Geoff Cameron has a thousand tales to tell about his time in one of the toughest battles fought by Australian forces in the Vietnam War.
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But perhaps what he is most angry about is the way returning veterans were treated by institutions back home.
“It was a hell of a shock coming back to Australia,” the Barragga Bay resident said.
“I think the RSL lost 50,000 members after Vietnam; we were given the back of the of hand.
“I went to join an RSL in Canberra and the bloke said to me ‘come back when you’ve been in a real war’.”
But not one to shy away from a challenge, he and other veterans created their own sub-branch within the RSL.
Back in 1968, Mr Cameron was sent to work as a senior intelligence officer at a fire support base outside Saigon during what would become known as the Battle of Coral.
While not as well-known as Long Tan, the Battle of Coral was a vicious fight where 11 Australian soldiers were killed on the first day along with at least 52 of their North Vietnamese enemy.
According to Mr Cameron, one of the advantages the North Vietnamese had was the element of surprise.
He said the Australian forces had gone from sitting around being bored to being sent to Coral where they were unexpectedly attacked almost straight away by the well-equipped enemy.
“They knew we were coming,” he said.
“We were glad to go to Coral because we thought something might finally happen, we were bored out of our brains.
“Then we got to Coral and something happened.”
It was Mr Cameron’s job to discover who the North Vietnamese soldiers were and where they came from.
One responsibility was searching the bodies of enemy soldiers for information, but he recalls none of them had anything except for photos of their families.
Despite coming close to being mortared by the Vietnamese three times, Mr Cameron does not regret being part of the war effort at Coral and Balmoral.
“We were all pleased to be in action,” he said.
“You don’t want to die. But that’s why you join the forces: to fire a gun in anger, to see action if you can.”