There were two firing ranges at Canungra. One was a marksman range where you lay on your belly and took carefully aimed shots at a distant target, and the other the jungle track type, where you walked along with an Owen gun through dense bush where targets would pop up suddenly, from behind that shrub, beside that tree, and some would be enemy and some friendly. I leave it to you to judge which was more fun, and more useful.
    The jungle walk was a big step since it was the first time we got to use live ammunition without an instructor standing over you, and it amounted to a point system. Each target was covered with a sheet of paper with your name on it, yellow were enemy, white were civilians, and you gained points for all hits on the former, lost them for all hits on the latter and misses were also deducted. There were no points for accidently shooting your mates, neither were there for shooting an instructor even if it did win you much admiration. A positive score and you completed the course.
    But it proved to be a race to the bottom, when we learned that once you had successfully completed the course, you got to be one of the chaps lying in a slit trench, hiding in the bushes pulling the strings that made the targets pop up while bullets whizzed all around you. I never successfully completed the course and I don’t know anyone else who did either.
 
The Bedford Incident by Mark Rascovich was a neat blend of The Enemy Below and Dr Strangelove, in which a US nuclear destroyer plays a cat and mouse game with a Russian nuclear submarine, the former having caught the latter in illegal waters and trying to force it to surface and surrender. The tension causes a German officer to try and avenge WW2 by destroying them all in the end. I was therefore completely unprepared for the stunning ending to the film, which they changed—for the better! The German is still present, as an advisor, but for a change he is not to blame. The tension on the bridge has got to the jittery young gunnery officer played by James MacArthur who sits with his finger on the button. Captain (Richard Widmark) mutters to himself. “If he fires one, I’ll fire one,” he says. “Fire One!” echoes Macarthur. Thus the nuclear annihilation of Earth begins.