The Odd Angry Shot

This film's producer Sue Milliken has said of this movie: '[The novel] was written by a wild Vietnam veteran called Bill Nagle [William L. Nagle] whom we assumed had been in the SAS but eventually it turned out he had been an army cook. Nevertheless, a cook with an ear for the vernacular. The story was told from the soldiers' point of view and was sardonically anti-war. We made this film in 1978, which was only four years after the end of the war, so feelings were still very strong. The book said everything you needed to know about the misery and alienation of fighting a war which should never have been fought in the first place. It was also acerbic and funny, and it was this aspect of the piece, which we emphasized to wary investors as making the story accessible to an audience. After months of perseverance, we got the cooperation of the army, although the army hierarchy was very nervous about anything to do with Vietnam. The soldiers, on the other hand, couldn't have been more helpful. We shot for six weeks at the Land Warfare Centre at Canungra, in the hills behind the Gold Coast. The film is recognized by soldiers in all sorts of places around the world as one of the best films ever made about how a war is fought."

Long shots of the base show The jungle right up to the edge of the camp, however in Vietnam all Australian army bases had the trees and shrubs cleared sometimes up to two kilometres all around to eliminate any cover for an attack on the base.

Featured in Winter of Our Dreams (1981)