The Odd Angry Shot

A tough and biting comic novel about a group of SAS soldiers on a tour of duty in Vietnam who use quintessentially irreverent Aussie humour to maintain their sanity.


Winner of the National Book Council Award, 1975.

The Odd Angry Shot is the seminal account of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. Brief and bracing, tragic yet darkly funny, it portrays a close-knit group of knockabout SAS fighters: their mateship, homesickness and fears; their practical jokes, drinking and fighting. The enemy is not just the Vietcong they've been sent to fight, but their superiors, the mud and torrential rain, and boredom.

This edition comes with a new introduction by the renowned military historian Paul Ham, who writes: 'The Odd Angry Shot reveals...how war damages and destroys not only life and limb, but also the brains, hopes and dreams of everyone involved...It is an Australian Dispatches and—like Michael Herr's classic, which came out two years later—it rips the scales from our eyes.'

William Nagle was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1947. Enlisting in the army in 1964, he qualified as a cook the next year. In mid-1966 he was deployed with the SAS to Saigon, but was sent home for subordination the following March and later discharged. The Odd Angry Shot, his debut, fictionalised his experiences in Vietnam. Published in 1975, the novel won the National Book Council Award and became an instant classic. In 1979 it was made into a major film starring Graham Kennedy, John Hargreaves, John Jarratt and Bryan Brown. Nagle died in 2002.

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