General News
19 October, 2024
Barry's Corner
Here were the old diggers - thin as rakes, grey of hair, long of tooth, lean and hardened, but ready for action.
It was on a photograph shown around the table.
The second photo of the same group was taken about 50 years later where reality has set in.
It was the occasion of a get together of the former crew of the Centurian battle tank we used in a deployment to Vietnam.
A couple of weeks ago, the four of us, plus one, met for lunch in a Melbourne suburb, and chewed over the futility of it all and the ailments that are catching up with all of us.
Despite all the best efforts to care for ourselves over the decades, we were obviously succumbing to the passing of the years.
It was a sentimental few hours but a pleasure to meet the others with a parallel history.
It took two years out of our lives, at an age we should have been working up careers or getting on with our lives.
Regrets, there was a few, but to catch up with these old blokes was a few hours well spent and we resolved to try again in the future.
There were four men to a crew, with a commander, gunner, loader radio operator and a driver.
I was a fill-in driver who hot-seated a vehicle when another driver took sick or was out of action, and I spent a lot of time with this crew of 31charlie, which is the number four tank of One troop.
The past 50 years have mellowed us a lot and there was not as much beer downed as there might have been once; harder to cope with a stomach machinery making its presence felt.
But it was easy to settle into the reunited company; it was nearly like family.
We had been thrust together as a group and soon learned to trust the skills of the others.
This tank has been found in a private museum at Ballarat, and we have gathered as a crew to take a gander and talk with the new owners.
It is not the first time we have spent a solid couple of hours together, but a valuable kick back in history.
Would we get dragged into the military again?
Not likely, we would be much more cunning and harder to contact.