Intelligence gathering - Terry Culley

Submitted by Editorial team on

Extract from interview with Claire Hall, 23 January 2013

Reproduced with permission of Terry Culley

Terry Culley recalls intelligence gathering on SAS operations.

Things we would find would be signs of enemy movement. It could be just a track, a foot track or a footpath, and there’s bicycle tracks on it or footprints that show that there’d been movement. Deciding what the footprint was made of, whether it be a sandal print or a boot print, would be an indication of who was wearing that boot or that sandal. If we could see where they crossed that stream perhaps, we could get a bit more accurate information. We did carry cameras initially and sometimes we took photographic records of things like camps, caches of weapons and food in particular, they quite often made food dumps. When we were allowed to we did things to the food dumps or the weapons caches to make them unuseable by the enemy. If we didn’t want them to know that we’d been there we would do nothing. The idea is see without being seen. Staying alive was a very good song that we all got to sing – John Travolta came later but that could have been the motto of 4 Troop. 

Reference

Vietnam War Oral History Project, Manatu Taonga Ministry for Culture & Heritage

How to cite this page: ' Intelligence gathering - Terry Culley ', URL: https://vietnamwar.govt.nz/audio/intelligence-gathering-terry-culley, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 04-Aug-2014