in, you don't deserve the pips (officers rank is denoted by the pips they wear on their shoulders).

Joining up was a relatively straightforward exercise, but it was daunting enough that very few people do it each year. Since I was at uni, the only suitable regiment for me was the Uni Regiment, WAUR. That was because it was the only unit in WA that didn't hold exercises during the university term - and especially during exam times. It might have been a bit inconvenient to have to ask a lecturer (most of whom were rabid lefties) for an extension on an assignment because I had to go on an exercise with the US Marines or some such thing. So I made a few inquiries and went along to WAUR.

After showing a bit of interest in joining, I was invited to visit the barracks on a Tuesday night to view what happened when the unit paraded. By "parade", I don't mean that everyone spent all night marching around in formation going left turn-right turn-halt etc etc. Everyone would show up by the appointed time, which I think was 7pm, a short assembly would be held (the parade) and then everyone was dismissed to get on with whatever was on their training program for the night. Signallers might practice radio stuff. Medics would kiss plastic dolls. The actual fighting soldiers might sit around scratching their arses until it was knock off time. We probably got shown a few rifles and a spade and that was that. Everyone would be assembled again, dismissed and then it was off to the boozer for a few beers before going home around 11pm to midnight.

It didn't seem that arduous. Kind of like a grown-up version of boy scouts.

At the time, WAUR was located in an old wooden building in the middle of Perth. Parking there was an absolute bastard, and it was crowded, noisy and possibly falling to bits. But it was the home of the regiment, and like military formations everywhere, the boys had done their bit to spruce it up as best as possible.

But it was still a dump. Back then, Labor was in power and defence was not high on the spending priority list. The Air Force and Navy got all the money and the fun kit, whilst the Army got by on scraps. The Regular Army got first dibs at funds and new stuff, then the "active" reserve units got what was left over. WAUR got what was left over from that. We were not just the poor relations. We were the poor relations from the boondocks - the type that marries your first cousin and keeps the farm animals in the lounge room.

But they had rifles - things that go bang. And they had machine guns - things that go bang-bang-bang, and that was enough for me.

The formal part of the process was that after doing a bit of paperwork to establish who I was (laughable by todays standards - it's more difficult to open an account at a video shop than it was to join the Army), I was told to report to Karrakatta Barracks on a Saturday or Sunday morning to go through a bunch of medical and psychological tests.

I have no idea what day it was that I attended. I know it was a weekend, because I got blotto the night before, so it had to be a morning after the night before. I have no idea how I got to the appointed screening depot at 7am, or whenever it was we were supposed to arrive. It was early in the morning, and I was still half cut. I might have had a nap on the lawn out the front, along with several other potential recruits that had also had a big night out. I do know that I was lying on the ground when a car came skidding through the gravel car park and crunched into the coppers log fence not far from us. Another drunk disembarked, staggered over to the trees and vomited copiously. That set off one of my fellow lawn recliners, who also had a chuck.

By the time the medical staff opened the doors to commence examining us, there were possibly 30 young men flaked out on the lawn, with a variety of crappy old cars parked at odd angles throughout the car park. I guess they figured that if we had made it that far, and could put up with sleeping on the dewy ground, then we were fit for service.

I remember having to do the usual strip naked thing in order to be poked by a doctor. What was possibly unusual about my exam is that I threw up in his rubbish bin - stark naked and all that. I spent the rest of the morning carrying that bin around - clutching it to my chest actually - as I continued to vomit up beer, vodka and other hideous drinks, as well as bits of Whopper and chips. I was not the only one.

We had to do a multiple choice psych exam, which was so easy, you'd have to be absolutely mental not to fake it through. A few of the questions were interesting:

- do you wet your bed?

- if you get to the top of a tall building, do you feel like jumping off?

- do you wake up feeling refreshed in the morning?

I distinctly remember the last question because I answered "no" to it. It was the only question out of 100 that I got wrong. The shrink asked me why I gave that answer. He wanted to know as the 13 blokes before me had given the same response.

I pointed to all the drunks currently sprawled over chairs in the waiting area, snoring and farting and occasionally vomiting into a bin. I gave him my best bloodshot eyes look over the rim of the rubbish bin that I was clutching, and explained that I had been to several pubs the night before, then gone to a nightclub, and had left that club at 6.30am to attend this induction. The only sleep I'd had was on some wet grass out the front of his office.

He seemed rather shocked by all that. I thought that since he was in the army, he'd be used to this by now, but it turned out that he was not in the army. He was a civilian quack contracted in to do a bit of weekend work. The army was as foreign to him as it was to us, and by the look he gave us, it was also quite repugnant. I get the feeling that he thought the sooner we were all mown down in some muddy hell hole, the better off the country would be.

No one failed. If we could go out drinking all night, survive on no sleep, navigate to a place we'd never been before (whilst completely pissed), and put up with 6 hours of bullshit, then we were the perfect recruits.

I have no idea what happened next. All that I know is that some time later (a few weeks perhaps?) I was attending a two week recruit camp. Somewhere along the line, I did a bit more paperwork, swore an oath and was given a list of things that I would need for recruit camp.

And there the story ends for now.