This photograph was taken quite late in the evening as we were waiting for it to get dark. The stays for one of the aerials are visible at the right of the picture.
A little later on we moved out into the scrub and set up our ambush.
Did I mention that the sand hills were crawling with geckos? And some of the little suckers got quite big. They were harmless, of course, but I was not looking forward to having one of them wandering all over me in the dark, or just making lots of noise.
Before we'd left Australia we'd done the jungle training bit up at Kunungra JTC, part of which was a night camping out in the bush. So there I was guarding the camp at 2 in the morning. Everybody else fast asleep, and some ruddy great marsupial starts blundering about in the bush 20 feet in front of our position. It clearly wasn't anybody trying to sneak up on us - nobody in their right mind would make that much noise - and it wasn't a dangerous animal. Australia doesn't have any. But it's amazing how loud the littlest sound can be when your eyes don't work and your imagination does.
So out there you are in the dark in Vietnam and you hear a rustle in the scrub 20 feet out. You tell yourself it is a gecko, isn't it?