Transcript
If I happened to need the newspaper at certain times of the day, I always went out through the gun position, the machine gun, because the gun people change... one changes every hour and the other changes on the two hour. So there's always one person just on, and one person been on an hour. And I would say, "I'm going out to that tree there."
If you see movement, because with the Vietcong, when your greens are wet they're black, they look black. And I was, this sounds stupid, I never went to the toilet on the top part of the hour, as in 12:00, 11:00. I always went on the bottom part of the hour because I knew you weren't having a new person coming on. And I never went to the toilet in the dark. I made sure I conditioned my body that if I had to do number twos, it was always in daylight and it was always...
Because people got killed through, not that I know, but you hear rumours. People get killed because they're going out to the toilet and I have been on the gun duty for night-time and even though some people had tiny, tiny torches, the fireflies in Vietnam of a night-time... It's like that, you know. "Oh, light", and then a few more paces, light again. And you're swinging the gun, the M60, or if you're on the 50 calibre, gee, I wish I'd fired the 50, but I never fired it because you don't want to give the position away, but they move. And the more you look at the trees, the trees start to move with your eyes, 'cause you never... Your best vision is what comes out the side. What comes out the front is not good over night-time.
