Image: Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Junior in a faked army casualty scene from Tropic Thunder.

The Australian Defence Force can be creative in its training of its officer cadets.

In one exercise designed to test stress, a simulated massacre, six litres of tomato sauce was used to make soldiers look like they’d been involved in a serious accident.

Added to the mix was a butcher’s waste basket of animal lungs, hearts, intestines.

All was keep refrigerated to keep it fresh for the exercise in which soldiers were doused with the tomato sauce and offal.

The recipe was apparently successful because a bus driver took legal action claiming damages for the fright he said he suffered when he saw the scene.

The driver, 55-year-old Vasko Petrovski, had transported one group of cadets to the scene, left and returned with a second group.

He says he didn’t know that the first group he’d dropped off had been made up to look like victims of a two-car collision.

This is what he found:

A young woman with an injured leg appeared at the front of the bus asking for help.

He saw the mini bus on its side and another soldier who appeared to be dead with part of his brain on the ground.

He looked inside the mini bus and saw a person sitting in the front, hunched over the horn and with one of their eyes hanging out.

There was also a person with their tongue hanging out and two apparently dead people on the ground.

His first thought was that a person with a machine gun had shot at the group and that perhaps that person was still present.

Somebody pulled him back from rendering assistance and told him the scene was only training.

The Supreme Court in the Australian Capital Territory awarded Petrovski, a former professional soccer player, a total of $546,222.

The court was told Petrovski suffers from recurrent visions of the incident and that he had difficulty driving.

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