Bill Williams - A Japanese boulder

Transcript

I never fired an angry shot. I never shot at anyone…We used to do guard duty, that was of a night as well and I was on guard duty one night and we were on top of this hill that had been levelled off and the headquarters and everything was up there, and my duty was round and round the headquarters. And I looked across and I seen this bloke over the other side and he's squatting down.

I thought ‘He's right alongside the jungle. Why would he step out of the trees to have a crap in the open?' I watched him and watched him and finished running around again and he'd moved and I'd moved further along and I'm staring and string at him and he's still squatting down and I thought ‘There's something wrong with this bloke'.

When the other fellow came to relieve me, he said, "Is there anything I ought to know?" and I told him about this bloke over there. He looked at it and he said, "I'll go around here and you go around there and we'll get him in between us". We thought he'd be a Jap. He wouldn't be a bloody Australian.

He went one way and I went the other way and we got around there. I came back for some reason. Perhaps I didn't want to be in it. I came back and then he came back. He said, "You're queer'. I said, "What?" he said, "That Jap, I just walked over, you said you seen him walking around'.

He said, "That's a boulder". It was a big stone. That's all it was, and I nearly had a shot at him. I had him lined up and I thought ‘No, I won't do this. This is being stupid, and I won't do this because he's probably got a family in Japan and they'd want him back'. It was right towards the end of the war and we knew the war was nearly over so I wouldn't have a shot at him, and I didn't either. I never fired an angry shot in the war, not one shot in anger.