I used to think the Green Berets were the best jungle fighters in Vietnam. We ran special operations across the central highlands, trained indigenous forces in the art of unconventional warfare, carried the same suppressed weapons and encrypted radios that made us the elite of American special forces. People called us warriors and liberators, and I believed it until the day I watched an Australian SAS patrol move through the jungle near Newi Dat and realized we’d been learning jungle warfare wrong the entire time. The year
was 1967. I was a captain with the fifth special forces group assigned to a mobile strike force operating in Buuaktui province. We’d been running operations for 18 months, training Montenard strikers, setting up ambushes, and conducting what we called counter insurgency operations. We were good at it, too.
Our kill ratios were impressive. Our afteraction reports read like tactical textbooks, and we wore our green berets with the kind of pride that comes from knowing you’re operating at the tip of the spear in a war that demanded excellence or death. But excellence, I would learn, is a relative term. The assignment came through channels in March of that year.
command wanted us to conduct a joint operation with an Australian SAS squadron operating out of New Dat. The briefing was sparse. They told us the Australians were running reconnaissance patrols in our area of operations, that they’d been in country since ‘ 65, and that we’d be linking up for a week-long patrol to gather intelligence on enemy movement patterns along the Mautow Mountain Range.
What they didn’t tell us was that we were about to get an education in jungle warfare that would fundamentally change how we understood our own craft. We flew into Newat on a warm morning when the air already felt like breathing through wet canvas. The Australian base was smaller than ours, more compact, with fewer of the creature comforts we’d grown accustomed to at our forward operating bases.
There was a discipline to the place that felt different from American installations. Quieter, more focused, less chaos. The SAS men we were assigned to work with were waiting near the operations tent. Five of them. Not sixman teams like we ran, not eight like the LRPS preferred. Five. They wore faded jungle greens that had seen better days, bush hats instead of helmets and carried minimal gear.
No radio antennas visible, no obvious rank insignia, no name tapes. They looked like they’d been pulled from the jungle rather than assigned to patrol it. One of them, a sergeant with sunweathered skin and eyes that seemed to track everything at once, gave us a nod. No handshake, no introduction, just a nod and a gesture toward the treeine that meant we’d be moving soon. My team exchanged glances.
We were used to briefings, to detailed operations orders, to radio checks and equipment inspections before stepping off. The Australians seemed to have already moved past all of that in their minds as if the mission had started the moment they woke up and we were just catching up. We moved out an hour later.
My team consisted of six green berets, all experienced, all combat veterans with multiple tours. We’d trained at Fort Bragg, graduated from the special forces qualification course, and most of us had been through recondo school, or one of the specialized courses that taught long range reconnaissance. We knew how to move through jungle.
We’d done it a hundred times. But within the first hour of that patrol, I began to understand the difference between knowing how to do something and mastering it. The Australians move differently. Not faster, slower, much slower. They would take three steps, pause for 30 seconds, listening, then take another two steps.
They didn’t check their rear. They didn’t signal each other with hand gestures. They didn’t bunch up or spread out based on terrain. They simply moved as a single organism. Each man, perfectly aware of where the others were, without looking, without communicating, without any visible coordination at all. My point man, a staff sergeant named Ramirez, who’d been running patrols since ‘ 65, whispered to me during our first rest halt, “Sir, I can’t see them half the time.
They’re 20 ft ahead and I lose them in the bush. He wasn’t exaggerating. The Australians had this way of using shadow and vegetation that made them nearly invisible even when you knew exactly where they should be. They didn’t avoid obstacles. They became part of them. A fallen log wasn’t something to step over. It was something to move along using it as cover.
A patch of thick undergrowth wasn’t something to go around. It was something to slide through, parting the leaves without disturbing them in a way that left no trace. We stopped for a map check around midday. My team pulled out our compasses, checked our pace count, verified our grid coordinates. The Australian sergeant glanced at a tree at the angle of sunlight through the canopyat the slope of the ground beneath his feet and simply pointed in a direction that matched our azimuth exactly without pulling out any navigation aids at all.
When I asked him how he knew, he just said, “Been walking these mountains for 2 years. You learn to read them.” It wasn’t bravado. It was fact. These men had internalized the jungle in a way that went beyond map reading and land navigation courses. They understood terrain the way a sailor understands the sea, reading currents and patterns that were invisible to everyone else.
But the real revelation came that night when we set up our patrol base. My team began the routine we’d practiced dozens of times, setting out claymores, establishing radio contact with base, checking fields of fire, organizing our gear for quick access. We were efficient, professional, quiet, or so we thought.
The Australians watched us for a moment, then the sergeant walked over. Your radio, he said quietly. The squelch breaks every time you key it. Heard it from 50 m out. I looked at my RTO, a specialist who’d been handling comms for 6 months without issue. We’re using minimum power, I said. Burst transmissions encrypted. The sergeant nodded, still heard it.
So will they if they’re close enough. He walked back to where his team had set up their position. I noticed they had no visible radio. When I asked about it later, one of them showed me a message card tucked in a sealed pouch. “If we don’t come back, someone finds this,” he explained.
“If we do come back, we brief in person. No transmissions means no way to track us, no way to intercept us, no signature at all.” The philosophy was so different from ours, it took me a moment to process it. We were taught that communication was a lifeline, that maintaining contact with base meant help was always available if things went wrong.
The Australians had planned to not need help in the first place. They designed their entire patrol methodology around being invisible, self-sufficient, and so thoroughly integrated into the environment that rescue or extraction would never become necessary. Over the next 3 days, I watched them work. We encountered enemy activity twice.
Both times, my team spotted it first, and I felt a moment of pride. We’d seen the signs, the broken vegetation, the fresh footprints, the smell of cigarette smoke on the wind, but the Australians had spotted it 10 minutes earlier. They were already in position, hidden so completely that when the Vietkong patrol passed within 15 meters of us, they looked directly at where the Australians were concealed and saw nothing.
Not because the Australians were behind cover, but because they’d become part of the landscape itself. One of the SAS men was lying under a fallen palm frond that he’d carefully arranged over himself, not hidden behind it, under it. He dug out a shallow depression in the soft earth, covered himself with the frond, and then scattered loose dirt and dead leaves across it until he looked like nothing more than part of the forest floor.
His face was painted with mud, not camouflage paint. His eyes barely moved. His breathing was so controlled I couldn’t see his chest rise and fall even though I was less than 10 ft away. After the enemy patrol passed, he simply stood up, brushed off the debris, and continued moving as if lying perfectly still for 30 minutes while enemy soldiers walked overhead was the most natural thing in the world.
No adrenaline, no visible relief, just calm, practiced discipline. That night, during another patrol base halt, I sat with the Australian sergeant. His name was McKenzie from Perth, a veteran of the Borneo campaign during confrontation, who’d been operating in Southeast Asia since 1964. I asked him how they’d learned to move like this, how they’d develop techniques that seemed so far beyond what we were teaching in our schools.
Borneo, he said simply, we spent three years there running patrols against the Indonesians, crossborder operations, deep reconnaissance, sometimes 60 days in the bush without resupply. You learn fast when there’s no artillery support, no air cover, and the only thing keeping you alive is not being seen in the first place.
He explained that the British SAS had learned these lessons in Malaya, fighting communist insurgents in the 50s. The Australians had adopted those methods, refined them in Borneo, and brought them to Vietnam with a level of institutional knowledge that went back nearly 20 years of continuous jungle warfare experience. The thing Americans don’t understand, McKenzie continued, is that in this kind of war, movement itself is a weapon.
If you move fast, you make noise. If you make noise, they find you. If they find you, you fight. If you fight, you take casualties. So, we don’t fight unless we have no choice. We move so slowly and so carefully that we gather the intelligence we need and leave before anyone knows we were there. No contact means no casualties. No casualties meanswe can do it again tomorrow.
It was a completely different philosophy from what we’d been taught. American doctrine emphasized speed, overwhelming firepower, and aggressive patrolling. We were trained to make contact with the enemy, fix them in place, and call in artillery or air support to destroy them.
The Australians were trained to avoid contact entirely, to observe and report rather than engage, to treat combat as a failure of tactics rather than an opportunity to demonstrate prowess. On the fourth day, we encountered a supply cache, a small one, maybe 20 cases of ammunition and some bags of rice hidden under camouflage netting near a creek bed.
My first instinct was to destroy it. Deny the enemy resources. The Australians had a different idea. Leave it, McKenzie said. But map it. If we destroy it, they know we’ve been here. If we leave it, we can come back tomorrow and watch who uses it, learn their patterns, track where they’re moving.
One cash tells you where they’re storing supplies. Watching them use it tells you their entire logistics network. It was brilliant in its simplicity. Instead of a single tactical victory, they were thinking strategically, using one piece of intelligence to build a larger operational picture. I radioed back to my command and explained the situation.
They understood eventually, but the hesitation in the response told me this wasn’t how we normally operated. We were focused on body counts and destroyed enemy positions. The Australians were focused on understanding the enemy well enough to make them irrelevant. The patrol ended on the seventh day. We’d covered maybe 30 kilometers, moved through some of the densest jungle I’d ever seen, encountered the enemy three times, and returned without firing a shot. My team was exhausted.
The Australians looked like they just finished a morning jog. The difference wasn’t physical conditioning, though they were certainly fit. The difference was that they’d expended energy efficiently, moving deliberately, resting frequently, never rushing, never wasting motion on anything that didn’t serve the mission.
Back at Nui Dat, I debriefed with their squadron commander, a major named Beasley. He explained that the SAS had been providing instructors to the American Recondo School since late ‘ 66, teaching long range reconnaissance techniques at the Ma CV facility in Naha Trang. He also mentioned that Australian advisers were working with US special forces units across Vietnam, training them in the jungle warfare methods developed during Malaya and Borneo.
The problem, Beasley said carefully, is that American doctrine treats the jungle as an obstacle to overcome. You push through it. You dominate it with firepower and technology. That works in some situations, but in Vietnam, the jungle is the battlefield. You can’t dominate it. You have to become part of it. He was right, and I knew it.
We’d been fighting the jungle instead of using it. We’d been trying to impose our will on an environment that required adaptation, not domination. The Australians had figured that out years earlier, and they’d refined their techniques to the point where they’d achieved something close to perfection in their craft.
After that patrol, I requested permission to send members of my team to observe SAS operations more extensively. Some of that request was approved. Over the following months, several Green Berets rotated through Australian units, learning their methods, studying their techniques, trying to understand what made them so effective.
The lessons filtered back slowly, but they did filter back. We started moving slower on patrols. We reduced our radio transmissions. We spent more time observing and less time engaging. Our casualty rates dropped. Our intelligence gathering improved. We became better at what we did because we’d learned from people who’d mastered it first.
But the institutional change was harder. The American military in Vietnam was built around different assumptions. We had the resources, the technology, the firepower to prosecute the war in a way that emphasized American strengths. Slower, quieter, more patient methods didn’t fit well with those assumptions, even when they were demonstrabably more effective at the tactical level.
So the lessons we learned from the Australians were absorbed by individual soldiers and small units, but they never fully transformed how American special forces operated in Vietnam. The Australian contribution to training American forces extended beyond individual patrols and joint operations. By 1967, the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam had established a significant presence throughout the country.
These advisers, handpicked for their expertise in jungle warfare, worked directly with US units and South Vietnamese forces, providing instruction and tactics that emphasized patience, discipline, and thorough understanding of the environment. The MOCV Recondo School, which operated from July 1966until December 1970, graduated over 3,300 men during its existence.
Australian instructors were part of that program from early on, bringing techniques refined through years of jungle warfare experience in Malaya and Borneo. The school taught reconnaissance and commando skills to American soldiers and Allied forces with Australians contributing expertise in long range patrolling, silent movement, and survival techniques that had proven effective in Southeast Asian jungles.
Later, as American and Australian forces prepared to withdraw from Vietnam, the Australians established a jungle warfare training center first at Nui Dat, then relocated to Vankeep in Puaktui province. This facility trained South Vietnamese forces in counterinsurgency tactics, attempting to transfer the hard one knowledge of jungle warfare to troops who would continue fighting after Western forces departed.
Australian advisers worked at this center through 1972, maintaining their commitment to training even as combat operations wound down. The methods the Australians taught weren’t complicated, but they required discipline and patience that didn’t come naturally to forces trained in Western military traditions. Move slowly. Observe carefully.
Avoid unnecessary engagement. Use the jungle as concealment rather than treat it as an obstacle. Minimize noise. Minimize equipment. Minimize your presence until the moment action becomes absolutely necessary. These principles were simple to state but difficult to master. Requiring hundreds of hours of practice to become second nature, the Australian SAS maintained an impressive operational record in Vietnam.
Between 1966 and 1971, they conducted over 1,400 patrols, killed more than 600 enemy soldiers, and maintained the highest kill ratio of any Australian unit in the war. But perhaps more importantly, they did this with remarkably low casualties. Only six SAS soldiers died during their service in Vietnam.
Four from accidents, one from wounds, and one missing in action. 28 were wounded. For a unit that spent six years operating in some of the most dangerous territory in the war, these numbers speak to the effectiveness of their tactics. The North Vietnamese and Vietkong learned to fear Australian patrols.
They called them phantoms of the jungle, a nickname that reflected the supernatural quality of their movements. Enemy units operating in Fuaktui province knew that Australian forces were active in the area, but they struggled to detect them, engage them, or predict their patterns. The Australians emphasis on stealth and observation meant that enemy forces often never knew they’d been watched until operations based on that intelligence resulted in their positions being overrun or their supply lines being cut.
This fear wasn’t built on brutality or overwhelming firepower. It was built on competence, on the psychological impact of facing an enemy that could appear and disappear without warning, that knew your movements before you made them, that watched and waited and struck only when victory was certain. The Australians proved that in jungle warfare, the ability to remain unseen was often more valuable than the ability to bring massive force to bear.
American special forces absorb these lessons unevenly. Some units embraced the Australian methods enthusiastically, recognizing their value and adapting their own tactics accordingly. Others remained committed to American doctrine, trusting in superior technology and firepower to overcome tactical disadvantages.
The result was a patchwork of approaches across different special forces groups with some teams operating more like the Australians while others maintained traditional American methods. Individual soldiers who trained with the Australians often became advocates for their techniques. Green berets who’d observed SIS patrols returned to their units with stories of men who could move through jungle without disturbing a leaf who could remain motionless for hours while enemy soldiers passed within arms reach, who navigated without compasses
and communicated without radios. These stories spread, creating a mythology around Australian capabilities that sometimes bordered on exaggeration, but was fundamentally rooted in real observation of real excellence. The cultural differences between American and Australian forces played a role in how these lessons were transmitted.
Australian military culture emphasized understatement and professionalism over showmanship. Their soldiers didn’t advertise their capabilities or seek recognition for their achievements. They simply did the job, did it well, and moved on to the next mission. This humility made them effective teachers because they focused on practical results rather than personal glory.
American military culture shaped by different historical experiences and institutional values sometimes struggled to absorb this approach. We were trained to be aggressive, to take initiative, todominate battlefields through force and determination. These qualities served us well in many contexts, but in the jungle environment of Vietnam, they sometimes worked against us.
Learning to value patience over aggression, observation over action required a fundamental shift in mindset that didn’t come easily to forces trained in a different tradition. The Australian contribution extended beyond tactical training to broader strategic thinking about how to fight counterinsurgency wars. Their experience in Malayaia had taught them that military operations needed to be integrated with political and social objectives.
That winning battles meant nothing if you didn’t win the support of the local population. In Vietnam, Australian forces emphasized civic action programs, medical assistance to villages, and careful treatment of civilians, understanding that these efforts were as important as combat operations in determining the war’s outcome.
This approach wasn’t unique to the Australians. American forces conducted similar programs, but the Australians integrated it more thoroughly into their operational philosophy. They saw every patrol, every contact with local populations, every interaction with South Vietnamese forces as part of a larger effort to build legitimacy for the government we were supporting.
Combat operations were one tool among many, not the primary measure of success. The lessons the Australians offered went unheeded at higher levels of American command. General West Morland and other senior officers were committed to a strategy of attrition. believing that American firepower could inflict unsustainable casualties on enemy forces and compel them to negotiate.
This strategy required aggressive patrolling, frequent contact, and high body counts as measures of success. The Australian approach, which emphasized avoiding contact and gathering intelligence, didn’t fit well within this framework, even though it was demonstrably more effective at the tactical and operational levels. The disconnect between what worked at the tactical level and what was rewarded at the strategic level created frustration for many special forces soldiers who trained with the Australians.
We could see that their methods reduced casualties, improved intelligence gathering, and created sustained pressure on enemy forces without requiring the kind of set peace battles that often resulted in heavy losses on both sides. But the metrics used to evaluate success, body counts primarily, didn’t capture the value of what the Australians were doing.
A patrol that observed enemy movements for a week, gathered detailed intelligence, and returned without firing a shot looked like failure in a system that rewarded confirmed kills above all else. This created a strange dynamic where individual units would adopt Australian methods because they worked. They kept soldiers alive and accomplished missions but would struggle to justify those methods in afteraction reports because they didn’t produce the quantifiable results that higher command wanted to see. Some units solved this by
conducting hybrid operations using Australianstyle reconnaissance to identify targets and then calling in Americanstyle firepower to destroy them. This worked reasonably well, combining the strengths of both approaches, but it still represented a compromise rather than a full adoption of the patient intelligence focused methodology that made the Australians so effective.
The cultural barriers went deeper than doctrine. American forces were trained to solve problems quickly and decisively. We valued initiative, aggression, and rapid response. The Australian approach required comfort with ambiguity, with spending days observing without acting, with gathering information that might not be immediately useful, but that built a comprehensive understanding of enemy patterns over time.
This mindset shift was harder than learning specific techniques. You could teach an American soldier to move more quietly in a few weeks. Teaching him to be comfortable with patient observation, with letting targets pass without engaging them, with trusting that intelligence gathered today might enable a more decisive operation weeks from now that required a fundamental change in how he thought about his role as a soldier.
Some Americans adapted naturally. men who’d grown up hunting, who understood stalking prey and waiting for the perfect shot, who were comfortable spending hours in the woods without moving. These soldiers often took to Australian methods quickly. Others, especially those from urban backgrounds, who’d been trained to think of combat as immediate and kinetic, struggled with the patience required.
The Australians didn’t judge this. They simply recognized that different soldiers had different strengths and that their methods worked best for people with certain temperaments and backgrounds. The equipment differences between American and Australian forces reflecteddeeper philosophical divides. American special forces carried substantial gear, 60 to 70 pounds per man, including multiple radios, extra ammunition, demolitions equipment, medical supplies, and backup systems for every critical function. This gave us capability and
redundancy, but it also made us heavier, slower, more dependent on resupply and extraction. The Australians carried 40 to 50 pounds, sometimes less, with minimal redundancy and almost no luxury items. They believed that the best backup system was thorough planning and excellent execution.
that if you moved carefully enough and observed thoroughly enough, you wouldn’t need backup systems because you’d never put yourself in situations where primary systems failed. The Australian approach to ammunition was particularly instructive. They carried less ammunition than American forces, reasoning that if they got into firefights, requiring large amounts of ammunition, they’d already failed in their primary mission of remaining undetected.
They trained extensively in marksmanship, ensuring that when they did fire, each shot counted. American doctrine emphasized suppressive fire, laying down large volumes of fire to keep enemy heads down while maneuvering. The Australians emphasized precise fire, individual aimed shots at identified targets.
Both approaches worked in their respective contexts, but they required different loadouts, different training, different tactical thinking. Water discipline was another area where Australian expertise proved valuable. They developed techniques for operating in tropical environments with minimal water resupply, teaching soldiers to recognize signs of dehydration early to ration water effectively to identify safe water sources in the jungle.
American forces often operated with the assumption that resupply would be available regularly, carrying less water per man, but planning for frequent resupply drops. This worked when helicopters were available, but in remote areas where enemy air defenses made resupply dangerous, Australian methods proved more sustainable.
The Australians also taught different approaches to dealing with leeches, mosquitoes, and other jungle hazards. Rather than relying heavily on insect repellent, which left a scent that could be detected, they used protective clothing techniques, movement strategies that avoided the worst infested areas, and personal discipline in checking for parasites regularly.
They accepted that operating in the jungle meant dealing with its inhabitants, that trying to create a sterile American environment in the middle of Southeast Asian rainforest was both impossible and counterproductive. This acceptance of environmental reality rather than resistance to it characterized much of their approach. After I returned to the United States in 1968, I spent time at Fort Bragg working with the special forces training program.
I tried to incorporate some of what I’d learned from the Australians into our curriculum, emphasizing movement discipline, environmental awareness, and patience in reconnaissance operations. Some of these lessons stuck, others were quickly lost as new instructors arrived who hadn’t experienced what the Australians could do and who fell back on familiar American methods.
The challenge was that teaching these skills required instructors who truly understood them, who’d internalize them through practical experience rather than learn them from manuals. You couldn’t teach someone to move like an Australian SAS soldier by showing them a PowerPoint presentation or having them read a field manual.
You had to take them into the woods, make them practice for hundreds of hours, correct tiny errors in posture and movement, build muscle memory and environmental awareness through repetition and feedback. That kind of instruction was timeintensive and required instructors with genuine expertise which was always in short supply.
Some units solved this by bringing in Australian advisers directly. Small teams of SAS soldiers would rotate through American bases, conducting short courses and providing demonstrations. These exchanges were valuable but limited. You can learn a lot in a two-week course, but you can’t develop the kind of deep proficiency that comes from months or years of practice.
The Australians understood this limitation and focus their teaching on fundamental principles rather than advanced techniques, knowing that American soldiers would need to develop proficiency through their own practice rather than through abbreviated instruction. The institutional memory problem plagued both forces.
Soldiers rotated through Vietnam on 12 or 13-month tours, just long enough to gain experience, but not long enough to develop true expertise. The Australians partly addressed this by having some soldiers serve multiple tours, building a cadre of veterans who could pass knowledge to newer arrivals. American forces struggled more with this as individual soldiers would gainexpertise in Vietnam only to rotate back to the United States where that expertise often went unused or was lost as they moved to new assignments. Some
Green Berets who’d learned from the Australians ended up in training positions where they could pass on what they’d learned. But many others found themselves in roles where their hard one jungle warfare expertise simply atrophied. The specific techniques the Australians excelled at were numerous and varied.
Their tracking skills were particularly impressive. They could follow trails that were invisible to American eyes, reading disturbed vegetation, crushed grass, displaced soil, broken spiderw webs, anything that indicated human passage. They taught that tracking wasn’t about finding obvious footprints, but about recognizing subtle disturbances in the natural environment, understanding what the jungle should look like when undisturbed, and noticing tiny deviations from that baseline.
Their ambush techniques were equally sophisticated. Rather than setting up in obvious positions along trails, they’d identify locations where terrain naturally channeled enemy movement where a small force could engage effectively while maintaining multiple escape routes. They planned ambushes not just for the initial engagement, but for the entire sequence of actions, including breaking contact and evading pursuit.
American ambushes often focused heavily on the violence of action. The initial burst of fire that would devastate an enemy force. Australian ambushes were designed with equal attention to what happened after that initial burst. How to disappear before enemy reinforcements could arrive.
How to leave no trail that could be followed. How to be miles away before anyone realized who’d hit them. Their medical training emphasized self-sufficiency in ways that complemented their operational philosophy. Australian SAS soldiers were trained to handle serious injuries with minimal equipment using improvised materials and techniques that didn’t require resupply.
They understood that requesting medical evacuation meant revealing their position, potentially compromising their mission and possibly losing men to enemy action during the extraction. So they trained to stabilize casualties and continue operating, getting men to safety under their own power whenever possible.
This wasn’t recklessness, but calculated riskmanagement, recognizing that in their operating environment, calling for help could be more dangerous than handling problems internally. The psychological aspect of their training was equally important. Australian soldiers were selected partly for their ability to remain calm under stress, to function effectively when isolated and under constant threat, to make sound decisions without the support structure that most soldiers took for granted.
The selection process for SAS was notoriously difficult with pass rates sometimes below 20%. And it was designed to identify men who could handle the specific stresses of long range reconnaissance. Once selected, soldiers underwent extensive training that built confidence through realistic scenarios and honest assessment of performance.
American special forces selection was also rigorous but it emphasized different qualities. We looked for physical toughness, language aptitude, teaching ability, cultural sensitivity, all essential for the unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense missions that defined much of Green Beret work. Some of those qualities overlapped with what the Australians valued, but the specific focus on patient reconnaissance and independent operation without support wasn’t as central to American selection criteria. This meant that
while American special forces soldiers were highly capable, they weren’t always suited temperamentally for the kind of operations that Australian SAS excelled at. The relationship between Australian SAS and Green Beretss was generally excellent at the individual level. Soldiers recognized and respected each other’s professionalism, understood that different missions required different capabilities, and were eager to learn from each other.
There was none of the competitive tension that sometimes characterized relations between different American special operations units. The Australians had no need to prove themselves. They’d already established their reputation through operational success. The Americans had nothing to prove either.
Our capabilities were well demonstrated in other domains. This mutual respect created an environment where learning could happen without ego getting in the way. Some of the most valuable exchanges happened informally during downtime at bases where both forces operated. Australian soldiers would talk about techniques they’d used, problems they’d encountered, solutions they’d developed.
American soldiers would share their own experiences, discuss technological capabilities the Australians didn’t have, explore how different approachesmight complement each other. These informal discussions often led to hybrid tactics that combined the best of both traditions, Australian movement and observation techniques with American communications and fire support capabilities.
The artillery coordination skills that American forces possessed impressed the Australians who operated with minimal artillery support and were fascinated by how quickly we could bring accurate fire on target. We used sophisticated fire support coordination procedures, pre-planned targets, immediate suppression capabilities that gave American infantry tremendous asymmetric advantage.
The Australians recognized this as a force multiplier they couldn’t match given Australia’s smaller military infrastructure and some adapted their tactics to take advantage of American artillery support when operating in joint missions. Similarly, American helicopter capabilities far exceeded what the Australians had available. Our ability to insert and extract forces anywhere in the operational area to provide aerial fire support on call to resupply remote positions gave us operational flexibility that the Australians couldn’t replicate. They
learned to work within these capabilities when cooperating with American forces, using them to extend the range and sustainability of their patrols while maintaining their core emphasis on stealth and observation. The legacy of Australian training continued after Vietnam ended. The techniques they taught, the philosophy they embodied influenced how American special forces approached jungle warfare in subsequent conflicts.
When special forces deployed to Central and South America in the 1980s and 90s, many of the lessons learned from Australian advisers in Vietnam resurfaced. movement, discipline, environmental integration, patient observation. These principles became part of the institutional knowledge of American special operations, even if their Australian origins were sometimes forgotten.
Looking back across more than five decades, I recognized that patrol with the Australian SAS as one of the most important experiences of my military career. It taught me humility. First of all, I’d believed we were the best at what we did. That American special forces represented the pinnacle of military capability. The Australians showed me that excellence isn’t about resources or technology or even training intensity.
It’s about mastery of fundamentals. About discipline maintained over thousands of hours in the field. about cultural transmission of hard one knowledge from one generation of soldiers to the next. It also taught me that different military traditions have different strengths and that learning from allies requires genuine openness to the possibility that they might do some things better than you do.
That’s not always easy, especially in a military culture that prides itself on being the best. But it’s essential if you want to actually improve rather than just maintain comfortable assumptions. The Australians never claimed to be teaching us anything revolutionary. They were just showing us how they operated, sharing techniques they’d developed through years of experience, offering lessons they’d learned the hard way in jungles from Malaya to Borneo to Vietnam.
They weren’t trying to prove they were better than us. They were just trying to keep more soldiers alive by passing on knowledge that worked. Years later, I learned that the feeling was mutual. Australian soldiers who worked with American forces came away impressed by our logistics capabilities, our ability to bring overwhelming firepower to bear when needed, our technological sophistication.
They recognized that we had strengths they lacked, that we could accomplish missions they couldn’t because we had resources and capabilities they didn’t possess. The relationship was complimentary with each force learning from the others strengths. But in that specific domain of jungle reconnaissance, of moving silently through hostile territory to gather intelligence without being detected, the Australians were simply better.
They’d spent more time doing it, had refined their techniques over decades, had built an institutional culture around excellence in that specific mission set, and they were generous enough to share what they knew with allies who needed those skills. The SAS soldiers I patrolled with that week in 1967 are old men now, if they’re still alive.
McKenzie would be in his 80s. The others scattered across Australia, some still connected to military service in some capacity, others long since returned to civilian life. I wonder sometimes if they remember that patrol, if it stood out to them as anything unusual. Probably not. For them, it was just another mission, another week in the jungle with a group of Americans who needed to learn what they’d spent years perfecting. But I remember it.
I remember watching them move like shadows, watching them disappear into jungle that should have provided noconcealment, watching them demonstrate that true mastery of a craft looks effortless precisely because of how much discipline and practice it requires. I remember feeling humbled and educated and grateful all at once, recognizing that I’d been given a gift of knowledge that might someday save lives.
In the end, that’s what the Australian SAS offered American forces in Vietnam. Not just tactical techniques or specific skills, but a different way of thinking about jungle warfare itself. They taught us that sometimes the best way to win isn’t to fight harder, but to fight smarter. That patience is a form of aggression.
That invisibility is a weapon. That mastery comes from discipline, not dramatics. Some of us learned those lessons, some didn’t. But for those who did, for the Green Berets and reconnaissance soldiers who took the time to watch and learn from Australian expertise, the impact was profound and lasting.
We became better at what we did because they showed us what excellence looked like when it had been refined through decades of practical experience in exactly the kind of warfare we were being asked to conduct. The Australian SAS didn’t try to teach the Green Beretss how to survive in Vietnam. They just showed us how they survived.
And in watching them, in patrolling alongside them, in seeing what discipline and patience and environmental mastery could accomplish, we learned lessons that changed how we understood our own craft. That’s the best kind of teaching. The kind that doesn’t announce itself as instruction, but simply demonstrates excellence and allows observers to learn from what they see.
I’ve trained soldiers myself since then, passed on what I learned in Vietnam to younger generations who never experienced that war. And when I teach movement discipline, when I emphasize patience in reconnaissance, when I talk about becoming part of the environment rather than moving through it, I’m teaching lessons the Australians taught me in the jungle near New7.
They showed us that we’d been doing it wrong. Not completely wrong, not catastrophically wrong, but wrong enough that learning their methods made us significantly better at staying alive and accomplishing our missions. That’s the gift they gave us. The knowledge that there was another way, a better way, a way refined through years of experience that we could adopt if we were willing to learn.
Some wars are remembered for battles, some for strategies, some for political consequences. Vietnam is remembered for many things, most of them painful. But in that complicated history, in that long and costly war, there were moments of genuine professional excellence, moments when soldiers from different nations shared expertise and made each other better.
My week with the Australian SAS was one of those moments, a brief intersection of different military traditions that left me changed and improved as a soldier. I still think the Green Beretss are among the best special forces units in the world. But I know now that being the best doesn’t mean you can’t learn from others. And I know that the Australian SAS, those quiet professionals who move through the Vietnam jungle like ghosts, had mastered aspects of jungle warfare that we were still learning.
They tried to teach us in their understated way and some of us were smart enough to pay attention.
