John Brownbill's story

I had a position on the foot of Ascension Valley where the guns were facing out. There was a mountain with a straight front on it like that, coming down and my tent was back there because the trajectories of any weapons was such that they had to go over and we dug down and pushed our guns out on the face this and we had to get all our equipment out in 24 hours, 1500 metres back and the North Koreans had to do the same the other way to make the demilitarized zone.

We knew the war would end at 10am and when it did we reckoned life was wonderful and crashed my tent and my platoon was sitting round with their feet standing in because when you build a tent like that you dig a hole that deep to give you more overhead and you can work around the edges of it if you make the hole a little bit less and the size of the tent. Am I making sense?

And we’re all sitting there cleaning weapons and chatting away and a fellow on the other side had got a 9mm pistol from the Canadians and he removed the magazine, pulled the working parts back a couple of times, pressed the trigger which is the way to do it and it’s inexplicable, it couldn’t have happened, but there happened to be a bullet in there.

It should have come out when he opened it and the bullet went into the ground two inches under where I was sitting. Oh dear. I’ll never forget that. That’s ten minutes after the war ended. Could have ended my life.

They were a dedicated enemy and a fair and hard fighting enemy, and they had a bit of a sense of humour and they were meticulous. Our fellows would occasionally walk into booby traps. The Chinese would take a piece of straw and crawl on their hands and knees feeling for mine wires.

They were incredible and on one occasion a mine laying party started laying a minefield and when you do that you have a screen of infantry out and the engineers would lay the minefield and then the infantry would come in through the mine gaps and the engineers come in and they did this this particular night and come daylight, looked out and there were four batches of mines.

The Chinese had followed them in and lifted the mines and put them in in four corners. So that night the boys went out as soon as it was dark and there were no mines there. The Chows must have dug in and taken them away.

JJ: You know how it's a normal reaction to stir your coffee and then lick your spoon? I seen a bloke do that one time in Korea, stirred the coffee and put it in like that and the spoon stuck to his lip. Now the only way they could get that was put electric wires on it to heat the spoon up to get it off his lip, otherwise it would have torn the skin off.

JB: I was out on patrol one night with one of my chaps. The Owen gun has a magazine sticking up like that, and for some reason he saw something and he licked it. And I grabbed the gun and pulled it like that and pulled about a quarter of an inch of his tongue off. If I hadn't done that he would have lost his whole tongue.

JJ: You've never seen cold like it.

JB: I think we used to have about five pairs of gloves to wear. With a Vickers gun you hold it like that and pull in here and press like that. Your hands are so cold that fellas would do that and press like that. You just couldn't bend your hands, even with gloves on. It has to be experienced. It's one thing you can't explain.

JJ: That's what I say about each conflict throughout the war, throughout the world, is different because the people can only talk of their experiences. You can't relate to somebody else's war and compare it. It's like chalk and cheese.

JB: Our boys in Australia used to send us up, the government send us up, large lots of one pound tins of butter. And we'd go round the Americans and give them two cans - one for the Colonel and one for the Quartermaster - and they'd fill up a three ton truck of food for you. And one of the things was big capon turkeys. They looked like emus. Now they had some rubbish around them, and deep frozen mind you, and this rubbish, of course we didn't know what it was. Years before we got it. It was polythene or king-sized Gladwrap or something. At 40 below, or 20 or 30 below, how in the hell are you going thaw that in a field kitchen? So they'd throw it into deep fry and let her go. And the polythene would float to the surface, they'd chuck it away. And they'd pull it out - this put me off poultry for years - and they'd serve it up with a sort of machete. The outside would be charcoal and the inside would still be cold and bleeding.

JJ: One day a week we used to get dehydrated cabbage and powered eggs.

JB: Yeah, remember the powdered potato mash? Oh god.

JJ: It was shocking stuff. At the time I was the only Australian in the unit. There was an Australian unit manned by Pommy national servicemen and I was the Australian representative. So I had the job of going and picking up the rations. On the Wednesday I used to get in my truck and drive over to the Quartermen. They'd load up all this dehydrated stuff, then I'd do the rounds of the Yankee camps and swapping it for different things. You'd be surprised what you could get for a case of bully beef. You know, legs of ham and chickens.