In late 2001, a small group of Australian soldiers landed at a dusty airfield outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. They were members of one squadron, Special Air Service Regiment. About 90 operators in total, no fanfare, no press conferences, just a handful of bearded men in tan fatigues, stepping off a transport plane into the most dangerous country on Earth.

The Americans running the base barely noticed them. Inside the main US command center, someone had marked the Australian positions on the operations map, not with a proper military symbol, with a picture of Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter. That was how the most powerful military on Earth welcomed one of the most lethal special forces units ever fielded.

And within months, those same American commanders would be saying something very different about the men they had marked with a joke. To understand why the Americans underestimated the Australians, you have to understand what the US military knew about them at the time, which was almost nothing.

The Australian SAS had been formed in 1957, modeled on the British Bur Special Air Service. Same motto, who dares wins. Same philosophy of small team operations deep behind enemy lines. But unlike the British SAS, whose exploits in World War II and the Iranian embassy siege had made them famous worldwide, the Australians had built their reputation in a war most Americans had tried to forget, Vietnam.

If you have been enjoying these kinds of stories, consider liking the video and subscribing. And seriously, thank you for helping this channel reach 1,000 subscribers. Between 1966 and 1971, Australian SAS squadrons rotated through the jungles of Fuaktui province. They operated in tiny patrols of four to six men.

They move slower than any other unit in the country, creeping through triple canopy jungle for days without making a sound. And when they made contact with the enemy, they unleashed a volume of fire designed to make the Viaong believe they were facing a much larger force. The results were staggering. Across 1,200 combat patrols, the Australian SAS killed over 500 enemy enemy fighters.

Their own losses in action, one killed, one. The Via gave them a name, Marang. Phantoms of the jungle. The irony is that the Americans already had a direct connection to this legacy. During Vietnam, Australian SAS operators provided instructors to the US Army’s long range reconnaissance patrol school. They were literally teaching Americans how to operate in small teams behind enemy lines.

But by 2001, that institutional memory had faded. The generation of American soldiers who remembered the Australians had long since retired. So when the SAS arrived at forward operating base Rhino southwest of Kandahar, the first coalition foothold inside Afghanistan, the Americans treated them like a curiosity.

One Australian SAS sergeant named Matthew Builo later reflected on those early days. He described the Australian contingent as a gypsy army. They would attach themselves to any unit that had work for them. US Marines from Task Force 58 were running things in southern Afghanistan and the Australians joined their vehicle mounted patrols across hundreds of kilometers of open desert around Kandahar and into the Helman Valley.

The Americans used them, but they did not trust them. Not yet. According to the former intelligence chief of the Australian SAS task force, a man identified only as Adam for security reasons, the Americans simply could not comprehend that the Australians had the ability to go into areas for protracted periods to conduct strategic reconnaissance.

The American approach to special operations was fundamentally different. Go in for a day or two, do your business, get out. The SAS way was the opposite. Walk in silently, establish a position on a mountaintop or a ridgeel line. [snorts] Stay there for a week, watch, listen, report, and if the moment came, reach out with a precision rifle from over 1 kilometer away and put a bullet exactly where it needed to go.

The opportunities for the SAS to prove themselves were so limited in those early months that the Australian contingent was actually packing up to leave just four months into the deployment. They felt wasted, underutilized, frustrated. Then came operation Anaconda and everything changed. In late February 2002, US intelligence identified a large concentration of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters gathering in the Shahai Cop Valley, a remote mountain stronghold in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. The Mujahedin had used this

valley to defeat the Soviet army twice. The enemy knew the terrain intimately. They had dug trench systems into the ridgeel lines, built bunkers and firing positions into the mountain sides, and cached weapons in caves throughout the area. The plan was massive. Nearly 1,700 US troops from the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne, plus 1,000 Afghan militia fighters would assault the valley in a hammer and anvil operation.

Air power would soften the enemy positions before the ground forces went in. The Australian SAS were given a supporting role, blocking forces, screening possible escape routes. It was the kind of assignment you give to a unit you do not fully trust with the main effort. An Australian SAS officer had actually pushed hard for a more significant role.

The disagreement got heated. A near shouting match erupted between the Australian and an American special forces major named Jimmy over the issue. The Australians knew they could do more. The Americans were not convinced, but before the main operation kicked off, something happened that would change the dynamic permanently. An SAS patrol had been inserted onto a mountain overlooking the Shy Cot Valley 10 days before the assault was scheduled to begin.

Six men in freezing conditions on a snow-covered ridge. Some of them were from Queensland and had never seen snow before in their lives. The novelty, as one of them later said, wore off after about 5 minutes. From their position, the Australians observed al-Qaeda fighters below performing training exercises in the valley. They reported what they saw back to the US command.

The Americans were already planning Anaconda and did not take kindly to the Australians probing that area without authorization. Then the operation launched and it went wrong almost immediately. The pre-planned air bombardment, which was supposed to involve a full 55 minutes of carpet bombing by B52 aircraft across every known enemy position, failed catastrophically.

According to the Australian liaison officer Clint Palmer, only one B1 bomber arrived. It dropped six bombs along a humpback ridge line. That was it. The enemy positions were barely touched. When the United States ground forces flew into the valley by helicopter, they landed directly into prepared kill zones. The al-Qaeda fighters had survived the bombing and were waiting.

Mortar rounds and rocket propelled grenades rain down on the landing zones. United States troops took casualties immediately. One group of 82 United States Army Rangers from the 75th Ranger Regiment was dropped by helicopter into one of the hottest parts of the valley. Their helicopter was hit. They were stranded on the valley floor, surrounded by al-Qaeda fighters firing from the high ground with heavy machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, and sniper rifles.

For the next 18 hours, they were under constant fire. Up on the mountain, the six-man Australian SAS patrol watched the disaster unfold below them. There was a critical problem. In the chaos of the initial contact, many of the American troops had dropped their packs, including their radios, to run for cover.

Communications with the command headquarters at Bram Air Base, over 100 km away, were fragmenting, but the Australian communication specialist, Signalman Martin Wallace, had not dropped his pack. He later explained that his position did not require him to run as far for cover, so he kept his radio. That decision may have saved dozens of American lives.

Wallace’s radio became the primary communications link between the men trapped in the valley and General Hagen Beck’s command post at Bagram. He could talk them through what was actually happening on the ground in real time, giving headquarters a clear picture of the fight that they could not get from anywhere else.

The SAS patrol then did what they had trained to do for decades. They provided sniper overwatch from their mountain position, engaging al-Qaeda fighters who were attempting to advance on the stranded Americans. And they began calling in air strikes, precise air strikes, guided by men lying in the snow on a mountain ridge with binoculars and laser designators, directing bombs onto enemy positions with surgical accuracy.

Up to 300 al-Qaeda fighters were estimated to have been killed by the air strikes. The Australians coordinated. The 24 stranded Rangers survived. The battered force was eventually extracted after midnight. Two embedded Australian soldiers were among the last to leave the battlefield. SAS radio operator Jock Wallace later received the medal for gallantry.

When the Australians finally made it back to the coalition base, something remarkable happened. One of the SAS patrol members, identified only as John for security reasons, described the scene. He said it was almost embarrassing. Everywhere the Australians went on base, the Americans stepped aside. They applauded. They pushed the Australians to the front of the meal line ahead of a hundred or more American soldiers who were already queued up.

The Australians looking wild and woolly after days on a frozen mountain were taken aback. Lieutenant General Frank Hagenbeck, the overall coalition commander in Afghanistan, put it plainly. He said the Australian SAS displayed those kinds of things that make them the elite in his view of small unit infantry men throughout the world.

He said their autonomy, independence, and tenacity meant they would never ever be defeated. He went further. He said he would not have wanted to do that operation without the Australian SAS on that ridge line. They made it happen that day. He added that in that part of the battlefield, the Americans were very much dependent on the Australians.

You had to have someone there on the ground. He said, someone who could see and hear and smell and pick up the sense of the battlefield. From that point on, the picture of Steve Irwin came off the map. If you are finding this useful, hit subscribe. I cover military history and special forces operations every week. Now, let’s talk about what happened when the Australians came back.

After the initial deployment ended in late 2002, all three SAS Saber Squadrons had rotated through Afghanistan. The regiment went home, but the war was far from over. The Taliban was regrouping. In 2005, the Australian government sent the SAS back. This time, the Americans knew exactly what they were getting.

The special operations task group built around SAS squadrons and commando companies established itself at Camp Russell inside the coalition base at Taran Kout in Urugun province. Each rotation lasted up to 6 months. Operations beyond the wire were constant day and night by vehicle, by helicopter, or on foot. The Taliban gave them a new name.

Not phantoms of the jungle this time. greeneyed bearded devils. The name referred to the green light emitted from their night vision goggles as the Australians moved through Afghan villages in darkness. And then came the battle that produced Australia’s first Victoria Cross in nearly 40 years. On the 2nd of September 2008, a combined Australian, US, and Afghan patrol rolled out from forward operating base Anaconda in Uzugan province. The plan was an ambush.

Australian SAS patrols equipped with long range sniper rifles would move on foot into the foothills and established positions overlooking a valley near the village of Ka Orusan. Five Humvees crewed by US special forces from the seven special forces group and Afghan commandos would drive through the valley as bait trying to draw out Taliban fighters into the SAS killing zones.

In the pre-dawn darkness, two SAS patrols moved on foot through the mountains to set up their northern ambush positions. Two more SAS patrols rode with the vehicle convoy, planning to split off and establish positions to the south once they were deep in the valley. At first, the plan worked. The northern SAS patrols spotted three Taliban fighters moving across open ground, possibly organizing an attack on the Americans.

The Australian snipers waited until the Taliban crossed the killing ground where there was no cover. Then they engaged. All three targets were neutralized. American intelligence intercepted communications showing more Taliban were on the way, coming to collect their dead. The Australians waited, but what arrived was not a recovery team.

Up to 200 Taliban fighters had been prepositioned throughout the valley. And when the vehicle convoy pushed deeper into the terrain, the ambush flipped. The Taliban opened up with everything they had, sustained machine gun fire and rocket propelled grenades. The initiation was so violent that the entire patrol was immediately suppressed.

Casualties mounted within seconds. Sergeant Troy Simmons, the patrol commander of the forward SAS element, later described the incoming fire in an interview with the Australian War Memorial. He said the fire was like rain on the surface of water. The convoy was trapped. Vehicles crawling over rough terrain at walking speed.

SAS troopers on foot alongside the Humvees. Unable to move faster, the fire intensified as they tried to push through the valley. US Sergeant Firstclass Gregory Rodriguez, a military dog handler attached to the seventh special forces group, was killed by enemy gunfire during the fighting. The US forces suffered one killed and one wounded.

The Australian SAS had nine wounded, including both attached engineers. In Simmons own fiveman patrol, only one member was not hit. Among the wounded was Rob Mor, a former British Royal Marine who had passed SAS selection in 2003 and become one of Australia’s most elite snipers. A man who had spent 18 years mastering what he called the dark art of sniping.

He had walked for hours, sometimes days, through hostile mountain country to find the right position. And when the moment was right, he would engage targets at distances exceeding 1 kilometer with absolute precision. In the chaos of Ka Orosan, Mor was hit. The man who patched him up was a trooper named Mark Donelsson.

What Donaldson did during those two hours would become the defining act of Australian military valor in the Afghanistan war. As the ambush raged, Donaldson deliberately exposed himself to Taliban fire. He moved into the open, drawing the enemy’s attention toward himself and away from the wounded soldiers who were being dragged to the vehicles.

His actions allowed the casualties to be evacuated to cover. As the battered convoy finally began to push out of the kill zone, someone realized the Afghan interpreter who had been traveling with the patrol was wounded and had been left behind. He was lying in the open 80 m from the nearest vehicle under sustained enemy fire. Donaldson didn’t hesitate.

He sprinted across 80 m of open ground, picked up the wounded interpreter, and carried him back to the vehicles. Then he administered first aid while rounds cracked overhead. When asked later about what he did, Donaldson kept it simple. He said he was a soldier. He was trained to fight.

He saw the interpreter lying there. He went over and got him. That was it. On the 16th of January 2009, Trooper Mark Donaldelsson became the first recipient of the Victoria Cross for Australia, the highest award for gallantry in the Australian military. He was the first Australian to receive the honor since Keith Payne in Vietnam nearly 40 years earlier.

There is one more chapter in this story that deserves to be told. It happened at the peak of the relationship between Australian and American special forces in Kandahar province. In May and June of 2010, the special operations task group launched the Sha Wali Kat offensive. Joint raids swept the district targeting Taliban leadership networks.

Australian SAS commandos, engineers, and American forces worked in concert, clearing entrenched insurgent positions in 50°ree heat. On the 11th of June, an SAS element attacked the village of Tzac to capture or kill a senior Taliban commander. What followed was 11 straight hours of close quarters combat, room by room, compound by compound.

Corporal Ben Roberts Smith, who had joined the SAS in 2003, found himself pinned down with his patrol by two machine gun positions covering their approach. The patrol was stuck. Nobody could move without being cut down. Robert Smith made a decision. He charged the first machine gun position alone under direct fire and neutralized it.

Then he turned and assaulted the second position and neutralized that one, too. His actions broke the deadlock and allowed the entire assault to continue. Robert Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia. Commando Sniper Sergeant Gary Robinson, who fought through the same offensive, summed up the experience in five words.

It was kill or be killed. For the Shiawali Coat offensive, the Australian Special Operations Task Group received a battle honor, the first for the Australian Army since Vietnam. It was titled Eastern Shiawali Kot and it recognized the combined actions of the SAS and second commando regiment. So what did United States special forces actually say when they met the Australian special air service snipers in Kandahar? At first not much.

The Americans came from a military culture built around overwhelming force, technological superiority, and short duration raids. The Australians came from a different tradition entirely. small teams, extended endurance, patience measured in weeks, not hours, and a sniping philosophy that treated the rifle as the last resort of a man who had already done the hardest work, which was getting into position without anyone knowing he was there.

The Americans did not understand it. Not at first. But after watching a six-man Special Air Service patrol survive 10 days on a frozen mountaintop, call in air strikes that killed 300 enemy fighters and save two dozen stranded United States Rangers. The conversation changed permanently. After watching a special air service trooper sprint across open ground to rescue a wounded man while 200 Taliban fighters tried to kill him, nobody questioned the Australians again.

After watching a special air service sniper walk for days through hostile country to find a position from which he could reach out and touch someone at over 1 kilometer, the Americans stopped asking what the Australians could do. They started asking how. The Australian Special Air Service Association said it best. Across Afghanistan, Australian special forces earned a reputation for professionalism, courage, and reliability that remains deeply respected within the global special operations community, particularly among the United States

service personnel who shared the danger and saw the proof firsthand. The bonds forged in Kandahar were not built on politics or alliances. They were built on shared danger, mutual trust, and proven competence. They endure beyond administrations, elections, or individual leaders. A small force, fewer than a hundred operators at any given time.

From a country most Americans could not find on a map, they arrived as unknowns. They left as brothers. If you want to see how another small Allied force earned the respect of the United States military in combat, that video is on screen now. Subscribe for more stories like this.