Graeme Burgess remembers army training for the Vietnam War, 2006

Transcript of interview

Well, the training at Casula was the pure engineer training. It was teaching us how to lay explosive devices - you know, how to run ring mains to demolish things. It was how to set up a water point to supply water supply to troops, pontoon bridging, setting up barbed wire entrapments, and virtual basic engineers' duties.

And there was a compound in one corner of the area at SME [School of Military Engineering] that was labelled the 'VC Village'. And they constructed several huts out of, you know, twigs and sticks and straw - typical that you would find in a VC village in Vietnam. And they had a tunnel system in that, that we could practise on. They had set-ups of booby traps and punji-stick type things - you know, holes in the ground with spikes in them - to demonstrate what would happen if you come across these sorts of things in Vietnam, and all that sort of thing. So basically, it was a small re-enactment of a VC village. And I understand that there were people in Vietnam, probably from officers' notes and such, being fed back to Australia and they were updating things in that village to try to keep it abreast of what was actually being found in the field.