Danny Blomeley - A typical day

Transcript

The general day-to-day was we'd go for, because we were right on the Mekong, myself and the two British Marines, we were pretty keen to be active and do what we needed to do and maintain a presence down that part of the world. Because you had the Cambodian Army, which appeared to have no structure or no direction. And they were doing their own things. You had the border police, customs, sorry. And then you had police.

So there was really a conglomerate of lawlessness down that part of the world, and then we were stuck in the middle. So myself and two of the British guys and one of the Kiwis, we would daily go on a boat patrol, so we had a Zodiac boat, and just remain a presence in the area to let them know that we were around and we were doing what we were doing. And we'd call in on different camps, I suppose you'd call it because as I said, they really didn't appear to have any structure. And we'd just take personal note of the weapon that were there. Yeah, basically essential elements of information.

We'd just keep an eye on what was there and just keep a record of who had what. It was quite amazing, the amount of leftover weaponry from the Vietnam War. So that was the mornings. We'd come back, we'd have a bit of lunch, often baked beans on rice for lunch. And then we'd head out on motorbike patrols in the afternoon, along the Mekong, up and down from the Vietnam checkpoint to the north on the Mekong. So that was generally the day-to-day operation.