"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. "Except that it really did actually happen. It really was the way that they told it."

It was November 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, when an international football tournament was held in Saigon. Eight nations would compete: New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, then South Vietnam and Australia.

Not 'Just A Football 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. "This wasn’t just a football tournament. There were other motives."

"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.

After 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.

It’s hard to imagine now, in the current era, with Australia competing in consecutive World Cups and Asian Cups. But in 1967, the Socceroos had never even qualified for a World Cup, let alone won an international trophy.

"This was before the Socceroos were even called the 'Socceroos,' " Ray says.

There was little time for the players to think about the potential dangers of sending civilians into a war zone.

"I think it was about a matter of weeks. We’re on the plane off to Vietnam. We didn’t have too many discussions about it," says Stan Ackerley, who represented Australia from 1965 to 1969. "These days, you would think twice about going. When you got a young family — well, we had one daughter at the time. My missus encouraged me to go. I was only a youngster, mid-20s. But being young and ambitious, all right, well, off we went to Vietnam."

"Probably a little bit naive that we were going to a country that was in the middle of war," Ray says. "But at no stage did I think that it was going to be dangerous."

"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.

'Hello, We Are In The Middle Of A War Zone'

"Well, the first, biggest shock we got was the amount of armed people we saw — soldiers, sentry points all over the place," Stan says.

"Bombers here, and fighter planes here, there and everywhere," Ray says. "You thought, 'Hello, we are in the middle of a war zone,' you know? And we got through the airport, and then into the bus to take us to the hotel and had a police escort all the way."

"You hear a fair bit of shooting going on," Stan continues. "It had taken a couple of days for us to, you know, get used to it."

"They went to this briefing at the embassy, and one of the things they were told was, 'Be careful of people riding on bikes because it might be someone who’s a threat, and they could mistake you for an American or a soldier and attack you and shoot you,' " Davidde says. "Which, you know, might seem like reasonable advice, except that these players, in this completely new surrounding, walk out of the Australian Embassy, and what do they see? Just a city filled with people riding around on bikes."

"You know, to be on the bus and whizzing around through the streets and avoiding all the motorbikes and the traffic of Saigon, and the poverty that was quite obvious around, and the number of people and whatever," Ray says, "when we got to the hotel, we had a lovely welcome from the Vietnamese people. The hotel was very basic."

Basic is one way to put it. The players discovered the proprietor of their hotel had stolen their food vouchers, leaving them with nothing but substitute ham. And Stan received an electric shock, thanks to exposed wires in his room.

Even the training pitch was questionable.

"The training field was a real quagmire at the best of times, so you couldn’t train there all the time because of the conditions and that," Ray says. "It was really a cow paddock. You know, quite often we’d train on the roof of the hotel, just to keep the body moving a little bit. We weren’t allowed to train on the main stadium."