Back in the olden days....

I was browsing through some ancient photos and found this one of me during my short but illustrious military career. It was taken on my crappy old Instamatic camera, which I think took a tiny 9x9mm negative, and had three aperture settings: bright, normal, and dark.

This would have been 1980, on exercise with Bravo Company just outside Whakatane. I was a platoon signaller at the time, which is why I'm carrying an M16 instead of an SLR — it should have been a Sterling, but I don't think we had any in the armoury.

The radio was an ANPRC-77 set, a heavy and clunky old piece of VietNam-era American kit, as was almost all of our equipment at the time. It had a pathetic range, and coped not at all well with things like hills and dense forest, two things that I'm given to understand are quite common in VietNam, as they are here in New Zealand.