A Mullengandra lad turned Albury welder, Doug was in the prime of his life when he was conscripted to serve with the Australian Army in the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s.

Born just before the end of World War II, he never wanted to join the military.

Few of his peers did either.

Yet in May 1965 Doug and seven others fronted for a medical examination in Albury.

Within two months of arriving in South Vietnam, Doug came within seconds of joining one of the most brutal engagements in Australian military history, the Battle of Long Tan.

Having spent the early hours of August 17, 1966, on watch for enemy fire, Doug's brewing tonsillitis took a turn for the worse.

He returned to company lines the next day but his superior had other ideas.

"I started to pack my bag up but the sergeant came along and said: 'What are you doing? You've been pretty unwell, you'd better stay behind today'," Doug recalls.

"So I didn't argue with him but I didn't know anything like that was going to happen."

Mid-afternoon on August 18, Major Harry Smith and his company of 108 young and mostly inexperienced Australian and New Zealand soldiers fought for their lives for more than three hours in the rubber plantation called Long Tan.

They held off an overwhelming enemy force of 2500 battle-hardened Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers in the torrential rain-made mud and splintered trees.

With the ANZAC's ammunition running low and casualties mounting, the enemy was massing for a final assault.

Delta Company 6^th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (6 RAR) - platoons 10, 11 and 12 - was piercing the dense plantation in an arrowhead formation.

"The 11 platoon made first contact with a couple of Viet Cong before they ran into an ambush with hundreds of Viet Cong," Doug says.

"The rest of the company was spread out a fair way; the Viet Cong thought there were more than 100 or so men and they've said since if they'd known there were only 100 men, they would have overrun them.

"When our armoured personnel carriers came out, the Viet Cong were a bit frightened of them and they turned and ran."

Though both sides claimed victory, it is believed 500 enemy were killed while the Australians lost 18 men with 24 injured.

Among the losses was Albury-born Private Ernest Grant. Private Grant, 20, a Thurgoona farmhand and Army enlistee, was one of 14 soldiers from Albury-Wodonga who died during the war. (Ernest Grant Park at Thurgoona honours him.)

Having gone to Albury High School together, Doug fondly recalls the young dairyman: "He was a very decent sort of man."

The next day Delta Company 6 RAR returned to the hellish scene of the battle, a jungle hotbed strewn with dismembered bodies.

"We had the job of burying all the Viet Cong bodies; 250 to 500 of them," Doug says.

"In the heat and the humidity, the smell was terrible, it wasn't very nice, bodies blown apart. Some of us spent two days doing that before we returned back to Nui Dat camp.

"For years it did worry me quite a bit; I've still got a bit of depression from all of that."

Within months of that battle, Doug miraculously survived being shot in the head by a Viet Cong sniper about 100 metres away.

His 12th platoon was seeking out enemy late in the afternoon on November 26.

"The bullet went in my left eye and came out just behind my right ear," he says.

"It's a miracle I'm alive still; my parents got the message that I'd been seriously wounded and had brain damage, the bullet grazed my brain!

"I was in a coma and they didn't expect me to wake up but if, by some miracle, I did they expected me to have brain damage."

Taken to Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne two days before Christmas 1966, Doug defied the odds but still didn't know he'd lost his left eye for weeks.

"Things were very difficult for a number of years; I was in and out of hospital until 1969, having trouble with my eye," Doug says.

"I realised I couldn't go back to the work I was doing before and I used to like to play sport too but I couldn't do that. It was very frustrating, I played basketball and football.

"Life wasn't very good, I was getting very depressed. I couldn't go out much at night or see much."

Then two things happened within months of each other that changed the course of Doug's life.

He joined Lavington Baptist Church in November 1972 before he met his future wife Christine in February the next year. They married a little more than a year later and have been blessed with four daughters and 13 grandchildren.

"I couldn't have survived if I hadn't met Christine then," he says.

"Occasionally I still have dreams about Vietnam. I still get frustrated; frustrated that I can't get out and kick the football with the kids and that I can't drive a car."

The Battle of Long Tan was one of the most savage in Australian military history, gaining US and South Vietnamese Presidential Unit Citations for gallantry.

"I was lucky to not go out that day," Doug reflects. "But I still wished I was there to help my mates."

Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan opens at Regent Cinemas Albury on Thursday. There will be a counsellor in the foyer outside Cinema 2 on the night.