To draw the attention of insurgent machine-gunners away from the medics, Keighran left his sparse cover and dashed across an area of open ground.

The Diggers with him that day say the heroism of "Dan the Man" saved Australian and Afghan lives.

Keighran received the Victoria Cross of Australia for his repeated heroics during the Battle of Derapet - vicious, unrelenting combat at close range during which a force of 20 Australians and 20 Afghan troops fought for more than three hours against at least 100 insurgents who were well dug in and heavily armed.

"I hadn't been shot," the 29-year-old said this week. "I don't know how - just bloody lucky at the end of the day."

When the Dutch withdrew most of their troops from Afghanistan in 2010, the Australians of Mentoring Taskforce One took over in Oruzgan province and replaced a French mentoring unit in the Tangi Valley area.

At the request of the commander of the Afghan troops they'd been training, the Australians agreed to mount a "fighting patrol" made up of 20 Diggers and 20 Afghan troops who were aware that they were likely to see action.

"It was all about getting the Afghans into an area they hadn't been in before," said unit commander Lieutenant Colonel Mark Jennings.

The patrol arrived near the village of Derapet aboard light armoured vehicles, which remained on high ground to cover the advance of the soldiers on foot.

The troops approached along a sandy track towards the "green zone" - the rich, green valley floor, thick with crops.

Sergeant Sean Lanigan and Private Paul Langer were out in front with two Afghan soldiers.

"We saw a lot of people leaving and that's when we realised things were starting to go wrong," Lanigan said. As they neared a plantation of massive marijuana plants, insurgents opened fire with machine-guns from about 70m away.

Both sergeant and private were to be awarded the Medal for Gallantry after the battle that followed.

"When you're out in front, our job is to return fire and regain the initiative, so we hooked in," Lanigan said. "Things got pretty intense very quickly."

As he and Langer fought their way along an aqueduct, Keighran urged the Afghan troops he was mentoring to move to higher ground to provide covering fire.

The gunfire brought more insurgents streaming to join the fight. At one point, another Digger called Keighran on his radio to warn him that enemy fire was landing close to him.

"No shit!" he responded. "We were really getting smashed with really accurate fire right at us," Keighran said. "I don't know how we didn't get killed but we didn't."

The corporal threw a smoke grenade to let the Australian gunners in the armoured vehicles know where he was, so they knew where to direct their automatic canon fire.

"That was probably the stupidest thing I did all day because anyone in that valley who didn't know where we were did after that," Keighran said.

"It needed to be done. They worked across the whole thing with 25mm canon and after that we received no more fire from that location."

The patrol included an officer, Captain Brendan Perkins, trained to call in air support from coalition jets and helicopters. Under very heavy fire, Keighran crawled and ran down the hill to get Perkins and brought him back up to the hilltop so he could point out the enemy positions to him.

Then he moved out from what little cover there was to give the Taliban gunners something to shoot at so Perkins could locate their positions from the muzzle flashes.

Keighran told Private Sean Parker, who was with him, to fire a long burst of machinegun fire towards the enemy positions.

Then he stood up and dashed across the hilltop.

"I had to draw fire, essentially," he said. "I did that three times. The second time was pushing it. The third time, I'm lucky, to say the least." Aircraft arrived to hit the Taliban positions.

So, was Keighran scared?

"Once I did it I didn't really think about it. It was just the action that I chose to take.

"I just needed to get rounds on these guys to stop them firing at us."

Australian reinforcements arrived but minutes later Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney was seriously wounded and several Diggers ran to help revive him.

As they worked, the snipers protecting the medical party warned by radio: "Get down, mate. We're copping too much heat."

Corporal Lukas Woolley said Keighran, still up on his beleaguered hilltop, heard the warning and again intervened.

"We had a lot of people there trying to take care of one person," Keighran said. "It's a big target."

So he stood up again. "I moved across deliberately in plain view for everyone on the battlefield to see," Keighran said. "That's me. I'm a moving target and I was happy to do that." He fired a burst of tracer (illuminated gunfire) to pinpoint the insurgents he wanted the Afghan soldiers to hit with their RPG launcher.

An Afghan soldier missed with his first round.

Keighran then used small rocks to create a map showing the Afghan soldier where his shot landed and how he needed to adjust his sights.

The next rocket landed on target. The Afghan soldier, who did not speak English well, yelled: "RPG good!"

Keighran joined the army when he was 17 and says he had an "awesome" time there. Last year, he decided that after 10 years he'd like a change. He felt he had no significant formal qualifications and an army mate helped him get a job at a Kalgoorlie goldmine.

Like many other highly accomplished service personnel, he left the Australian Defence Force "to make some money, mate".

Three weeks ago, he returned to the surface after a shift underground at a goldmine to find a missed call and a message for him to phone Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison.

He spoke to the general and then rang his wife to say: "Kathryn, you'd better get some nice clothes on. We're going to see the Chief of Army at the airport."

Morrison handed him a letter informing him that he'd been awarded the Victoria Cross of Australia.

Keighran has spent the past three months working on getting an underground blasting licence.

He's now in the active reserve but says he'd be happy to rejoin the regular army if he were sure of being deployed overseas again.

"But it's all the stuff in Australia you have to do to get deployed that I no longer like," he says. "All the paperwork and everything."