He was one of 3000 New Zealanders to serve in Vietnam, with the first cohort arriving 60 years ago.
On Sunday, Vietnam veterans are set to be commemorated in Wellington. However, Dunedin veterans will instead be enjoying a low-key dinner together.
Returned and Services Association Otago-Southland president Major Lox Kellas shipped out to Vietnam as part of 161 Battery in 1968, as a radio operator.
Vietnam was chaotic, Maj Kellas said.
"There’s bullets whizzing through the trees, there’s people yelling and machine guns going off while you’re trying to listen to the radio. All the while people are trying to frantically tell you messages to pass on - it’s unbelievable, instant chaos, like an earthquake really.
"But then it settles down, and you can start to constructively figure out what to do."
His first introduction to death was a shocking shake into the reality of war.
The youngest men serving in Vietnam with him were teenagers, and the first casualty he saw was a 19-year-old gravely wounded Australian man being winched up into a helicopter.
"I was giving the sergeant major a hand at the time . . . I asked ‘will he be all right?’, he responded ‘dead, help me with this other one’— that was my first introduction [to casualty], but in the middle of war you have to suck it up and deal with it."
The Anzac spirit remained alive and well during Vietnam, and Maj Kellas remembered another 19-year-old Australian known as "Blackie", who often bantered with the Kiwis about their cricket and rugby skills.
"That guy was hard case. He said to me one day ‘you can’t play cricket, you can’t play rugby’.
"Anyway, s... hit the fan and the next we saw him he was being carried back on a stretcher - he was gone."
Maj Kellas said he had not been to any reunion with the Australian men he served with, but did have plans to eventually go to Australia to lay a poppy on Blackie’s grave.
"He was a character, a bloody character, but he was only 19 - [when I visit], I’ll finally get the last word.
"It’s closure for me - Blackie was gruff and by God he was brutal in rugby, but against others we stood together, that’s how Anzac is."
Maj Kellas had not been back to Vietnam and did not have any plans to return, despite having the opportunity to do so.
"I just thought, what is left and what would I see? The ants and the mosquitoes are still there, and the flies and the heat doesn’t change. Do I need that? I don’t think so, and it wouldn’t be closure."
On Vietnam Veterans Day tomorrow, Maj Kellas and other veterans will be having dinner, talking about how the grandchildren were and when they should put the potatoes in. They would not be sharing stories from the old days.
"No swapping war stories. Those days have been and gone, and the memories mean different things to different veterans."
Maj Kellas said it was hard to grasp the movement of time and comprehend how the Vietnam veterans were now considered the old ones.
There were about 25 Vietnam veterans left in Dunedin, and he had been to just as many funerals of ex-service members in the past year.
Nowadays, Maj Kellas spends his time supporting New Zealand’s war veterans to get people who need it back on their feet if they are not coping, no matter how many years have past.
Maj Kellas said he was once told that in Vietnam, your time was 99% was pure boredom and 1% was excitement.
"But when that 1% does happen, you desperately want that 99% back - boy, wasn’t that true."
