How a Quiet Farmer from Australia Became Vietnam’s Deadliest Tunnel Hunter

本站添加: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]The hole was 40 cm wide, maybe 45 at the generous end.

[00:00:06]It was cut into red Vietnamese clay at the base of a strangler fig, hidden under a mat of woven leaves that the patrol had nearly walked over without seeing.

[00:00:17]And it smelled of something that the soldiers standing around it in the August heat of Phu Oc Tai province could not immediately name, but that made every one of them take a half step back without consciously deciding to.

[00:00:31]The platoon sergeant knelt at the entrance, shone his torch into it, saw the passage disappear into darkness after 3 m and straightened up. He looked at his men.

[00:00:42]12 soldiers, all of them trained, all of them capable, all of them currently finding reasons to examine the middle distance with great professional concentration.

[00:00:53]He knew what was down there.

[00:00:55]He knew what the tunnel system represented, a VC logistics network, an ammunition cache, possibly a command post, possibly enemy fighters who had gone underground when the patrol entered the area and were now sitting in the dark 30 m below them, waiting for whatever came through the hole.

[00:01:16]He knew all of this. He also knew that not one of the 12 men standing around him was going to volunteer to find out.

[00:01:23]Then he looked at the 13th man, the small one, the one who had barely cleared the height requirement at Cap Nuoc, who weighed less than some of the packs his section mates carried, who had said almost nothing since they'd left the wire that morning, and who was now looking at the hole with an expression that nobody in the platoon had ever seen on anyone's face at a tunnel. Not fear, not the controlled neutrality of a man suppressing fear, something closer to the expression a plumber gets when he looks at a blocked drain, Quiet, professional, unhurried assessment. The sergeant said his name.

[00:02:01]The small man looked up. The sergeant nodded at the hole.

[00:02:05]The small man nodded back, took off his webbing, checked his pistol, got on his stomach, and went in. He was 21 years old. His name was Colin Barwick.

[00:02:16]And he was about to become the most effective tunnel fighter in the Australian Army's Vietnam deployment.

[00:02:22]Not because anyone had trained him for it. Not because he had volunteered for it.

[00:02:28]Not because he possessed any quality that any recruiting officer or selection board had ever thought to look for.

[00:02:36]But because he had spent the first 18 years of his life crawling into underground spaces to fix irrigation pipes on a property where, if you were the smallest son, you got the jobs that required fitting into places the larger men couldn't reach. And what that produced in him, the specific, bone-deep, completely unremarkable familiarity with darkness and confined earth and thin air, and the discipline of a body that had learned not to panic in spaces designed to make the human nervous system scream, was something that no training program had ever thought to create because no training program had ever imagined that the most dangerous man in the tunnels of Vietnam would arrive at the war having learned everything he needed to know about it in a Queensland irrigation channel before he was old enough to vote.

[00:03:32]To understand what Colin Barwick was, you first have to understand what Donovan Downs was. Was the kind of place that produces either people who leave and never come back or people who become so completely shaped by it that leaving is not really possible in any meaningful sense.

[00:03:51]Because the land has already entered them at a level below conscious choice.

[00:03:56]It was 9,000 acres of Mitchell grass country in the western districts, flat and hard and merciless in summer, and cold enough in winter to kill stock that had survived the summer.

[00:04:08]And it ran on the specific economy of a working sheep station, which meant that every person on the property had a function, and the function was performed regardless of age or weather or inclination.

[00:04:22]Because the property didn't pause for any of those things, and neither could you.

[00:04:27]Colin's grandfather had taken the station up in 1921.

[00:04:32]His father had run it since the early 50s with two stockmen and whatever sons were old enough to be useful. And Colin, the third of four boys, was useful in a specific and unglamorous way.

[00:04:45]He was the runt. His oldest brother stood 6'2.

[00:04:49]Colin stopped at 5'5 and never grew another inch, and his father used the word runt the way a station man used all words, which was factually and without decoration.

[00:05:02]Because on a working property in western Queensland, you described things as they were, and you didn't soften descriptions to protect feelings because feelings were not the most pressing issue when you had 9,000 acres to manage and a wool price that fluctuated like a bad diagnosis.

[00:05:22]The runt got the jobs that required fitting into spaces the larger men couldn't reach, and the primary job of this kind on Donovan Downs was the bore drains.

[00:05:33]Queensland stations in the western districts ran on artesian water, water that came up hot from deep underground through bore systems and ran across the property in open channels and on the older stations like Donavand Downs through subsurface sections, covered channels and underground pipes that ran beneath stockyards and homestead paddocks, and silted up and collapsed and blocked with the patient regularity of things that are underground in red clay country and subject to the slow geological pressure of Australian dirt deciding to reclaim what was dug through it.

[00:06:13]When they blocked, someone went in to clear them. From the age of 14, that someone was Colin.

[00:06:19]His father would lift the access hatch on a subsurface channel, peer into the darkness, and call for the runt.

[00:06:27]And Colin would lower himself into a passage that was sometimes 60 cm wide and 40 cm high, and sometimes considerably less than that.

[00:06:38]With a short-handled shovel and a torch that his father told him not to waste batteries on, and he would crawl forward in total darkness on his stomach with the packed earth pressing against his back and the channel floor pressing against his chest and work by feel, pushing silt and debris backward with his feet while his hands operated blind ahead of him.

[00:07:02]And he learned things in those drains that no school could have taught him, and that would not have seemed like learning at the time because it felt like plumbing, which it was, but which was also, though he had no framework for understanding this, a complete education in the specific physiological and psychological demands of operating in confined underground spaces.

[00:07:25]The regulation of breathing when oxygen thinned, the suppression of the panic response when walls pressed from every direction, the navigation by touch and air movement, and the subtle temperature changes that told an attentive body whether a passage was open or blocked ahead.

[00:07:44]The fundamental discipline of a mind that had been trained by repetition and necessity to remain calm in conditions that the human nervous system was explicitly designed to flee.

[00:07:57]He didn't think of it as training. He thought of it as drain work. He thought the skills were useless outside the specific context of Queensland irrigation maintenance.

[00:08:08]He was 20 years old when the army took him, 21 when they sent him to Vietnam.

[00:08:14]And he arrived at the war with a complete and genuine modesty of a man who had no idea that the thing he was most capable of was the thing the war most needed.

[00:08:25]Which is perhaps the only form of modesty that is entirely without performance and entirely without self-deception. Because it is not humility about a gift you know you have.

[00:08:37]It is the simple factual ignorance of a man who has never been told that what he learned in a bore drain has a military application.

[00:08:47]The call-up papers arrived at Donovandowns in February 1965.

[00:08:53]The national service ballot had selected his birthday.

[00:08:57]His father drove him to the bus stop in the same truck he used for everything, said nothing of particular note, and drove back to the property.

[00:09:06]Colin reported to Kapooka in New South Wales, and the receiving sergeant looked at his 5-ft-5 62-kg frame and said something about jockeys that Colin stored in the same place he stored his father calling him the runt.

[00:09:23]Which was the place where things were noted and then left alone because responding to them used energy that the work required.

[00:09:32]Basic training was not difficult for him in the ways it was difficult for others.

[00:09:38]The physical demands were hard, but he had been doing physical labor since childhood and hard physical work in the heat was not a new condition.

[00:09:47]The sleep deprivation was familiar from shearing season that ran on 4:00 in the morning starts and midnight finishes for weeks at a stretch.

[00:09:56]What surprised him was how many of the city boys broke, not physically but mentally, under the pressure of discomfort and boredom and being told they were insufficient.

[00:10:08]And watching them break taught him something he hadn't known about himself.

[00:10:13]That the runt who got the crawling jobs because he was the only one who fit had been building something all those years that he hadn't recognized as a resource, a tolerance for being uncomfortable, a capacity for operating in conditions that others experienced as intolerable, a deep familiarity with being told he was less than adequate and converting that assessment into motivation rather than defeat, which was the thing that kept him functional when everyone around him was coming apart at the seams.

[00:10:48]And which nobody at Kapooka would have identified as a military asset because it didn't look like anything military.

[00:10:56]It looked like a quiet small man from Queensland who didn't complain and didn't talk much and finished everything they put in front of him without making a production of it.

[00:11:07]Sergeant Greeny noticed him at Canungra.

[00:11:11]15 years in, two tour of Borneo, a face that looked like it had been used as a target and the specific observational quality of a long service soldier who had learned to look at men rather than at their paperwork.

[00:11:26]He pulled Colin aside after a jungle navigation exercise and asked where he was from and what he had done before this. And when Colin said Longreach station work, shearing, Greeny looked at him for a long time with the expression of a man who has found something he was looking for without knowing he was looking for it and said, "You move like a man who's comfortable underground." And Colin didn't know what to say to that, so he said the truth, which was that he had done a lot of drain work.

[00:11:58]And Greeny nodded and said good and walked away without explaining why because he was a sergeant from Borneo, and explanation was not his primary communication mode.

[00:12:10]But the observation went into Colin the way observations from people who have seen things tend to go in, not loudly, but permanently, as a small new piece of understanding about what he was that he had not previously possessed.

[00:12:26]The 5th Battalion deployed to Vietnam in May 1966, and Colin Barwick arrived in Phuoc Tuy Province weighing 60 kg, having lost two since Capulka.

[00:12:39]The heat taking it before the tunnels had a chance to.

[00:12:42]The first weeks were patrolling, the specific endless patrolling of the Australian approach to counterinsurgency, out for 3 days and back for 2 and out again through country that looked empty and wasn't, through rubber plantations and paddy fields and scrubby bush that contained a Viet Cong infrastructure the Australians were only beginning to understand the scale of.

[00:13:08]Colin found the closeness of the jungle familiar in the way that the bore drains had been familiar, the vegetation pressing in from every side, the canopy closing the light down to a permanent green twilight, the sense of operating in a space that was tight and watchful and required your complete attention in exchange for allowing you to move through it.

[00:13:32]Other soldiers complained about the vines and the leeches and the heat and the darkness. Collins said nothing. He had been inside bore drains that were tighter than this.

[00:13:43]He had been inside wool bins under shearing shed floors that were darker.

[00:13:48]The jungle was uncomfortable, but discomfort was not new information. The tunnels were different.

[00:13:55]They were not a revelation so much as a recognition. A moment when the thing he had spent his entire life practicing without knowing he was practicing, it suddenly revealed its actual purpose.

[00:14:07]The way a key feels ordinary in your hand until it finds the lock it was made for.

[00:14:13]The entrance he went into that first time was 40 cm wide at the base of a strangler fig.

[00:14:20]And the passage beyond, it descended at a shallow angle into a darkness that his torch illuminated for 3 m and no further. And the first thing he noticed underground was the temperature.

[00:14:33]Which dropped below the crushing surface heat into something still and heavy that tasted of clay and root systems and a faint chemical trace he couldn't identify. And his body recognized all of it.

[00:14:46]The thin air, the pressing walls, the complete absence of light beyond the torch beam, recognized it not as threat but as familiar.

[00:14:56]The bore drain was darker and the bore drain was narrower and the bore drain had never contained enemy soldiers or booby traps or the accumulated violent history of a 20-year guerrilla war.

[00:15:09]Fundamental sensory conditions were the conditions he had trained in since he was 14 and his nervous system processed them accordingly.

[00:15:18]Which is to say it did not panic, it assessed.

[00:15:21]He lay in the darkness of the first passage for two full minutes and listened because the first lesson of Australian tunnel fighting the lesson that the Americans hadn't learned because the Americans moved too fast to learn anything the tunnel was trying to tell them was that sound traveled differently underground.

[00:15:43]That voices carried through earth in ways they didn't carry through air. That breathing echoed.

[00:15:49]That footsteps vibrated through packed clay long before the feet that made them came into range of your torch.

[00:15:56]And that 2 minutes of absolute stillness in a tunnel entrance was worth more than any briefing conducted above ground because the tunnel would tell you what it contained if you were quiet enough to.

[00:16:09]He heard nothing. He moved forward.

[00:16:11]The passage turned left and descended.

[00:16:14]The air thinned and thickened simultaneously in the way he knew from the deep sections of bore drains where oxygen went stale and his body told him about it through a quickening in the lungs and a gathering density in the head.

[00:16:30]And he slowed his breathing in response the way he had slowed it in the drain since he was 16. Shallow inhale, long exhale. The pattern that told the body it was not drowning.

[00:16:42]That the air was thin but sufficient.

[00:16:44]That panic would cost more oxygen than it was worth and that the space would hold if you refused to fight it.

[00:16:52]30 m and he found the chamber. Wooden ammunition crates against the far wall, rice bags, medical supplies.

[00:17:00]One Chinese grenade wired to a crate lid with a pin that would have pulled if he'd lifted it which he didn't.

[00:17:08]Because he had learned in bore drains to check for the places where the passage wanted to trap you before you committed your weight to anything that might give way.

[00:17:17]He memorized the layout, counted the crates, marked the booby trap mentally, and crawled back out. 40 minutes underground.

[00:17:26]He emerged into the daylight and told his platoon sergeant there was a chamber 30 m in with ammunition and rice and one booby trap on a crate and probably more beyond the left passage which The sergeant stared at him, asked how he felt. Colin thought about it and said like he had been clearing a boar drain, just darker. The sergeant didn't laugh.

[00:17:49]He nodded.

[00:17:51]He had just watched a sheep farmer do something that most trained soldiers in the theater couldn't do and describe it in terms that suggested the primary difference between the thing he had just done and fixing an irrigation pipe was the ambient light level.

[00:18:08]And he understood with the clarity that combat experience gives to assessment that he was looking at something rare and that rare things in war had to be protected and properly used.

[00:18:20]Word spread the way word spreads in a battalion of 700 men with nothing to do between patrols but observe each other which is fast and comprehensively.

[00:18:32]Within a week, every platoon in C company knew that Barwick had gone into a tunnel system alone and come out with intelligence that the Americans hadn't been able to produce in two years of grenade first methodology.

[00:18:47]Within a month, the battalion intelligence officer had his name on a list. Colin didn't seek any of this. He didn't volunteer.

[00:18:56]He didn't present himself as a specialist or request tunnel assignments or do anything that could be interpreted as ambition.

[00:19:05]He simply did not refuse when they asked him to go underground.

[00:19:09]And each time he went in he learned something new about the environment that nobody had taught him because nobody else had gone in enough times to have anything worth teaching.

[00:19:21]The second tunnel had trapdoors between levels.

[00:19:25]Wooden hatches covered with packed earth that were invisible to anything except a hand that had learned to feel the difference between natural floor and concealed void.

[00:19:36]And Colin's hands had learned exactly that in Queensland bore systems where a subsurface channel that seemed solid occasionally gave way to a section that had partially collapsed and would take your wait for a moment before dropping you into the blockage below.

[00:19:54]So he tested the floor ahead of him as he moved and found the hatch by the slight give of earth over timber and marked it and moved on. And this was the pattern of his education underground.

[00:20:06]Every technique he developed arrived not as military innovation, but as the direct application of a civilian skill that had never been considered in a military context because nobody who designed military training programs had ever thought to look for it in a sheep station irrigation system.

[00:20:26]He learned to detect booby traps by the subtle turbulence a tripwire created in the airflow of a passage.

[00:20:34]To feel a pressure plate by the slightly different temperature of wood or metal against surrounding earth.

[00:20:41]To smell pungent stakes by the specific bacterial signature of the human waste the VC coded them with.

[00:20:48]Detectable at 3 m to a nose that had spent years distinguishing the smell of healthy sheep from sick ones. Healthy bore water from contaminated water.

[00:20:59]The difference between dry channel earth and wet channel earth in a subsurface drain he he see.

[00:21:06]He learned to navigate in total darkness by counting paces and building a three-dimensional map in his head. Left at 12. Descent at 20. Chamber at 35.

[00:21:17]Junction at 40.

[00:21:19]And he could retrace any route he had taken without light and without error.

[00:21:24]Because the mental mapping of a space he couldn't see was something he had been doing since he was 14 years old in channels that his father told him not to waste torch batteries on.

[00:21:36]The third tunnel had an occupant.

[00:21:39]Colin was 15 m in when he heard breathing that wasn't his own. Ragged and uneven and close. And he turned off his torch and lay in the complete darkness for 5 minutes.

[00:21:51]The longest 5 minutes of his life by his own later accounting. Listening to the breathing not move. Not organize itself.

[00:21:59]Not acquire the specific quality of a man preparing to act. Just continue.

[00:22:05]Shallow and frightened and fixed.

[00:22:08]He turned the torch on and moved forward with the pistol ahead of him. And found a VC soldier in a small alcove gut shot.

[00:22:16]Holding a pistol with a hand shaking too badly to use it.

[00:22:20]Eyes wide with the specific terror of a man who is dying alone in a dark underground space. And has accepted this. But has not accepted it.

[00:22:30]And Colin kicked the pistol away from his hand. And checked him for grenades.

[00:22:34]And backed out to get a medic.

[00:22:37]Someone said later that he could have just shot him. Colin agreed that he could have.

[00:22:43]He didn't explain why he hadn't. Because explanation wasn't his primary communication mode either. And because the reason was not a reason that translated easily into military language.

[00:22:56]It was station culture. The simple unargued moral position of a man raised in a place where you didn't shoot something that was already done. Didn't kick an animal that was down.

[00:23:08]Not out of sentimentality, but out of the kind of character that forms in people who spend their lives with livestock and understand at a cellular level that there is a difference between killing that is necessary and killing that is additional.

[00:23:24]And that the second kind tells you something about yourself that you don't want to know in a tight space where nobody else can see you.

[00:23:32]That moment defined the man he was becoming underground in a way that no tunnel entry or intelligence recovery could define.

[00:23:42]Because it established that the transformation the tunnels were working on him was not producing a killer, but producing something more precise and more useful.

[00:23:52]A man who understood the underground environment with the complete professional competence of a craftsman and who brought to it the moral framework of his civilian life intact.

[00:24:03]The shearer who happened to carry a pistol, methodical and careful and without malice, because the malice would have made him reckless and the recklessness would have made him dead.

[00:24:15]By his fourth month, Colin Barwick had entered more than 20 tunnel systems and developed a body of technique that nobody had taught him and that he taught informally to other soldiers by taking them to tunnel entrances and showing them how to read what the entrance was telling them before they committed to going in.

[00:24:36]Occupied tunnels smelled different from empty ones. Cooking smoke and human sweat and the specific organic presence of people living underground.

[00:24:46]And Colin could identify the difference at the entrance before he had seen anything but the hole.

[00:24:52]Abandoned tunnels had their own smell, only the But the earth had a quality of recent disturbance that told him how recently the system had been vacated and whether the departure had been orderly or urgent.

[00:25:07]Because orderly departure left the tunnel in a particular state of careful preparation, traps set, passages sealed, nothing recoverable left behind, an urgent departure left it differently.

[00:25:20]Scattered, open food still on the underground cooking fires that the VC used to heat the chambers in the wet season.

[00:25:29]And both states were readable before he entered and both told him something about the risk of what he was entering and how to approach it.

[00:25:38]He could stay underground for 90 minutes before air quality forced him out. Most tunnel fighters lasted 30.

[00:25:46]The difference was the breathing pattern he had developed in bore drains at 14, shallow and controlled and conserving.

[00:25:54]The lungs operating at a fraction of their normal demand because the body had been told the available air was sufficient and had been told this often enough and early enough that it believed it.

[00:26:06]The way bodies believe things they have been taught consistently since childhood, which is completely and without argument.

[00:26:14]The operation that sealed his reputation came in September 1966, a tunnel complex east of Nui Dat with multiple entrances spread over 200 m and confirmed VC inside.

[00:26:29]Three soldiers attempting entry before him. The first breaking at 10 m, the second retreating with a wire scratch that told him how close he had come to the booby trap junction.

[00:26:41]The third refusing to enter after hearing the second man's account.

[00:26:46]Colin arrived, knelt at the entrance and spent 3 minutes in absolute stillness listening to what the tunnel was telling him.

[00:26:55]He smelled cooking smoke recent. The system was occupied. He said so.

[00:27:00]The company commander said they knew, said he wanted it cleared and mapped.

[00:27:05]Colin took off his webbing and his shirt because fabric snagged on roots and made noise and noise underground was the difference between being heard and not being heard.

[00:27:17]And being heard was the difference between dying in a tunnel and not dying in a tunnel. And checked his pistol and his torch and his bayonet and went in wearing boots and trousers and a singlet.

[00:27:30]And he was underground for 2 hours and 14 minutes.

[00:27:34]In that time he mapped three levels of tunnel system, identified four chambers, located and marked six booby traps.

[00:27:42]Bypassed two occupied sections by using air current analysis to find alternate passages that the occupants didn't know he knew about.

[00:27:52]And recovered documents from the command chamber that the intelligence officer would later assess as significant.

[00:28:00]He did not fire his weapon. He did not need to.

[00:28:04]He came out covered in red clay with torn elbows from 2 hours of crawling over packed earth and his breathing shallow and fast from the air quality in the deepest sections.

[00:28:16]And he sat down on the ground and drew a map from memory. Every passage and junction and chamber and trap and occupied section.

[00:28:25]With the steady hand of a man performing a task he has performed many times before and expects to perform again.

[00:28:33]And the intelligence officer looked at the map and said it was the most detailed tunnel assessment he had seen in the war. And Colin said could he get some water, please?

[00:28:44]Because he had been underground for 2 hours and 14 minutes and the thing he required was water, not recognition.

[00:28:52]And the thing he had produced was a complete operational picture of a major VC logistics hub. And the distinction between those two things, between what he needed and what he had done, was the entire story of what he was.

[00:29:08]The cost accumulated in the way that costs accumulate in wars, slowly and then all at once, and always in ways that the systems designed to measure military performance were not designed to measure.

[00:29:22]His hearing deteriorated first. The underground explosions and booby trap detonations bouncing off tunnel walls and amplifying in ways that open-air detonations didn't, damaging his eardrums in an environment where the sound had nowhere to go except through him.

[00:29:41]By his ninth month, he had significant hearing loss in his left ear.

[00:29:46]By the end of his tour, both ears were damaged in ways that would persist for the rest of his life.

[00:29:52]His lungs absorbed everything the tunnels contained.

[00:29:56]Explosives residue and decomposition, gases from bodies the VC couldn't retrieve, and chemical agents from booby traps, and smoke from underground cooking fires with nowhere to vent.

[00:30:09]And he developed a cough in his seventh month that the medics called bronchial irritation. And that was also the beginning of respiratory damage that no civilian doctor would ever fully explain because no civilian diagnostic code existed for the specific pathology of spending hundreds of hours breathing the air of a Vietnamese tunnel system.

[00:30:34]His back compressed under 200 entries into spaces that required extended low crawling, disc damage and muscle deterioration in a 22-year-old spine that moved by his eighth month like a man twice his age when he straightened up after a long underground session.

[00:30:54]His forearms became a landscape of scars, cuts from roots and rocks that the tunnel bacteria infected and that healed and reopened and healed again and scarred over in the specific pattern of wounds that are constantly re-contaminated by the same environment that made them.

[00:31:13]None of this was what the cost actually was. The physical damage was the part that could be documented and was therefore the part the army documented.

[00:31:24]The actual cost was different and arrived differently and announced itself one night in his 11th month when he entered a tunnel near the village of Hoa Long and found a chamber that was a VC field.

[00:31:37]Three wounded soldiers on bamboo platforms, one dead, the other two looking at him with eyes that had already made their peace with what was coming and were simply waiting for it.

[00:31:49]And he marked the chamber and backed out and reported it and a clearance team went in and did what clearance teams did.

[00:31:57]And that night his section mate found him sitting behind the platoon lines in the dark, not moving, and asked if he was all right. And Collins said he kept thinking about the bore drains.

[00:32:09]And the section mate asked, "What about them?" And Collins said nothing was ever alive in them.

[00:32:15]Seven words, the confession of a man whose analogy had finally broken, whose comparison had held for 11 months and through more than 200 tunnel entries and through scorpion stings and booby trap encounters and the wounded soldier in the alcove in every dark and airless and pressing passage the war had sent him into and had now failed at the sight of two men on bamboo platforms who were dying and knew it and had made their peace with it in a space that was supposed to be their sanctuary.

[00:32:50]Their one place in the war where the technology and firepower of the Allied forces couldn't reach them.

[00:32:57]Their underground world where the war was supposed to reverse and give them back the advantage the surface denied them.

[00:33:05]And instead a small man from Queensland had come up through the floor with a pistol and a torch and a calm expression. And the sanctuary was no longer sacred.

[00:33:16]And the bore drain comparison that had kept the calm in place and the panic at bay and the work proceeding with professional method and without malice [clears throat] for 11 months had finally met the thing it was which was not darkness or thin air or scorpions or booby traps but simply the specific human image of men who were dying underground and knew it which was not a bore drain had never been a bore drain was a grave and he had been crawling into it voluntarily for 11 months.

[00:33:49]He went back underground the next day.

[00:33:52]He had three weeks left on his tour and he completed eight more tunnel entries in those three weeks and he did not refuse a single one and he did not hesitate at a single entrance.

[00:34:04]Because the thing that had broken the night behind the platoon lines was a civilian's analogy and not a tunnel fighter's capability.

[00:34:13]And the tunnel fighter was what he was now regardless of what he had been. And the tunnel fighter did not have the option of stopping because the bore drain comparison had given out.

[00:34:25]He walled it off.

[00:34:27]He compartmentalized with the specific efficiency of a man raised in a place where the work did not pause for what you were feeling about it.

[00:34:36]And he did what the army needed him to do for 3 more weeks.

[00:34:40]And then his tour was over and he flew home to Australia on a charter flight with 200 other soldiers and landed in Sydney and took a connecting flight to Brisbane and took a bus to Longreach.

[00:34:53]And his father picked him up in the same truck that had dropped him at the bus stop 13 months earlier and asked how it was and Colin said hot.