In August last year, Governor-General Quentin Bryce unveiled the original Long Tan cross with Lieutentant Colonel Harry Smith SC former Officer commanding D Company 6RAR at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Photo: Andrew Meares.Canberra Times.

Yesterday, the Herald Sun newspaper published an article titled, Long Tan cross heads back to Vietnam.

An abridged copy of the article has been reproduced below.

An icon of Australia’s war in Vietnam, the Long Tan cross is heading back to Vietnam after almost a year on loan to the Australian War Memorial.

Harry Smith… built the original, using scrap steel from the rubbish dump at the Nui Dat base for reinforcing, gravel from the roadside and cement mixed up in a wheel barrow.

Long Tan was a significant battle of Australia’s war in Vietnam.

It was fought between 108 members of Delta Company of the 6th Battalion (6RAR) and a 2000-strong force of North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers in the Long Tan rubber plantation on August 18, 1966.

Eighteen Australians died.

When 6RAR returned for its second deployment in 1969, then as a composite Australian-New Zealand unit, a memorial cross was created to be placed on the battle site and dedicated on the third anniversary.

McAvinue, 75, of Chelsea, Victoria, said he got the job as other Long Tan veterans were out on operations.

“I said ‘what do you want?’ They said: ‘That’s up to you, you’re the expert’,” he said.

Scrounging up materials took around a week.

Reinforcing steel was straightened with a sledge hammer and cut with a hacksaw. Construction of the formwork took a day.

Cement was allowed to cure for a fortnight and then a brass plaque, made up in the base engineering workshop, was affixed with brass screws salvaged from a wooden ammo box.

The finished item, standing about two metres tall and weighing more than 100 kilograms, was flown beneath an Iroquois helicopter to the battle site and set into the ground.

It was dedicated in a moving ceremony on August 18, 1969, an event requiring a significant military operation as the area was regarded far from secure.

“When everybody put it up and we all walked away from it, I thought ‘that’s the last we will ever see of it’. Forty-odd years later it turns up in Australia,” McAvinue said.

Following the fall of Saigon to communist forces in 1975, the cross vanished.

At one stage it marked the grave of a Vietnamese Catholic priest and for the past 20 years it’s resided in the Dong Nai Museum, which agreed to loan it to the Australian War Memorial.

Vietnam veterans gathered for a farewell reception, an event preceded by the war memorial’s increasingly popular “last post” closing time ceremony. At each such ceremony the story of one soldier is recounted…

Smith said the cross symbolised the 17 soldiers he lost plus the armoured personnel carrier commander killed in the rescue mission.

“It also symbolises the whole of the Vietnam War (including) the 520 people we lost…”

• To read the full article from the Herald Sun, click onto Long Tan cross heads back to Vietnam.