Vietnam Veterans Day

Dennis Weatherall
Badged Member # 34
Sydney Australia.

I'm off in the am Sunday 15th August (with a group of Vietnam Vets as guide & leader) to Vietnam and Cambodia for Vietnam Veterans Day. It's the 44th Memorial Service for the Battle of Long Tan held at the original Cross site erected by 6RAR after the battle.

The site of the Cross is the ONLY foreign War Memorial to the Vietnam War period allowed to be erected in the "winners circle" - (South Vietnam) so to say. The service is held each year by the Australian and New Zealand Ambassadors and respective Defence Attaches at the site. As always the service takes place at 15:35 on the 18th August each year for the past ten years, it's the exact time Delta Company 6 RAR (Royal Australian Regiment) made contact with the enemy, shot and killed two NVA (North Vietnamese Army) regular soldiers on a track winding into the rubber plantation.

For the next six hours they fought a life & death struggle. The end result was 18 Australian's KIA'd (17 Infantry + 1 Cav) and on the battlefield clearance 247 KIA's on the opposition batting team.

As the years have passed old foes meet on this battle ground and the end truth has unfolded, 123 men of D Co 6RAR on a search and destroy mission that day in fact came upon a full Battalion of NVA encamped awaiting to hit "NuI Dat" our ATF (Aust Task Force Base) some 7 kms (as a crow flys) away that night. I'll fill in the full story line with my article in due course.

The old foe (245 Battalion NVA) have told us it was the greatest mauling they received up to that point in their war in the south. Our troops had fought skirmishes but the NVA wanted to see if we were different than the ARVN (Army of the South Vietnam) or the Americans that had been stationed in the area until we arrived. They say that with those badly wounded and dragged away by their fellow NVA comrades (they tied themselves together with leg ropes so they could pull a wounded comrade away from the battle front) the real KIA total was more like 750 almost the entire Battalion.


But of course the NVA wrote the post war history and originally their propaganda the day post the battle told that they the mighty NVA had destroyed an Australian Battalion, in fact 44 years on it was exactly the reverse. The North government were suing for peace & were in Paris endeavoring to stitch up a peace treaty and the extraction of all foreign forces, they needed a win situation to press home at the conference table that war was being won by their side.....how different it was back then !


Australia lost some 500+ KIA's during 12 years (our longest fought war) but our allies America lost 57,000 ... how futile is war, so many mothers weep for their lost sons, but as we come together we that are left to grow old, also remember the 2 million opposition forces that never went home to their loved ones either. Vietnam is a different place, thank god today. So different my 2nd son Jarrod has married Tram (pronounced Chum) the only daughter of an ol' soldier from the North (NVA). On his return with me from Long Tan he brings back to Australia his pregnant wife Tram to start a new life in this country, and Lady Di and I will soon be blessed with our first grandchild a Aussie-Vietnamese child.

It's a pity Tram's father didn't get to see their marriage, as he passed away last October but he'd given his blessing for my son to marry his only daughter. It's Vietnamese culture that the son stays behind and looks after the family (as mother is still alive) but the daughter must make a live with her husbands family be it 1000's of miles away. "Trun" - Tram's father was a decorated NVA soldier and was happy the war was over and his country was at last one country and at peace, so am I, but we should never forget the sacrifice it took and the men that died in the process. I'm looking forward to my return along with both my sons Darryn and Jarrod and the part I play in bringing my Aussie Vet mates back to see the new Vietnam they left behing so many years ago !