After completing training at Kapooka, Borris joined the Australian Army in 1961 and then spent three months in Ingleburn before being posted at the 1 Royal Australian Regiment, which was the first Battalion to be sent to Vietnam. 

Looking far into the distance, Borris remembered the treacherous conditions, set in thick jungle and having to deal with extreme heat and the unconventional guerrilla warfare. 

“We did a lot of operations and sometimes it was shithouse and we had a couple of guys lose their legs, a few wounded but we were lucky compared to others where some lost a couple of guys,” he said. 

“At times it was scary and other times it was bearable.” 

Borris spent 13 months in Vietnam, until he returned home when the Australian Army decided to send two Battalions stationed at Nui Dat.

Years later, after he had completed a couple of posts in Kapooka, Borris was called to return to war, however he was newly-wedded and had only been home for a year, so he didn’t go back until 1971 with 4 RAR in Townsville. 

“I was the first Battalion to go and also the last to go out,” he said. 

Unlike many who returned home from Vietnam surrounded in controversy and blame for the war and the way it had been conducted, Borris said he was quite fortunate. 

“When we returned, I was posted at Kapooka and I stayed there for a few years and I didn’t move from Wagga for about four years,” he said. 

“With Wagga being a military town, I wasn’t getting much crap, compared to my mates who stayed in the Battalion and were getting a lot of shit in Sydney, getting called ‘the baby killers’, but I was alright here.” 

Borris said these days of remembrance are the hardest. 

“It was a long time ago, 50 odd years since we first went over and it’s just something that happened,” he said. 

“I get some good memories of all my mates and a lot have passed away from a few different things but some became alcoholics and drank themselves to death. 

“It’s only days like these and Anzac Day that you really think about them.” 

War widow Sally Smerdon’s late husband Sergeant Neville, served 12 months in Vietnam and she recalls his time away as being “very hard”. 

“It was hard, because every time you heard someone being killed or injured over in Vietnam you wondered whether that was your husband,” Mrs Smerdon said. 

The pair met in the early 1960s when Neville was recruitment training out in Kapooka and they married in December 1965. 

Following his return from the war, he was posted in Kapooka for two years then sent to Townsville where he spent a total of 10 years, before finishing his service at an Army Reserve in Adelaide where he was discharged and the couple settled in Wagga. 

Mrs Smerdon was unsure whether her husband knew what he was going into as a soldier entering the Vietnam War. 

“I don’t know, he never really said whether he had an understanding,” she said. 

Mrs Smerdon and Borris were among a number of city veterans honouring fallen mates and remembering experiences on August 18.