Recalling the horror of Long Tan: 'I was too bloody busy to be frightened'

If he dwells on it, Lt Col Harry Smith can still see, vividly, the blood on the trees on the enemy’s escape path. There was so much blood. In the days after the three savage hours that was the battle of Long Tan, his soldiers were finding body parts, carnage and corpses spread across the battlefield. But it was that blood, “the blood of all the others that were dragged away, wounded, suffering”, that affects him the most. “That worries me more than a dead body.” In the eerie silence, in the pervasive gloom, among the smell of the dead in the Long Tan rubber plantation, latex ran down trees punctured by bullets and mingled with the blood.