By ANNA USHER

Mosman and Kirribilli veterans will gather at the Mosman War Memorial at noon next Tuesday to mark 60 years since the Battle of Long Tan, the costliest single battle of Australia’s Vietnam War.

The service is one of scores across the country, but Mosman’s claim on the day runs deeper than most. Warrant Officer George Chinn trained on Middle Head before Vietnam and won a Distinguished Conduct Medal at Long Tan.

On 18 August 1966, 105 men of D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, and three New Zealand gunners from 161 Field Battery ran into more than 2,000 Viet Cong among the rubber trees at Long Tan.

They were outnumbered close to ten to one. For nearly four hours, in torrential monsoon rain, they held their ground until armoured reinforcements smashed through to them.

Seventeen Australians were killed in the battle and another died later of his wounds. Two dozen more were wounded. It remains the heaviest Australian loss of any single engagement of the Vietnam War. At least 245 enemy soldiers were killed.

The date stuck. Veterans first gathered as “Long Tan Day” at a cross raised on the battlefield on the third anniversary in 1969. In 1987, after the Welcome Home march through Sydney, Prime Minister Bob Hawke made 18 August the national Vietnam Veterans Day. Almost 60,000 Australians served in the war between 1962 and 1972, and 524 never came home.

Mosman’s own thread to the battle

Middle Head was where it began. From 1962, soldiers bound for Vietnam trained at an army intelligence school on the headland’s old harbour fortifications, and were put through a punishing code-of-conduct course in the fort tunnels. The first to deploy, the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, were known simply as the Team.

Chinn served with the Team, then became the first regimental sergeant major of 6RAR. At Long Tan, with D Company almost out of ammunition and close to being overrun, he helped run the helicopter resupply that dropped fresh rounds into the fight.

He was not the only Middle Head man decorated in Vietnam. Ray Simpson won the Victoria Cross and Barry Petersen the Military Cross.

The service

Tuesday’s service will be led by Kirribilli RSL sub-branch vice president Terry Harper, himself a Vietnam veteran of the 7th Battalion. Retired Colonel Gerald McCormack, who commanded tank troops in South Vietnam, will give the Vietnam Veterans Day address.

Member for North Shore Felicity Wilson will speak as guest. The service will carry the anthem of the war generation, Redgum’s “I Was Only 19”, the Ode read by the Kirribilli branch’s Ian Nicol, and a lament on the pipes from Andy Blow. Naval chaplain Andrew Lipczynski, of HMAS Waterhen, will lead the prayers.

The public is welcome. It begins at noon on Tuesday, 18 August, at the Mosman War Memorial.