Bob served in Vietnam as platoon commander with 8 RAR. After the army he became an academic. He talks of Vietnam and the Wandering Souls program.
Robert (Bob) Hall was born on 24 May 1947 in Edmonton, England. He graduated from the Royal Military College, Duntroon in 1968.
From 1969 to 1970, Bob served in the Vietnam War as an infantry platoon commander in the 8th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (8RAR). It was responsibility he would never forget.
Between 1971 and 1974, Bob served in the Pacific Islands Regiment in Port Moresby and Wewak.
After a long army career, Bob entered academic life. In 1991, he joined the staff of the University of New South Wales, Canberra as the Executive Director of the Australian Defence Studies Centre at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He was appointed a Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. This involved research into the combat effectiveness of Australian forces in the Vietnam War.
Bob's years of research and analysis led him to discover a way to give back to the people of Vietnam. In 2010, he started Operation Wandering Souls. The project aimed to discover the burial sites of the Vietnamese soldiers killed in action and to return personal documents and artefacts recovered from the battlefield.
Since 2010, Bob worked as a military historian while helping with the Australia's Vietnam War website. Throughout his career, he has published many texts to share our military history.
