And not just the mere wearing of a uniform on the periphery of slaughter, but face-to-face with it. Enemies tried to kill him and he did kill them in his 22 years as a foot soldier in the most dangerous territory.

Nearly 70 years ago, he signed up for Korea: “It was an adventure. I’d never heard of the place but it sounded good – three meals a day. That’s all you want.”

For two decades, adventure meant sleeping with the strap of his gun around his wrist. Out on operations, he was careful not to wash with soap because soap smells and enemies have keen senses of smell. 

His adventure lasted through Korea, Malaya and finally Vietnam. 

He was in the battle of Long Tan where Australian and South Vietnamese forces confronted a much larger Vietcong force in monsoon rain. “It was a nasty one”, he says with understatement, “We lost a lot of fellows. Twenty-three were killed but we got over 200 of them.”

He does tend to speak in understatement. Of one fire-fight where there were hundreds of dead, he says: “It was a busy time.”

He is matter of fact about what he did. He signed up to be a soldier and soldiers fight. “It’s a case of you or them. When you get to a fire-fight, you do what you have to do.”

He described one incident in Malaya where they set a trap. They laid wires to alert them to movement at the site of the ambush. 

“Then, I got a tug on this wire.. The next thing, down came these four terrorists.”

Allen Evans and his comrades opened fire. “I emptied my gun into his back”. He says he “knocked these two blokes off.”

Some veterans wear their trauma on their face. The sadness is in the eyes. Or there is sometimes what’s called the thousand metre stare – vacant eyes looking far beyond you.

Allen Evans does not seem like that. He is low-key but clear-headed. He did what the elected government of Australia wanted him to do.

He says now in his home in Glen Innes: “I did enjoy it”, but he adds: “I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder”.

“You get upset very easily – very argumentative. I’ve been a loner for years and it made me more so.” He’s had psychiatric help: “It was because I’d been to too many damned wars.”

“I remember it all so well. That’s the trouble. I remember my first blokes who were killed”.

He still remembers the sound of helicopters because they signaled that he was about to leave for the fields of killing.

“As soon as you heard the chopper, you knew you were going out. They would drop you off in the jungle and off they would go”.

He is tortured by one big, guilt. It concerns not what he did to the enemy but what he may have done to his own family.

When he was at war, he was not with them and he fears he neglected them.

He says that the children of veterans are three times more likely to kill themselves than are the children of non-combatants.

His son was one who took his own life.

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