DAVID Carroll says he was proud to witness the revealing of his father's name on a war memorial in America after he tragically died in an accident during the Vietnam War.
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Private William Carroll, known as Bill, was the first Australian combat soldier to die in Vietnam after a grenade detonated on the truck he was on.
David, who was six months old at the time of his father's death, and his mother Lorraine, Bill's wife, joined a tour of the Warrnambool cemetery with Vietnam veteran and war historian Doug Heazlewood on Anzac Day.
In 2010 David travelled to America and was there when his father's name was unveiled on a memorial at Fort Benning, Georgia, along with 29 other Australian and 16 New Zealand soldiers.
"People don't realise they fought under the American flag," he said.
"It was the first time America has ever put a non-American on their war memorials. It's a completely different culture over there. People would come up to me and thank me for my father's service. A 10-year-old child came up and shook my hand."
Mrs Williamson, who remarried after her husband's tragic death, said she often wouldn't tell people how her husband had died, as the Vietnam War had been disregarded for many years after it finished.
"I used to say he died in an accident and people thought it was a car accident," she said.
"But it has got a lot better now, it is accepted."
David said it wasn't until he was in his mid-20s that his friends realised his father had died in the Vietnam War.
"No-one ever really knew," he said.
"I didn't know much about the war, only from the movies."
When Private Carroll died he was flown back to Melbourne and a funeral home drove him to Colac, where Warrnambool's Guyetts Funerals then picked him up.
"He was in a lead-lined coffin," Mrs Williamson said.
"It had to be sourced from America."
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