HOME unfolded slowly as Jeff Taylor endured the long flight back from south Vietnam.

It was a time before the conflict got mired in social and political controversy in Australia. And yet the price of war was unnervingly close as the Hercules skipped across south-east Asia, en route to the RAAF’s Richmond air base in Sydney.

Sharing that flight in March of ‘66 were “two bodies in the back”. Soldiers recently lost in battle.

In all likelihood, they died not far from where Mr Taylor was stationed at Bien Hoa. 

They were two of the 521 Australians killed by the time by the time prime minister Gough Whitlam pulled out the troops.

“It really brought it home, especially for three days. The poor buggers,” he says.

Tuesday marks 50 years since Mr Taylor and his good mate Trevor “Doova” Thomson left for the Vietnam War. 

Both eventually retired to Wodonga.

They had spent about three years training at the Bandiana army base. Or, as Mr Thomson describes it, the Border’s version of ’70s British sitcom Dad’s Army.

Most of their superiors were World War II diggers, caught off-balance by the influx “of all these young blokes”.

“But by geez they could drink, led us young blokes astray,” Mr Taylor says.

“They’d tell us right from wrong, mainly wrong.”

Mr Taylor had joined up from his home in Western Australia in 1960. 

He wanted to see the east coast and thought the only way he could do that was with the army.

By the time he and Mr Thomson, from Adelaide, met they had worked into their speciality, something that possibly spared them a more sobering fate.

They were not to become frontline soldiers. Without them, and the rest of the 1st Australian Logistic Support Company though, the initial war effort would have gone nowhere.

No uniforms, no boots, no vehicles, no spare parts. No weapons or ammunition.

But the soldiers’ grub wasn’t a worry. 

“I think they got their rations from the Yanks,” Mr Thomson says.

This was the first such Australian unit deployed on active service since World War II.

The pair stayed at Bandiana with the 1st Composite Ordnance Company until April of 1965, then were sent to Sydney’s Holsworthy base to prepare vehicles and stores.

“And then we still didn’t know where we were going until about two weeks beforehand,” Mr Taylor says.

The company of Australian Regular Army soldiers — 22 men, later joined by another six — were given the news. Despite the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam having arrived in mid-1962, the conflict had a low profile.

“They got us in an old theatre and said ‘Vietnam’. We looked at each other and said ‘Where’s that?’”

They had been thinking Malaya or Borneo, most likely the latter. 

After a few days’ leave they left Richmond on June 1 on a chartered Qantas 707, flying via Townsville and Manila.

It was Mr Taylor’s first time in a jet.

Their job in Vietnam was to support the 1st Battalion RAR, sharing a base with the Americans’ 173rd Airborne Division. 

It was announced just this week that 24 of the 1st Battalion lying in graves at Terendak Military Cemetery in Malaysia, plus another at Singapore’s Kranji War Cemetery, are to be brought home.

A couple of months before they flew in, the Viet Cong bombed the hell out of the Bien Hoa airfield. The wrecks of up to 30 aircraft were scattered near the runway.

“Luckily it never happened again, though it was always in the back of your mind just what was possibly going to happen,” Mr Thomson says.

The dangers quickly became background noise. An extraordinary everyday that didn’t even spare the blackest of nights. 

Mortars fell, flares lit up the sky above a river near the base. 

It felt like barely breathing distance away but they simply got used to it all.

And then there were helicopters in a never-ceasing round trip to the battlefield. The fighting was no more than four kilometres away.

Aircraft that got into trouble would land on the airstrip next to the base. The US’ U-2 spy planes took off on reconaissance missions a couple of times a day.

“The choppers used to take off six or seven at a time with the troops going out,” Mr Thomson says. 

And then there’d be the return landings with the injured and the dead.

“I don’t think anyone liked being there. You were away from your family and your loved ones but that was what we had to do,” he says.

Their safety was thanks to nearby troops doing their job. 

“They defended the air strip. And that’s what it was all about,” he adds.

“If that strip had gone they would have been in trouble.”

If it wasn’t for their Bandiana training they doubt their posting would have worked so well.

“We did a couple of major exercises in ’63 and ’64,” Mr Thomson says.

“I thought thank Christ we did them. It gave us an insight of what we had to do.”

Mr Thomson returned to Australia a couple of months after Mr Taylor. 

He eventually went on to serve for 20 years. Mr Taylor stayed for 33 years, including a posting to Papua New Guinea in the early 1970s and 2½ years with the Australian embassy in Washington.

“I just enjoyed the mateship and the challenges,” Mr Taylor says.

“It was hard on the kids and family at times but that’s what they grew up with.”

Last year the former major returned, slotting in a Vietnam stopover on his way back from a European holiday. 

No surprise much would have changed, 50 years on.

The area had a population of 6000 or 8000 when they were there. 

“Now it’s a million people,” he says.

The intention was to round-off the reminiscing with one last look at the base.

“We drove right up to the Bien Hoa air force base gate. But it’s all run by the Communists now and they wouldn’t even let us take photos.”