A war, a wall & Anzac goodwill

Former train driver Les Wallace back at the Dive Crescent level crossing where this story all started.

It started with a story of good fortune out of near tragedy. Then it morphed into a beckoning call to nine former Kiwi Vietnam War vets.

Are they still around? Are they still alive? Would they want a long overdue Anzac tribute for their contribution to our most controversial overseas military engagement – an engagement that rankled with the nation's collective conscience and still impacts for the soldiers and their families?

This is how the story unfolded.

An email arrived at The Weekend Sun for photographer Chris Callinan. It's from Seymour on the Hume Highway, a couple of hours out of Melbourne.

'I write to you about the reunion of a train driver and a truck driver, who were involved in a level crossing crash on Dive Crescent in Tauranga in the 1950s,” it said.

The story of two men drawn together by a brush with death and their reunion 50 years later featured in a story in The Weekend Sun.

'… Eric Holmes is one of our team,” says the email from a company of Melbourne landscape architects. 'And his wife Jan's grandad featured in that story.”

The grandad was Les Wallace of Otumoetai, the train driver who smashed into the timber truck. He was the other half of the reunion, one of the survivors in The Weekend Sun story.

Les was in Melbourne visiting Jan and Eric. He took The Weekend Sun story to show them, just out of interest. But Eric Holmes saw more than a warm reunion story – he saw a wonderful opportunity.

It's here the story veers off at a Trans-Tasman tangent and becomes an appeal to Vietnam War vets and a statement about the unshakeable bond between Anzacs.

That company of landscape architects had just finished building something called the Vietnam Veterans Commemorative Service Wall in Seymour Victoria.

'Purely from the response we were getting from veterans over here we thought it would be wonderful if Kiwi vets also knew what was going on,” says Phin Murphy, one of the wall designers.

And what's going on is a meandering 85m serpentine visual record of the conflict. It's made up of 106 near 2m-high glass panels of images taken by Australian and New Zealand servicemen during the war. It also carries the names of 60,267 servicemen.

It's a canvas, a public installation, an artwork, a commemoration, a celebration all in one.

'When we were installing the wall we had people pointing out the names of their mates and telling us the story of how they were killed. There was always tears,” say Phin.

Panels 27 and 28 on the wall are given over to Kiwi soldiers.

'The whole Anzac spirit is an important part of the wall,” says Phin.

It's a tell-tale image – nine callow, bare chested men of Victor 4, parading a captured North Vietnamese flag.

'Is there a chance they don't know they are up on the wall? That's why it's so important because we just don't know,” says Phin.

And in the spirit of the Les Wallace reunion story, would The Weekend Sun help spread the ANZAC goodwill encapsulated in the wall and put a call out to the soldiers?

Phin, Eric and Jan were thinking wouldn't it be great if the guys in that Kiwi photo, that troop, got together again.

'Not knowing any of the background of where they are now, whether they would want to and whether they can. But wouldn't that be a wonderful story to come out of the whole project.”

And that's how a simple Weekend Sun story did a 5000km round trip to Melbourne. That's the connection created by one simple story and a photograph published two years ago.

If you know these men from Victor 4, The Weekend Sun would like to hear from you.

Contact reporter Hunter Wells on hunter@thesun.co.nz or call (07) 557 0500

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