Sights of White Soldiers

Because we were white western men we couldn’t speak to the women and that wasn’t terribly difficult because the women knew enough to stay away from us. Kids are curious everywhere in the world so they’d come around and if guys had tattoos they’d come over, the kids would, and you know, scratch at your tattoo or whatever. Some of them, you know, if they saw white people in some of the remote villages and so on, would have been, we probably would have been there first, you know, in that part of the world. Certainly the first since British India, and some of these kids that were born, you know, that were little kids when we were there, the way they looked at us. They’d come over and smell us to see what we smelled like because we were so different to them. Well, they were that much different to us as well. So you had to learn the basic stuff and even how you talk to people, where you went, where you didn’t go. Those things were important.