Francis Adrian Roberts - Minefield

Transcript

Oh well we were working on operations all the time because the Vietnamese were perfectly aware of who we were, where we were.

The Task force laid itself down in a, what I call a pie crust perimeter because just to give you a for instance, there was the APC squadron to the west of the Route 2 and then there was a huge gap and 5RAR were on the other side of the road and when I say huge, damn near a kilometre.

They put up all this barbed wire and said 'Minefield. I didn't realise at that stage, certainly when I was in the second tour, I understood what North Vietnamese sappers were like and that would have fooled nobody for no time at all.

These were guys, the sappers, who stripped down to shorts, no shoes, and felt in front of themselves for the prongs on jumping mines for example and they'd get through, just in the dark I'm talking about, too. Amazing.