PUSS-IN-BOOTS By Mark Barrett, 5/7 RAR
We did a battalion ex (5/7) at Woomera. I was in TPT Pl and on this particular ex I was driving the Mack gun tractor. Well, it was towards the end of the ex and me having the gun tractor, one of my jobs was to retrieve the tank targets, which were basically square-shaped steel cubes that the Tankies shot the shit out of (I think I’ve got photos somewhere). Well, these targets were of course off the dirt track and in the damn scrub. As always, nothing’s never darn easy. So off I went to load these tank targets one by one with the help of Joe Cassidy. Mind you, each of these targets to pick up and take to the drop-off point took about half a day.
As you can imagine, it was well into the early evening and night had fallen, (end of ex now and basically clean-up). So Joe pulled out his gun (because we were in TPT Joe took his gun/silencer and spotty along on trips), hooked it up to his hand-held spotlight and proceeded to start fox hunting. He had a whistle in his gob, blowing his lungs out and all we could see were eyes coming towards us. Farrrrrk. Joe was beside himself; he didn’t know which one to knock off first. He singled one out and it was a feral cat. I hadn’t seen anything like it; the head on the damn thing was huge. Well, with a snigger Joe told me he had plans with it… So out came his knife.
“What the fuck! Don’t get blood all over the tray of the truck!” I exclaimed. “I’m not cleaning that shit off.”
Joe drained it, cut it in half from below its front paws and threw it on the back of my truck. I was still adamant about blood on my tray. We headed back to our camp. It was about 2200 or 2300 hrs and most of the lads were in bed by now, snoring as usual. Well, Joe went to work and put the top bit of this pussy in Terry Mitchell’s boot. The next morning Terry woke up and found a pussy in his GP. He was so pissed off and with Joe pissing himself, the cat and GP were launched at Joe. By now all the boys were awake and pissing themselves laughing at Terry and this cat was getting flung around everywhere. After the fun was over Joe launched it in the scrub before any fun police came over.
