A BENDIGO-BASED veteran is among those gathering to remember 26 days of "frenetic, heavy and savage" fighting in the depths of the war in Vietnam.
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Graham Christie was among soldiers who survived multiple North Vietnamese onslaughts 53 years ago and plans to attend a dawn service on Thursday marking the first day of hostilities.
He has described those days as a "life changing horror" lodged deep in the psyche of those who witnessed it.
"It will be a very small service, maybe only 10 or 12 people," Mr Christie said.
The 26 days of fighting is not well known today, but they should be, he said.
How else can the families of those who died there know their loved ones are being treated with the dignity they deserve?
Mr Christie does not want any attention for himself, but is among the survivors determined to make sure that his mates' legacy is pushed to the side no longer.
He was a 22-year-old conscripted National Service member ordered to fly to a series of rubber plantations and rolling grasslands north of South Vietnam's capital Saigon, and set up two bases 4 km apart.
They were not familiar with the area and they did not understand they were landing extremely close to North Vietnamese underground bunker systems.
That night, a torrential downpour rolled in. It was so thick that Mr Christie described it as "blackening". Many soldiers had not had time to properly dig in.
Then, in the very early hours of the morning, North Vietnamese forces began their assault by firing hundreds mortars and rocket propelled grenades on Australian positions little larger than a cricket ground.
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Mr Christie would say "we were being blown to bits as the roar of the incoming bombardment intensified as crunching explosions impacted in and all around us - the chaos of lethal splintering trees, mud, shrapnel & death was unabated".
Then, North Vietnamese soldiers charged in what Mr Christie described as "an incredibly frightening human wave onslaught of literally thousands of the enemy".
It was an assault on a particularly exposed part of an Australian base, complete with the use of flares to the North Vietnamese soldiers a ghostly appearance as they appeared from tunnels, screaming at the top of their lungs, Mr Christie said.
The Australians held their ground but the waves of attacks were huge, he said.
In desperation, commanding officers ordered Australians manning Howitzer cannons to lower them so that they fire horizontally.
The soldiers loaded the cannons with canisters full of small metal arrows and ordered every Australian in their firing lines to literally hug the ground.
It was a strategy invented on the spot.
The results were catastrophic for the North Vietnamese and saved the lives of every one of the vastly outnumbered Australian soldiers.
The attacks stopped within minutes.
Mr Christie said it was impossible to know how many enemy soldiers had been killed because some had not so much been killed as "simply vaporised" by the volleys.
Australia had lost 11 people, with another 28 wounded.
That assault became the first in a series in the weeks that followed as North Vietnamese forces tried to clear the way for a larger assault on Saigon, Mr Christie said.
He believed that the bases he was defending had deliberately been set up to draw the North Vietnamese into showing their hand after United States intelligence suggested forces were building for major attacks on the country's south.
The area he and his mates were defending became the scene of four "human wave" assaults, five mass-saturation mortar attacks, more than 57 firefights and three huge battles to thin North Vietnamese ranks in their own bunkers.
Australians slowly gained the upper hand over the next few weeks as they strengthened their positions and as more firepower was brought in, including US air power.
"We consider it the longest, largest and bloodiest battle by Australians in the whole war," Mr Christie said.
"We also believe it saved Saigon."
The 26 days of battles were so important that then-prime minister John Gorton flew out to thank soldiers. The United State's Vietnam commander recommended president Lyndon Johnson award them a citation for bravery.
But news of exactly what had happened was not widely recognised in Australia, Mr Christie said.
Perhaps the events on those battlefields were lost in a world that was turning the world upside down in 1968.
Huge anti-war protests were underway across much of the western world, including in Australia where mounted police would soon be ordered to ride at full canter into violent crowds outside the US consular general's office in Melbourne.
Meanwhile, the western world was facing other reckonings as old cultural assumptions on race and social order fell apart.
Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was shot dead in June.
The western world would soon have to grapple with an invasion of Czechoslovakia in what Soviet Union president Leonid Brezhnev said would protect communism in Eastern Europe "even if it meant a third world war".
All the while, US casualties in Vietnam kept climbing, drawing the world's attention away from operations Australian forces were involved in.
Plus, the battle had a convoluted name.
It is still widely referred to as the Battles of Fire Support Bases Coral and Balmoral.
Or maybe the whole thing was too politically sensitive.
Twenty-five Australians had been killed over 26 days and Mr Christie suspected the government did not want to draw attention, given how unpopular the war was becoming.
"It was 40 years before the Australian government recognised it by bringing us to Canberra and even then they only gave token references to Coral [one of the major battles over those 26 days]," he said.
"A lot of us got very angry, though others had been angry before that. People were disenchanted, frustrated and sad."
About half of those who served in them died before the nation properly recognised them with a unit citation for gallantry, Mr Christie said.
Today, Mr Christie is frank about the costs of war.
"I was a 22-year old guy believing he was going to get blown apart. That's frightening," he said.
"It affected me. It affected everyone who was there."
But he says Australia should know that some of its best soldiers sacrificed themselves.
"I'm 75 now, I'm not a kid. I was one and I lost all my innocence a long time ago. We don't want another war and we don't want our kids to go to war," Mr Christie said.
"It was our turn, apparently."
Commemorations of the anniversary of the Battles of Fire Support Bases Coral and Balmoral will take place at 6am on Thursday.
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