Time to bring our Vietnam veterans in from the cold

“On Vietnam Veterans’ Day a grateful nation honours, respects and embraces you for the service and sacrifice you made in Australia’s name’’.

Well, yes, Prime Minister, but that’s just not enough.

As we reflect today on that divisive conflict that started more than 50 years ago, one thing comes through loud and clear:

It’s time we brought our Vietnam veterans in from the cold.

But we will need more than the platitudes offered by Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull in his Twitter account as quoted at the start of this column.

In this online publication we featured yesterday the story of Viet veteran Kerry Chisholm of Bargo.

Now Mr Chisholm is not the first veteran this old journo has interviewed during his long career,

I found that the common thread among them all was the lingering hurt from the dubious welcome they all received when they returned home after their military tour of Vietnam.

As Mr Chisholm told me, “they just didn’t want to know us’’.

These were young soldiers who answered the call when their country asked them to fight in a war far away from our shores.

You can’t deny that close to half of the Australian population at the time were opposed to our involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

But why should that lessen the quality of the service provided by our soldiers in that war as compared to any other war, from World War II to Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan?

For all intents and purposes our soldiers fought and died in Vietnam to stop the spread of communism at the height of the Cold War.

But 50 years later Vietnam veterans are still waiting for some sort of recognition that they fought for their country as gallantly as our soldiers did in any other war.

That they were as heroic as anyone else in any other military conflict in history.

Let’s bring them in from the cold at last.