We embarked on our adventure from Sydney with the sun.
The grog was cold, our voices bold - we bloody well had fun.
But deep inside our churning guts, the trepidation sat.
The flight was only twelve short hours from a place called Nui Dat.

The sun was up when we embarked. It was up when we arrived.
(Imagine travelling all this way so some of us could die)
But young of heart and mind as well, we didn’t think of that.
All we thought of was that place that base called Nui Dat.

We landed at an airport; a place called Ton Son Nhut.
We were told it was in Saigon, but we didn’t give a hoot.
We landed to be greeted by the evening sun and dusk.
Three hours we sat and waited for Yankee airborne bus.

It was dark when we finally landed at that base called Nui Dat.
The strip was short and narrow but the plane seemed long and fat.
I don’t know how we made it but the engines roared to stop.
“Paradise…” I cringed with dread, “this place is bloody not.”

But some of us were lucky; we weren’t going to stay.
We had our base in Vung Tau, somewhere down the bay.
Little did I realize that I’d be back there soon,
training with the army learning how to shoot a goon.

Sure enough, two days passed by and I was on the move
with the reinforcement unit until all weapons I could prove.
Two weeks I slogged it out in the sticky dirty mud;
never clean ’cos we lived in clay, clay as red a blood.

“Not for me!” I swore inside. “There’s got to be something better.”
So I applied for chopper gunner as per the CO’s letter.
I figured flying above the war would be easier than the walk.
We’d outrun flying bullets faster ’n the nogs could talk.

But all is never as it seems, as I was soon to learn.
My mate was in a chopper; it was hit and it began to burn.
He died in Saigon hospital; he’d swallowed burning JP4.
Damn this bloody country and the stinking bloody war!

The futility of war rammed home the night we go a call.
A patrol has caught an ambush and was really badly mauled.
One dead - two shot and wounded so a dust-off was required.
We hauled the meat and wounded out a winch job under fire.

The tracer flew around our ship as we hovered overhead.
The thwacks into the chopper skin all added to our dread.
I survived that nightmare dream but just before he died
one digger said to me, “Thanks mate…”.
The clouds burst as I cried.

At nineteen when I went to Nam my mind seemed pure and clean
but at twenty when I came home again the things that I had seen!
Nearly twenty years have passed me by, and I still have those dreams.

The day I returned from Vietnam!
How old I bloody seemed.