It’s September of 1967 and Barry Bermingham is having the time of his life.

He’s 19, working in the family supermarket business and living at home with his parents in Niddrie. At the weekends he catches up with friends and plays footy with Airport West, having played a couple of games with Collingwood Under-19s two years earlier. In all ways it is an entirely normal life for a 19-year-old.

Then the letter arrives. And that’s the moment when Barry Bermingham’s life turns upside down.

The letter was from the Federal Government’s Department of Labour and National Service. It said that his birthday had been randomly chosen in a ballot and that, as he would turn 20 in December later that year, he was being conscripted for National Service with the army, to serve in Vietnam.

Nearly 60 years later, Barry is still battling to deal with everything that followed from his receipt of that letter: the horrors of what he saw and experienced in Vietnam, the ‘cold shoulder’ he received upon returning to Australia, the breakdown of his marriage and the horrific impact on his children. But a return to Collingwood this ANZAC Day could prove to be an important step in his healing.

Barry was born just before Christmas in 1947 and grew up in Niddrie, where his father ran one of the first small supermarkets in the State. Despite the geographical hurdle, he was a mad Collingwood fan from day one, forming huge scrapbooks comprised of cuttings from newspapers like The Herald, The Sun and The Sporting Globe.

His secondary schooling took place at St Pat’s in Ballarat, and that’s where he learned to play football. Future Richmond great Barry Richardson was a member of the school team, and Magpie legend Des Tuddenham – a Ballarat boy – would often train on the school grounds. Those grounds were muddy and boggy, but ideally suited to a player like Barry, who was a hard-nosed rover who loved burrowing into packs and getting the ball. He was a good drop kick, handy with the torpedo and had a propensity for high-flying species like an early Jamie Elliott.

After his schooldays, Barry returned to the north-western suburbs: the family home, the family business, and footy with Airport West. And it was from there that Collingwood pinched him for some training sessions with the Under-19s in 1965, courtesy of an uncle who had put in a good word for him with the Club.

He was named on the U19s training list, and along with the others on the list was invited to a pre-season dinner in the clubrooms with Club President Tom Sherrin and the rest of the Committee (he still has the invitation letter). But Barry was too shy, and couldn’t bring himself to turn up!

Even so, he managed a couple of games with the Under-19s mid-season, against Essendon and Hawthorn, playing alongside senior players such as Gary Wallis, Doug Searl, Lee Adamson and Dennis Le Gassick. “To actually get to wear the jumper, and play under Ronnie Richards … for someone who grew up as a fan it was a great thing. They are happy memories,” he says today.

That team would actually go on to win the Premiership later that year, but Barry by that time had returned to Airport West.

Just two years later he was preparing for life as a soldier. Even now, he remembers the sense of bemusement he felt.

“I was just a young fella getting on with life,” he says. “I didn’t really know anything about Vietnam, or what was going on there. I hadn’t followed it, and suddenly I was going to be part of this fight I didn’t really understand.”

He did months of training before he even left Australia, firstly at Kapooka in NSW and then at Enoggera in Queensland (his footy prowess was such that he was airlifted back from Queensland to play in a training camp Grand Final at Kapooka, disembarking from a chopper in the middle of the ground on match day!).

In 1968, he boarded the aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney, known during this time as the “Vung Tau Ferry”, to be part of the 4RAR Battalion.

Barry arrived at Vung Tau, then to Nui Dat, and spent most of his 12-month tour of duty as a foot solider (colloquially known as ‘grunts’) in the jungles and scrub, never knowing what the next day would hold. He doesn’t like to dwell too much on his time there, but he remembers the humidity, the relentlessness, the smell of kerosene and being ‘on the go’ all the time. He says he wasn’t able to have a shower for almost that entire year. He remembers faulty equipment – machine guns jamming when confronted with Viet Cong opponents – and the desperate attempts to avoid napalm bombs.

He also remembers the way everyone did their best to work together. “It was actually similar to a football club,” he says. “You trained, you kept fit, you worked closely together, you did your best, you knew each other and you looked after each other. The men you served with … they were like a close family.”

Barry somehow managed to retain his interest in football. A photograph taken in 1968 at Nui Dat shows him and two colleagues reading a copy of Footy Week newspaper that the publishers sent to the troops each week.

Vietnam was an ordeal for anyone who served there. But for Barry, and many others, the real troubles didn’t make themselves evident until they were back in Australia. Unlike veterans from other wars, the Vietnam vets weren’t celebrated, or congratulated or even supported. “We were pretty much shunned,” Barry says. “After all we’d been through. It felt like we’d been used as guinea pigs and then they didn’t want to know us.”

Barry tried to make life as “normal’ as possible. He went to work at the newly opened Tullamarine Airport, got married (to a woman who had been in the Official Collingwood Cheer Squad!), and had four kids. But he knew he wasn’t right.

“Yeah I wasn’t good. I was a bit of a mess. A misery. I went through merry hell. It turns out I had PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) but nobody knew it back then. It caused great stress in the home. My marriage eventually broke down … it really wasn’t easy.”

The impact on his children was just as severe. One would later be diagnosed with her own case of PTSD and another with high-level anxiety. The youngest, Anthony, battled with bipolar disorder and eventually took his own life in 2015.

But Barry kept fighting. “I’m still here, still battling away,” he says defiantly. “I’ve learned to look after myself a lot better, got some of the help I needed, changed my life around. Just tried to make things better.”

He moved north, settling many years ago near Albury. He remarried. And despite their trials together he remains close to his children. All are still passionate Collingwood fans too.

And it is through the Magpies that Barry is hoping he might find some more avenues to healing. The RSL has arranged for him to be part of the motorcade before Saturday’s Anzac Day game, and he will be a guest of the Club in the lead-up to the big day.

“Coming back to Collingwood will mean so much to me,” he says. “And being part of the motorcade too. Things like that mean so much to the Vietnam vets who went through hell, then were often forgotten.”

Then he remembers the last time he received an invitation from Collingwood to attend a Club function, way back in 1965. “I knocked that one back but this time it’s different. It’s like I’ve come full circle, to get another invite and be back there again. It will mean the world to me.”