Errors in the service records of a group of Vietnam veterans are quietly being fixed by the federal government following a six-year fight to have them corrected.
Retired lieutenant colonel David Brown has been battling with bureaucrats to have the Department of Veterans' Affairs' Nominal Roll corrected after discovering his service record and those of 29 other vets were wrong.
The veterans worked as army photographers and journalists, recording the actions of Aussie diggers in Vietnam so they could be relayed home and used in media reports about the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But the Nominal Roll listed the veterans as serving with Royal Australian Army Educational Corps (RAAEC), which was set up in 1949 and made up of civilian-qualified teachers.
Mr Brown has pushed for six years to get two letters - PR - attached to the RAAEC reference on the veterans' service records so the photographers and journalists are recognised for their public relations roles and distinguished from teachers who served with the corps.
A spokesman for Veterans Minister Dan Tehan says DVA has recently corrected 28 out of the 30 veterans' records.
However, Mr Brown, who was a journalist with the Canberra Times before joining the army, is still waiting for his record to be amended.
The 72-year-old, who retired from the army in 1986 and did two tours to Vietnam between 1968 and 1971, has written to Mr Tehan urging him to ensure the remaining records are corrected "without delay".
"I know of lot of people say, what's the difference? But it makes a lot of difference to us because it differentiates our role in Vietnam," Mr Brown told AAP.
"To the best of my knowledge no school teachers served in Vietnam and if they did, they certainly weren't operational like we were.
"Evidence of the work we did abounds at the Australian War Memorial in the form of tens of thousands of photographs that the photographers took of the Australian actions in Vietnam. All the black and white TV footage we shot, the scripts, and news stories filed by us for public release are there."
Mr Brown says his battle to get the records corrected has been long and frustrating, having had his initial requests rejected by DVA despite the army's history unit recognising two years ago that changes needed to be made.
The head of DVA's statistics and data integrity section Glen Yeomans also wrote to Mr Brown last October, acknowledging the error and saying the records would be amended "as soon as possible".
Mr Tehan says DVA began examining the service records after his office became aware of the issue in March 2016.
"Subsequently, DVA has been reviewing each individual record from Defence to establish attachment to the PR Corp, and 28 of the 30 records have been updated," he said.
"The remaining cases are under active review, this was undertaken to protect the integrity of the Nominal Roll."
