Canngra covered a large area and some distances were too great to be run, which meant that transportation had to be supplied, but that didn’t really make things any easier. Where ever we went, be it patrol in the jungle or forced march or indeed truck ride, we got ambushed. Instructors would lay in wait with blank ammunition in their weapons, differing from us since we had no ammunition of any kind.  
    Of course, it was all to practice our skills at deployment when unexpectedly fired upon, which, if viewed with the right attitude, could be rather fun and definitely a break in the monotony. But when it amounted to a truck load of soldiers weighed down by heavy gear being suddenly attacked, the matter was much more problematic. The truck would slam on its air-brakes, causing the soldiers to become a terrible tangle of men and gear, all in a heap at the front of the tray. Recovering from that, you had to leap over the side, figure out which side of the road the attack was coming from, deploy on the otherside, and then make a full frontal assault up the hill at the enemy’s ambush position. The simple fact that such an assault, if against automatic weapons, would cause us to be quickly wiped out to the man did not come into it. They wanted a charge up the hill and that was what they got.

Elliott Arnold is, sadly, the most common sort of successful writer. He wrote a number of books that were big sellers for five minutes, a couple of which were made into major films, but he and everything he did was forgotten five years later. Flight from Ashiya is probably his biggest success. It concerns Air-Sea Rescue teams in flying boats out of Japan—two planes have gone to rescue a boatload of women, victims of a typhoon, and one has crashed. The wives of the crew wait to find out which, and their reflections on the past give rise to the personal stories of both crews. Which is the problem—neither book nor film despite good actors (Yul Brynner, Richard Widmark, George Chakaris) were able to bring these people to life. I liked it only because of the flying boats, and the great scene with the model helicopter which tries to save villagers caught in an avalanche. And, of course, the story dated almost immediately with improved communications systems making its central premise irrelevant.