what was the war between Australia and Vietnam called

'Hello, We Are In The Middle Of A War Zone' 'Then they landed in Vietnam and were immediately confronted with the reality of what they had walked into and that started to change their understanding of what they were being asked to do,' Davidde says. 'But at no stage did I think that it was going to be dangerous.' 'Probably a little bit naive that we were going to a country that was in the middle of war,' Ray says. But being young and ambitious, all right, well, off we went to Vietnam.' When you got a young family - well, we had one daughter at the time. 'These days, you would think twice about going. We didn’t have too many discussions about it,' says Stan Ackerley, who represented Australia from 1965 to 1969. There was little time for the players to think about the potential dangers of sending civilians into a war zone. 'This was before the Socceroos were even called the 'Socceroos,' ' Ray says. But in 1967, the Socceroos had never even qualified for a World Cup, let alone won an international trophy. It’s hard to imagine now, in the current era, with Australia competing in consecutive World Cups and Asian Cups.

'We were the pawns in the game to win over the South Vietnamese people, so it was a PR exercise,' says Ray Baartz, a former Australian national team player, from 1967 to 1974.Īfter making his national team debut earlier in the year, Ray was one of the players selected for a six-week tour of Asia - of which, two weeks were spent in Saigon for the Friendship Tournament, otherwise known as the South Vietnam National Day Tournament. 'The Australian military came up with the idea of using football as sort of a vehicle to kind of connect with the local communities,' Davidde says. Eight nations would compete: New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, then South Vietnam and Australia.

It was November 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, when an international football tournament was held in Saigon. It really was the way that they told it.' 'Except that it really did actually happen. 'It was one of these stories that you heard at a bar with colleagues and ex-players, and you thought, 'Is this really true? Could this really be a thing? Surely this didn’t actually happen,' ' sports journalist Davidde Corran says. Facebook Email Before the Australian men's soccer team's first World Cup appearance in 1974 (pictured above), the team competed at an international competition in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

What was the war between Australia and Vietnam called