Then there was the matter of contracts—those between the US military and the armaments companies back home. Quotas needed to be filled and every day more shiploads of bombs and rockets arrived, and due to the dangers involved with over-stock-piling, and because the pilots flew every day because they wanted to get their hours up, thus they were under orders to drop their bombs and fire off their rockets, whether they had a target or not.
    “Goddamn trigger-happy Yankee cocksuckers,” Snowy seethed.
    “Well,” Nigel smiled, “At least now we know who our real enemy is.”

I chatted with this guy named Cullen in the boozer on the day he arrived from Replacement Coy, and he was killed 24 hours later. Stuck his head up to see where they were at the wrong moment. The bullet went in one ear and out the other.
    The incident made the news, although only just. “My son was too young to die,” his mother lamented on page three of The Sun. Diggers were being killed daily at the time and we were slipping further from the front pages.  See any mention of a storm, a camp, the long march, the fact that 55 men were wounded in some way or other on that operation? Not a murmur. I was one of the few the Charlies completely missed.

On the 17th December 1967, Harold (all the way with LBJ) Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, went for a swim on Cheviot Beach near his holiday home at Portsea. He remarked at the water looked rough, but went in anyway. “I know this beach like the back of my hand,” he declared. As usual, he was wrong. Almost immediately, the rip swept him out to sea and his body was never found. He was 59 and suffered shoulder problems and was exhausted after fighting off a leadership challenge. But most of all, he suffered overconfidence, and believe in his own publicity as the indestructible 007 Holt.
    Some say it was suicide, especially to escape the marital clutches of the abominable Dame Zara, but that isn’t likely. He had lovers all over the country, and at least one of them with him on the beach at the time. Others say a Russian or Chinese submarine kidnapped him, but what on earth could they possibly want him for? Still others insist on a shark, but he was a conservative politician and the shark would have spat him  out in disgust.
    There was a massive search followed by a great outpouring of grief in the media for a man most Australians didn’t care much about. Every world leader turned up in Oz for the funeral. Soon after, they named a swimming pool after him—our leader might have been dead but Aussie humour wasn’t. It was one of the few times that I was pleased to be in Vietnam and not in Australia.