Locals gathered at the Mount Gambier War Memorial on Thursday to pay tribute to the brave Australians that fought in the Vietnam War for Vietnam Veterans Day.
The day, which is also known as Long Tan Day, commemorates the brave Australians that fought in the Vietnam War.
It is held on August 18 to commemorate the Battle of Long Tan where, in a rubber plantation, Australian soldiers fought one of the fiercest battles in 1966.
The men of the 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment faced a force of around 2000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.
The battle resulted in the largest number of casualties in a single operation since the Australian Task Force had established its base at nearby Nui Dat the previous April, with 17 Australians killed in action and 25 wounded.
Penola Vietnam veteran Neville Dixon said he joined the army at the young age of 21, in search of a great adventure to get him away from his farming life in Kalangadoo.
“I enlisted in 1966, because I missed the call up,” he said.
“I just wanted to get away from home for a while because we’re out on a farm, so I joined the Army in September 1967 for three years.”
He was sent to Wagga Wagga for recruit training and then to Ingleburn for infantry training, which was “fairly intense”.
“The battalion had to be ready by November 1968 to go to Vietnam, so training was very intensive to get us ready.”
He was then posted to the ninth battalion, which embarked to Vietnam on November 10, 1968.
He said things became more real for all the men once they landed in Vietnam.
“None of us had ever been overseas before. I think reality sort of struck when we were getting off the boat – before we got off the boat, they handed us live ammunition,” he said.
“In Australia you’d use blanks and things like that, and then it suddenly dawned on us, this is real.”
In his company he served with keen young men that had signed up willingly, but also with national servicemen – men who were conscripted.
“I’ve always felt that we shouldn’t have called people up and send them off to Vietnam, because we didn’t even do it in the First World War,” he said.
“That was my feeling, but I was keen to serve.
“Before I went in I didn’t know a lot about Vietnam, but to me, it was an adventure until things got a bit real.”
Like many that served in Vietnam, he saw many of his fellow soldiers fall, many to landmines, and had a few close calls himself.
“In one case, I was walking through a gap in the bamboo and the lad behind me walked on a landmine and it went off, but luckily it went off in the ground and never sprang out the ground,” he said.
“It threw him about 10 metres and I was just in front of him, he broke his legs but he came good – he was very lucky.
“Another incident not long after that, there were three of us standing with our platoon sergeant, and he stood on a mine, and we were sort of standing in a group.
“The thing jumped out the ground and never went off.”
Although the experience was tough, and like many other returned soldiers, Mr Dixon experienced trauma and loss, he left the service with many good mates.
“It was an experience – sometimes I wonder why I did it but with me coming from a farming area around Kalangadoo, I had a fairly sheltered life,” he said.
“The thing that I liked the most is I got to know and become good mates with people from the inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.
“You become good friends when people normally wouldn’t. So I had friends from outside of farming – that’s what my father told me, he told me he said, ‘You need need to get away and mix from other people besides the farm boys’.”
