VIETNAM veterans took centre stage at Anzac Day events this year, ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.
The 18 August conflict was the costliest single battle for Australian troops during the Vietnam War, with 18 killed in action and many more wounded.
Councillor Angela Long shares her story about a chance encounter with a US solider during his Vietnam War service and an unlikely reunion.
“IN early 1967, a girlfriend and l decided to have a day off work and go to Station Pier in Port Melbourne to see an American warship.
The USS Canberra was there on rest and recreation from the Vietnam War.
This was before l met my husband, Barry. We met a couple of sailors who invited us onto the ship to have lunch with them.
Later that day, we showed them some of Melbourne and after that they escorted both of us home to Springvale, where one of them gave me his sailor hat.
His name was Lesley Daniel Morris, better known as Dan at that time.
His name along with his rank, serial number and the ship’s name was written on the hat.
Not long after this l met Barry, and in December 1968 we were married.
The hat was placed in a hall cupboard when we bought our house in Dandenong North in 1971. It stayed there for about 40 years.
One day, l was cleaning out the cupboard and said to Barry that the hat should be returned to the sailor or that if he was not still living, it should go to his family.
In 2013, at an Anzac Day service at the Noble Park RSL, the guest speaker was an admiral in the Royal Australian Navy.
I spoke to him at lunch and told him the story of the hat and how l would like to return it to Dan.
He Googled the ship’s name and found out that it was the only American warship to have a name that was not American, and he advised me to go through the RSL to trace this sailor.
I tried this to no avail, and in early December that year, my daughter suggested that we look on the internet to see if the ship had a website.
It did, and we left a message for Dan to get in contact with us.
In February 2014, we received a short email which read “I am the old Canberra man”.
I was a bit confused because l did not relate it to the ship and thought that it came from a person that l might have met in Canberra, Australia.
I emailed him back to say that l did not know who he was.
A reply came back and he explained that we had met in Melbourne in 1967 and asked me to call him.
Since then we have been in regular contact via email, and in April 2014 we sent him the hat and a photo of me in the Greater Dandenong mayoral robes with Barry.
In October 2014 we told Dan that we would be in America as part of a holiday and asked to see him while we were there.
We met up again in Oregon and he showed us around for the three days that we were there.”
