Transcript
I joined the regular army with the hope of becoming an army pilot based on an advertisement in the paper. Okay? And I then got sent to Scheyville which was an officer training unit set up for the national service guys.
Usually a class of about a 116, of which maybe 10 would be potential aviators. And because we aviators were regular soldiers, but we did the six months there, very high failure rate, up to 40%, at Scheyville. And it was very intense infantry training because we had a lot of training to do after that, to learn to fly aeroplanes, and then helicopters.
So Scheyville was a very intense place. Very, very intense…it was the infantry type training, and we had to learn a lot in a very short time because this was the only chance the national service guys had of becoming a second lieutenant. And they went to various corps, not all infantry, but the training was infantry.
But if one of these chaps graduated from Scheyville and went to an infantry battalion he would've spent just about the whole year in Scheyville, six months in the bush, and next thing you know, bang, he's in Vietnam as a platoon commander, which is pretty serious going, so it was full on.
