"WE ASKED what the training was and they said 'well, don't tell anybody, but we're commandos'.”

Those were the words that changed the course of Eric Geldard's life forever.

Mr Geldard, now 93, is one of the region's last World War II veterans, and his story is incredible.

In 1944 at the young age of 18, Mr Geldard enlisted in the RAAF, but was made redundant right at the end of his training.

At the time Mr Geldard was in Maryborough, and it was then that he and his mates watched as "army blokes” parachuted into the air field.

"A few mates and I got talking to them and asked them where they came from and they said 'well from Fraser Island, we're doing special training over there',” Mr Geldard explained.

"So we asked what the training was and they said 'well, don't tell anybody, but we're commandos and we're training for Z Special Force'.”

Soon after that encounter Mr Geldard and his mates transferred into the army and joined the commandos, and after their training were sent to serve in New Guinea.

"In New Guinea the allies in the Wewak area controlled the whole coastline. There was a coastal plain about a kilometre wide and then the land just grew, it went straight up about four to five thousand feet, and that was the highlands,” he explained.

"We controlled all the coastal plain and the Japanese were stuck in the highlands, they had no supplies.”

Only a few weeks before the war ended, Mr Geldard and his fellow commandos were sent up to patrol the highlands, and about 30 of them were sent to Jokuku Pass.

"(Then) 14 of us were sent out to patrol deeper into enemy territory to see where the enemy were,” Mr Geldard said.

"It was fairly tense because our vision was about, perhaps a metre either side of us, because the jungle growth had big leaves and a tremendous amount of growth, and depending how much the track wound around, usually about 20 metres in front of us.

"We found recent traces of the Japanese there, foxholes'd been dug and obviously it had been set up for an ambush, but they weren't there.”

At about 4pm on July 26, 1945 Mr Geldard returned from patrol where, as per procedure, he and his companions, including his good mate Mike Heffernan, would clean and ream their weapons.

"I joined the air force with him. We'd been together right through the lot, and he'd put his age up to get from the air force to the army, because you had to be 19 to go, and he'd been out on that patrol with me,” Mr Geldard recalled.

"(He) was cleaning his Owen gun at the time I was cleaning my rifle... he had it (in his lap) and he went to move it across, and the cocking lever caught in his shirt pocket, and just flicked it back enough, it went BOOM straight through my leg.

"It was a pure accident.”

The bullet tore through both Mr Geldard's legs, severing an artery and his sciatic nerve. Helpless in the highlands, a group of intrepid New Guineans carried Mr Geldard on a makeshift stretcher out of the highlands and to the coast, where he was sped to the nearest casualty clearing station.

It was a journey that took seven-and-a-half hours.

The injury left Mr Geldard with extraordinary pain due to the nerve damage, which saw him on maximum morphine for 16 days before an injection into the base of his spine to reduce the pain.

He spent 15 months in hospital, before returning to Miles, where he married his wife Betty and had children.

Unfortunately, Mr Geldard's friend Mike Heffernan was killed three days after the war ended when he was caught in a booby trap.

For Mr Geldard, his memories of the war never truly left him, even decades later. In the lead-up to Anzac Day this year, he visited the children at the Miles Kindergarten.

"Anzac Day is a day of remembrance, of remembering all the sacrifices and efforts of Australian people to maintain the way of life that we still are fortunate to have,” he said.

"That's what I was telling those little kids.

"For the young people it's a day when they, as well as everybody else, should realise that the future belongs to them and that the traditions that have been set by the older generations are good traditions and ones that we would hope that they would continue to live by.”