Raising age to enlist
I started off to be a surveyor. I liked the work but in those days there was no formal course for a surveyor but you still had to pass these formal examinations out of a book and that didn't suit me so after the best part of two years I thought 'Okay I'm just going to wander off' and I went to Queensland did a couple of odd jobs there for about a year or so and then I saw this ad, join the navy, sorry, join the army and go to Korea and I thought 'Oh well, why not?' So, I went into the recruiting office in Brisbane and said, 'I want to join' and I don't remember much about it.
The agent said 'Fill in here. How old are you?' I knew I was supposed to tell, sorry, have my parents' permission if I was under twenty-one in those days, would you believe? And they were in Sydney and I was up there, and I didn't want to do that, so I just added two years to my age, and nobody wanted a birth certificate. I was in.
American issue
We were issued with American made parkers, well, sleeping bags, parker jackets. Big parker came down here and wrapped over and I'm not sure what else. I spent a lot of my time sitting up in the ground, a hole in the ground, half in the ground and sandbags around the top, that was the signals hut. I think I had three other signallers working for me.
I spent a lot of my time sitting up all night monitoring the radio and the telephone with all of that on and in the sleeping bag in the winter. What else can I tell you about this? Okay, we didn't have, we were up on top of hill 355 and it was very hard to get supplies up, so only essential supplies coming up. Water supply, enough for drinking and a pannikin, an army pannikin which was enough to clean your teeth, wash yourself and have a shave if you had a shave every now and again.
I can remember walking all the way down the hill a couple of times to the creek down there and breaking the ice and having a wash just because I felt a need to wash. And once, just once, I got a jeep back to the American something or other like the 125th, not MASH, but the Mobile Advanced Shower Unit. They had one of those. You went in one end. You checked in your hat, your rifle and your boots, threw all the rest of your clothes in the corner and went in and had these hot steaming shower and went down the other end and picked up whatever clothes you could find and I did have a nice American jacket from there but that went to and got your important things back and went back to your lines, went back to 355 which is where I spent most of my time.
I do remember also in reserve, one of your companies would go back every now and again to reserve, and we had a sort of a little tent thing there and we, to keep warm, and that was, that was the winter of, Christmas '52 I think we were in reserve, and I don't know how many of us would have been in one these tents. You would have a drum, like a four gallon drum, sand in the bottom, somebody would pull for kerosene, a mug of fuel from outside, that would be in a drum outside, you'd have it leaking into the sand and light it and that was how you'd keep warm and you'd also get some beer when you were in reserve, Kirin and Asahi beer from Japan. So, I guess that's how I kept warm. It was pretty hard, pretty difficult.
Never felt terribly threatened
Well, I'll tell you, when I first started, even when I was made a corporal, one of the jobs I had a lot to do was repairing telephone lines. We had telephone lines running from our company to the outposts, you always had a couple of outposts for the company, back to the battalion headquarters across to the neighbouring companies and out to your own platoons because I was at company headquarters and because of constant mortar fire we'd get constant lines going out.
You spent a lot of time going along, on my own usually or one of the fellows on their own, with cables, with all the stuff repairing these lines and usually the Chinese way over there on 317 or whatever it was decided 'I can see somebody moving there' a long way away and they'd start putting a bit of mortar fire on him and he had to keep jumping in mortar holes and shell holes on the ground to just to keep safe but I never felt terribly threatened even under those circumstances.
Danger of buried grenades
I'll tell you what we had more problems with, in our defensive positions which had been there quite a while and the trenches around people and had been occupied by other forces at different times, like the Canadians and the British, the glorious Gloucester's, I think, had had our position once.
Around these trenches they would dig in boxes of grenades ready to be used if someone attacked them and over time some of them got covered over and we had a few accidents when people were extending trenches and of course, mattocks or whatever we were using in those days uncovering and setting off grenades so, yeah, that was a bigger danger I think than all the minefields. The mortars were a bit of a problem because they were coming in all the time.
