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From the killing fields of Gallipoli and France to the guerrilla skirmishes of Uruzgan province in Afghanistan, the experiences of diggers from five different wars reveal common themes of horror, comradery and heroism.
The men, who collectively fought in WWI, WWII, the Korean, Vietnam and Afghan wars, each had wartime experiences that exposed them to a similar sense of fear and horror.
However, there was also often a shared sense of adventure, of comradery, and very often of heroism and humanity.
Gallipoli veteran remembers horror
When Phillip Rubie joined the army in February 1915 he was half expecting a free trip to Europe. Most people believed the war would be over by Christmas.
Instead, he was sent to Gallipoli.
Speaking in an interview with Kim Dixon in the 1980s, which is now held in the Australian War Memorial Sound Archives, Mr Rubie said the first ones who landed there went for the beach.
"The Turks were on the beach with machine guns and they tore into them like blazes, mowed them down wholesale.
"And those that fell in the water, a lot of them were drowned, 'cause they were wounded and unconscious."
The terrain of Gallipoli could scarcely have been more difficult for an advancing army. A maze of steep ravines, gullies and dense scrub made their job almost impossible.
"It was hard to describe how you felt. You had a bit of fear there and it's no good in saying you didn't," Mr Rubie said.
'It took them days and days to die'
After Anzac troops were evacuated from Gallipoli in December 1915, Mr Rubie was sent to fight in France.
One especially horrifying feature of the fighting on the Western Front was the widespread use of poison gas, which led to the agonising deaths of almost 100,000 soldiers.
"The chlorine gas came as a vapour cloud that you could see — like a fog," Mr Rubie said.
"If you got a belly full of chlorine gas you spat your lungs out.
"There were fellas there that took days and days to die, but die they would."
Fighting on Australia's doorstep
In July 1942, Japanese forces landed in Papua New Guinea and began advancing on Port Moresby.
All they had to do was walk the 160-kilometre Kokoda Track and they could attack Australia.
With our best soldiers fighting in the Middle East only one thing stood in the way of the all-conquering Japanese Imperial Army — a poorly trained battalion of young infantrymen who had never seen combat.
Reg Chard, now 95, was among them.
Mr Chard and the 39th Battalion marched up and over the Owen Stanley Ranges from Port Moresby to stop them.
But with only a small force, and without heavy machine guns or artillery support, after a few months they were pushed almost all the way back to the coast.
Luckily, just when the Japanese could see the twinkling lights of Port Moresby itself, Mr Chard and his comrades were reinforced by battle-hardened Australian soldiers from the 6th and 7th Divisions who had been brought back from the Middle East to defend Australia.
'You never see them till they move'
The Australians forced the desperate and starving Japanese back up the Kokoda Track.
"When you're in the jungle itself it's pitch black, it's only 3- or 4-foot wide, the trail," Mr Chard said.
"You're walking single file, the sun never breaks through because the trees are all intermingled."
Mr Chard said the enemy was all but invisible.
"You can only see about 3 feet [one metre] in front of you and, of course, the Japanese are sitting there waiting for you," he said.
"You never ever see them till they move, that's the only time.
"You'd hear something rustle and you'd try and fire a shot there.
"If you heard a scream, you'd know they'd killed somebody. Other than that, you'd have no idea."
Alone in the jungle
It is 50 years since Keith Payne's bravery in battle in the jungles of Vietnam earned him the Victoria Cross.
But his memory of those terrifying hours in May 1969, when he rescued 40 wounded soldiers under heavy fire, have not dimmed.
He was on secondment to special forces when he was put in command of the 212th company of the 1st Mobile Strike Force Battalion.
The company was made up of 122 local highland tribesmen who were allied with United States and Australian forces against the Viet Cong.
"I was tasked to move west towards the border area, towards Ho Chi Minh Trail, and I'd set up a defensive position about a kilometre and a half outside Ben Het Special Forces camp," Mr Payne said.
But then he was attacked by a far larger force.
"We arrived on the position just before dark," Mr Payne said.
"When we got on top of the position we were just starting to go into a defensive position and had decided to put out our clearing patrols when all hell broke loose.
"I got hit early in the afternoon and then later again after dark."
A life-or-death decision
Despite wounds to his head, arms and hands, over the course of three hours, Mr Payne climbed the hill many times to find his wounded soldiers and carry them to safety.
But on one occasion he did not go unnoticed.
"I had heard the enemy firing single shots, which indicated that he was shooting my wounded," Mr Payne said.
"And it was the forward area of my forward platoon and I tried to get into there and see if there was anybody wounded."
Mr Payne said it was at this point that two enemy soldiers shot at him.
"I was crawling on my back, pushing forward with my heels and with my weapon over my chest so I could use it if necessary," he said.
"The gutter that I was in was just deep enough to cover the whole of my body. I'd just lift my head a bit so I could see out of both sides of this little bit of a draw.
"Unfortunately, these two characters came down. They must have spotted me, they both fired.
"A mistake commonly made is shooting high downhill. They went over the top of me, so I just rolled over a little bit and went, 'tap tap, tap tap' and got out of there."
By now Mr Payne was beginning to suffer badly from loss of blood and fatigue.
"I had to make a decision what I was going to do," he said.
"I'd already got out a few of these people and tucked them down about 50 metres on from the RV [rendezvous area].
"I thought, 'Well if I don't get them out, they're not gunna get out, [and] my chances of getting anybody else out from the hill is running pretty slim'.
"It was starting to get a little dangerous."
Mr Payne was torn between searching for more injured men and giving himself and the other wounded a chance of survival.
"So I said goodbye to my family, had a smoke, and made the decision to take out the people that I'd already got off the hill," he said.
"It was their only chance of getting out of the position and I didn't think that I would survive another run up the hill … to find any further wounded.
"So putting those things in the balance, I moved back, picked up the people I'd taken out, and went back to the RV and consequently married up with the other wounded on the way out."
War as a way of life
War had been a part of Tom Parkinson's life since he was a kid, with WWII raging through his formative years and his father serving in both world wars, so it was almost a given he would enlist when he came of age.
"I was six when the war started right up until I left school at 13 — it was all I knew," he said.
So, when the Korean War broke out in 1950, Mr Parkinson joined up.
He travelled to the Samichon Valley where United Nations forces faced off against the Chinese Army.
After receiving a two-hour crash course on using a flamethrower Mr Parkinson's platoon was sent up the road at 3:00am one morning to burn out enemy bunkers.
'I had no feeling in my legs'
While driving on their mission, the truck that Mr Parkinson and his platoon were travelling in was bombed.
"We were in the truck in pitch darkness coming along the road when a mortar [shell] came in and blew the road away," he said.
"The truck went over into the paddy field. I was thrown out.
"[The] flamethrower itself when it came down it landed on my back, and that was it."
Mr Parkinson was dragged back to safety, but was badly injured.
"I had no feeling in my legs, I just couldn't stand up, I couldn't get off the ground," he said.
"They took me down to this Indian field ambulance.
"I was there for nearly a week … my legs came good and I went back to the unit."
While Mr Parkinson regained the use of his legs, war had changed his worldview forever.
"I learnt to understand people a lot better," he said.
"I got very tolerant with people.
"I've tried to be like that all my life — be tolerant with people till the very end."
Stolen weapons and homemade firearms
It was a 2:00am phone call in 2006 that changed Chris Tilley's life forever.
As an Australian paratrooper he was on standby to serve overseas around the clock, and the mission that morning was in the world's youngest nation — East Timor.
"Although you're pretty gung-ho in those years of training, when you get that phone call you're really going, 'Wow, OK, this is a wake-up call'," he said.
Within hours he was airborne, his mission simple: Keep the peace.
"Our job was to go up to the main entry into Dili, the capital city, and confiscate weapons," Mr Tilley said.
"You've got to remember this was day one, so we really didn't know what to expect.
"We'd sit on a blind corner and search every vehicle and every person coming down."
Mr Tilley said there was a huge variation in their daily encounters.
"[One] minute you'd have an old lady come out of the bush and give you a massive fruit platter," he said.
"The next, a car would drive round and they'd have anything from weapons that are quite obviously stolen from military stockpiles to a homemade firearm made from a piece of wood and pipe and a nail."
In constant danger in Uruzgan
Not long after his time in East Timor, Mr Tilley was sent on a much more dangerous mission — across the other side of the world to Uruzgan province in Afghanistan.
This long and gruelling guerrilla war, which is still yet to resolved, was a completely different beast to keeping order in East Timor.
"I felt as though we spent most of our time being a target; by the end of the tour we'd all been mortared, rocketed [or] ambushed," he said.
"Most of us had an odd shot go over our head — our main base was suicide bombed.
"Every time you went out of that main base you'd almost certainly come across an IED [improvised explosive device] or roadside bomb."
Guerrilla warfare is frustrating and also uniquely stressful as there is no designated 'combat zone' as with other, more conventional, wars.
Soldiers must live and work among the enemy, never knowing if their next step will be their last or if the next person they pass is a suicide bomber.
"You're constantly on edge," Mr Tilley said.
"You can be trying to get a good night's sleep and all you can think about is if someone pops over those hills they might not be seen, and you could be killed in your sleep.
"There's never really a time to rest."
Like a lot of veterans Mr Tilley initially wrestled with Anzac Day.
"I got married and had kids when I got back and I suddenly had to look at everything that had happened through brand new eyes — through the eyes of a father, through the eyes of a husband," he said.
"And you can't help but humanise the people that you dealt with — whether they were friendly or enemy.
"And then when I went to Anzac Day I found it really difficult because I felt as though, perhaps, that I felt differently.
"My mates that I went through all those things with still felt the same, and it was really isolating to feel."
But over time Mr Tilley found the strength to participate in an Anzac march and realised he was far from the only one struggling to process what he experienced.
"When I marched with my battalion — I finally forced myself to do it — I marched with 3RAR in Adelaide," he said.
"I realised there were only 30 or 40 people there and, for a battalion that used to be based in Adelaide, for there to be only 30 or 40 people there made me realise, 'Wow, how many of these people feel the same way as I do, feel isolated and have seen things with new eyes and are scared to come out and march on Anzac Day?' "
Additional production by Michael Condon and Jacob Round.
Topics: anzac-day, world-war-2, unrest-conflict-and-war, papua-new-guinea, afghanistan, korea-republic-of, japan, china, united-states, adelaide-5000, vietnam, france, turkey, holsworthy-2173, east-timor, concord-2137, dulwich-hill-2203, ingleburn-2565