And Peter knew more about sliced bread than just about anyone in Echuca.
He had left school at 14 to work in the family’s High Street bakery, and his entire world revolved around kneading, baking, wrapping, selling, cleaning and preparing to do it all again the next day. Seven days a week.
For as many as 14 hours a day at times, leaving the teenager a singularly restricted social circle of mum, dad and customers.
No time for just hanging out, going to parties or even playing sport. It was eat, sleep and work the bakery.
“When I got called up in 1970, I thought it was brilliant,” Peter recalled.
“Suddenly I was meeting all these new people, making friends and having a great time,” he said.
“We knew there was Vietnam at the end of it, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, I was finding a whole new world – I ended up as best man at two weddings.”
Peter was conscripted as your garden variety private, the bread and butter of the military world.
Yet while the rest of the National Service recruits were chafing at the relentless crack of dawn starts, finding it a seismic shift, Peter saw it as a luxury.
He said when he first went into the barracks, he was awake and good to go anywhere between 3am and 4am, just as he was every day of his normal week.
“But I soon adjusted, it wasn’t long before I was such a heavy sleeper one night a bunch of blokes in my platoon picked me up, bed and all, and left me in the middle of the oval – I knew nothing about it until I woke up,” Peter laughed.
In the end, however, Peter was in the army, there was a war and in 1972 he was one of 129 troops in 7RAR headed for Vietnam.
“We ended up in Nui Dat and while one of my primary roles was liaison between our base and the hospital in Vung Tau, going backwards and forwards keeping tabs on the sick and wounded, I was also still one of the fighting force,” he said.
“Another of our key roles was providing an escort for the engineers, who were always blowing up the enemy’s tunnel systems, so I made five trips outside the wire to help with that.
“We would establish a perimeter so the engineers could work safely and once they blew the tunnels, we would all withdraw back into the base.”
Incredibly, Peter said they never came under attack while on patrol but being in Nui Dat was a different story.
It was a big target, and the Vietnamese artillery and mortars shelled it all the time.
Australia had begun withdrawing its troops from Vietnam as early as November, 1970, and after six months, Peter and his mates were also on their way home and discharged back to civvie street.
And the bakery.
“I only stuck at it for a few more years and then jumped at a job with the Moama Bowling Club – when I signed on, I was its fourth fulltime employee,” Peter explained.
“There was the secretary/manager, two barmen – I was one of those – and a greenskeeper,” he said.
“I was also one of the first members, and still am, and when I left that job 36 years later I was functions manager and the club had 120 people on the payroll – and I’ve bowled there for 60 years.”
Peter’s war was real, although the last Australians to be killed there had died the year before he arrived, in the Battle of Nui Le. He would also devote 40 years of service to Legacy.
Earlier this year his grandson Eden Thomson walked the Kokoda Trail as a Colin Sinclair scholar – an experience the two have discussed at some length.
But like all veterans, in Peter’s perfect world, no young people from any country would have to go through another war.
Which is why he says days such as Remembrance Day, or Anzac Day and Vietnam Veterans Day, are so important because they remind people of what war really means – and what it costs.
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