The story of how a gunner injured in the Battle of Long Tan in 1966 was mourned for more than two decades until it was discovered during a Vietnam veterans reunion that he was still alive is "extraordinary".

That story, and the 14-year search to locate him, was researched and brought to public attention by high-profile commentator Catherine McGregor and also brought her in contact with one of his fellow soldiers, Warrnambool Vietnam veteran Doug Heazlewood.

While the coronavirus pandemic has meant there will be no actual Anzac Day service at the memorial, Catherine has pre-recorded the message that she had planned to deliver in person. It will form part of the pre-recorded services that, in a first for the city, will be streamed online on the RSL Facebook page on Saturday morning.

Catherine and Doug have become firm friends since 2016 when Doug was organising the reunion to mark the 50^th anniversary of Long Tan.

It was to mark that anniversary that Catherine finally got to tell the story of one of Doug's fellow soldiers, Gunner Philip Norris, who the whole battery thought had died on that first night during the battle of Long Tan.

Norris had suffered a serious head injury in a random mortar attack on August 17, 1966 and was choppered out.

When the regiment went to check on him the next day, the message was that he would not make it.

"At that stage we had no hope that we'd ever see him again. In our minds he'd died of his wounds," Doug said.

His mates didn't forget about him and after the war, Norris was listed on the war memorial at Wacol in Queensland where the regiment camp was.

Soldiers returning from Vietnam were not embraced like their WWI and WWII counterparts, and it took about three decades for the members of the battery to get together for a reunion. They came from all over Australia for the unveiling of the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial. "It was just magic," Doug said.

But there was one name missing from the memorial, Gunner Norris.

When they went to have it corrected, they were told he hadn't died, but they were unable to find out what happened to him and where he was.

That was the start a 14-year search to track him down.

Eventually they found him in Sydney, at the same repatriation hospital he had been sent home from Vietnam to.

"He'd been there the whole time," Doug said.

"He hadn't been dead at all."

He said veterans from his battery were able to visit him and give him back the camaraderie that he had missed out on for so many years.

Doug said that before Norris died, they managed to reunite him with his daughter - who didn't know he existed - and the grandsons he didn't know he had.

Norris had left for Vietnam two weeks after marrying his sweetheart after a whirlwind romance.

"It's a very unusual story," Doug said.

Catherine, a former Australian infantry officer, transgender woman and journalist, researched and wrote about Norris in The Australian newspaper.

"It's an extraordinary story," she said.

Catherine served for about three decades in the Australian Army and was deployed on operations to East Timor three times.

She enlisted in 1974 and among the battalion she served, a third had been to the war in Vietnam.

Catherine said she was now regarded and an honorary member or "bit of a mascot" of Norris' 1st field regiment.

"I'm genuinely heartbroken I didn't get to Warrnambool," she said.

Catherine pre-recorded her Anzac Day message from the Vietnam monument in which she pays tribute to the Vietnam veterans who she noted were now the same age as the World War I veterans she watched march by when she attended her first Anzac Day as a kid.

"It took far too long for the country to recognise what an incredible force that was and fitting heirs to the ANZAC legend the Vietnam generation were," she said.

"They showed me and my generation of Australian soldiers what right looked like to be an Australian soldier."

In her speech, she also pays tribute to prominent Warrnambool soldier who was killed at the charge at The Nek serving with the 8^th Light Horse during the Gallipoli conflict .

Redford was a good rower and cricketer, and in 1916 they held a commemorative cricket match between the East Melbourne Cricket club and the local cricket club.

"Rowing was a big deal in Warrnambool at that time and the whole rowing club enlisted on the one day," she said.

"They paid respects to him as a cricketer with this match in the middle of the war."

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