The battalion searched North and North East of the 8 Platoon contact. 3 RAR was reinforced with A Company 2RAR/NZ [ANZAC] Battalion.

We spent our time scrub bashing trying to find sign of the enemy. But once again we were in the wrong area. The enemy had moved West to the Song Rai River.

They sent some APC's in to pick us up and move us closer to the Song Rai River.

This was a lot easier than scrub bashing, although you had to watch out for the ants. They had these little greenants that made their nests in the trees. They would bite the edges of leaves together and them glue them in place ... tricky little mothers. But when they bit you they took a little chunk of skin out and you would start bleeding ... when you had hundreds of them on you, you would bleed a lot. Unfortunately the aerials from the APC's would occassionally knock a nest and the ants would swarm into the APC attacking everyone they could find. Dogs would always sit on the lead APC peering intently ahead. We all thought that he was a bloody hero, checking for VC ambushes ... but we found out later that he couldn't give a stuff about the VC ... he was checking for ants.

For awhile we patrolled around the Song Rai without finding too much exciting. Towards the end of March we were assigned to ambush postions while other Companies tried to flush the Nogs out. The idea was that they would send them running into our ambush. It was hot and tiring work, cutting through the jungle to get to our ambush position.

So when we stopped for a lunch break on the banks of the Song Rai we took advantage of the river and went skinny dipping.
It was great swinging off vines, bombing each other and generally having a great old time ... you should have heard the noise ... we fair dinkum would have woken the dead. Someone said to Dogs that they thought that they had seen movement on the opposite bank. Dogs said "Your dreaming ... there's nothing there!". A bit later the same soldier was sure that he saw a face peering through the bushes on the opposite bank, but no one else saw it, so we just kept swimming.

Boodgie wanted a change in his diet, so Woody, Boodgie and a couple of other blokes linked some claymores together and laid them on the river bottom. When they blew them, there were bookoo fish. Boodgie was a great cook and everyone grabbed some fish and took them to Boodgie. He whinged and complained but he cooked them all and we had a great feed that day. Feeling refreshed and invigorated, we broke camp and moved at a jaunty pace to our ambush position.

Very shortly we would return to our swimming hole ... 'cause there was a bloody great Nog bunker system directly opposite where we were skinny dipping and Alpha Coy 2 RAR/NZ were about to bump it severely.