They were America’s elite, the best of the best. Green Berets who had survived training programs that broke 90% of candidates. Men who had stared down death in the jungles of Vietnam without flinching. And yet in January 1970, every single one of them ran. Not from the Vietkong, not from enemy fire, not from an ambush or a booby trap.
They ran from their own allies. What did these hardened American warriors witness at the Australian base in NewAtat that made them request immediate transfer within 72 hours? What was that smell, that unforgettable, primal stench that hit them before they even saw the camp? And why did the Pentagon classify what they reported for over four decades? Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on one of the most disturbing rivalries in special forces history.
A story that both the American and Australian military establishments wanted, buried forever. A story about methods so effective and so controversial that America’s finest couldn’t stomach being in the same camp with the men who used them. You think you know what elite soldiers are capable of? You think you’ve heard the darkest stories from Vietnam? You haven’t heard this one.
The Australians called themselves SAS. The Vietkong called them Maung, the jungle ghosts. And after you learn what they did to earn that name, you’ll understand why Green Berets chose retreat over one more night at Nui Dat. Stay until the end because the most shocking part of this story isn’t what the Australians did.
It’s what the Americans discovered about themselves when they witnessed it. Let’s begin. The stench hit them first. Long before they saw the perimeter wire of the Australian base at Nui Dot, long before they glimpsed the silent figures moving through the rubber plantation, the American green berets smelled something that made their stomachs turn.
It was not the familiar wreak of jungle rot or the cloying sweetness of tropical vegetation. This was something far more primal, something that spoke of methods the Pentagon would never officially acknowledge. Three days later, every single American special forces operator requested immediate transfer. Not one of them would explain why in official reports, but in private conversations that would remain classified for over four decades, they described scenes that challenged everything they thought they knew about Allied warfare.
But the smell was only the first warning. This is the story that the military establishment on both sides of the Pacific desperately wanted buried. This is the account of what happened when America’s finest came face tof face with operators who had abandoned every conventional rule of engagement. And this is the truth about why the Australian Special Air Service Regiment earned a reputation so fearsome that even their own allies refused to work alongside them.
To understand what those Green Berets encountered in 1970, one must first understand what the Australian SAS had become by that point in the war. They had arrived in Vietnam in 1966 as a small contingent of reconnaissance specialists. By 1970, they had transformed into something that defied easy categorization. Pentagon analysts studying their operational reports would later describe them with a single word that appeared nowhere in official military doctrine, predators.
And the numbers proved it beyond any doubt. The statistics alone told a story that American commanders found impossible to believe. Australian SAS squadrons operating in Fuoktui province were achieving kill ratios that exceeded anything US special forces had ever documented. Where American units measured success in body counts accumulated through massive firepower and helicopter support, the Australians were accomplishing something far more unsettling.
They were eliminating enemy combatants at rates that suggested an entirely different approach to warfare. Military historians would later calculate that a single Australian SAS patrol of five men could account for more confirmed enemy casualties in a two-week operation than an American company of 150 soldiers achieved in a month.
The Pentagon demanded explanations. They sent observers. They requested detailed afteraction reports. But what they discovered would never appear in any official publication. The Australians were not fighting the same war as their American allies. They were conducting something far older. Something that traced its roots back to ancient hunting practices adapted for the most dangerous prey imaginable.
And the Green Berets who arrived at Nui Dot in January of 1970 were about to learn this lesson in the most visceral way possible. The joint operation had been planned for months. American Special Forces Command believed that embedding Green Beret advisers with Australian SAS patrols would facilitate knowledge transfer between Allied units.
On paper, it seemed like a reasonable proposition. Both forces were elite. Both had extensive jungle warfare training. Both operated in small teams behind enemy lines. What the American planners failed to understand would cost them dearly. The Australians had developed methods that existed in a completely different operational universe.
Methods that would leave the Green Berets questioning not just tactical doctrine, but the fundamental nature of what they had signed up for. The first shock came during the premission briefing. American special forces operated with detailed intelligence packages, satellite imagery, and extensive support infrastructure. The Australians operated with something else entirely.
Their patrol leader, a sergeant whose name remains classified to this day, spread a hand-drawn map on the table and began describing the operation in terms that made the Americans exchange uncomfortable glances. He did not speak of objectives or extraction points. He spoke of hunting grounds. He did not discuss enemy positions or fortifications.
He described prey behavior patterns. And when he outlined the patrol’s rules of engagement, the Green Berets realized they had entered territory that their training had never prepared them for. But this briefing was merely a taste of what awaited them beyond the wire. The patrol departed Nui dot at 0300 hours on a moonless night.
The Australians moved with a silence that the Americans found genuinely disturbing. These were Green Berets, men who had completed some of the most rigorous training programs in the United States military. They prided themselves on their fieldcraft. Yet within the first hour, the Australian patrol leader had signaled three times for them to reduce their noise signature.
By dawn, the Americans understood why the Australians insisted on such extreme sound discipline. They were not moving through the jungle. They were becoming part of it. The Australians did not walk so much as flow between the vegetation, their bodies adopting postures and movements that seemed almost inhuman. One of the Green Berets would later describe it as watching men who had somehow learned to think like the jungle itself.
The patrol continued for three days without a single word being spoken above a whisper. The Australians communicated through hand signals so subtle that the Americans frequently missed them entirely. They ate cold rations that had been specially prepared to eliminate any smell that might alert enemy trackers. They did not light fires. They did not smoke.
They barely seemed to breathe. But silence was merely preparation for what came next. On the fourth day, the Americans witnessed something that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. The Australian point man had frozen in position, one hand raised in a signal that the patrol leader immediately understood. Enemy movement. Close.
Very close. The Australians melted into the vegetation with a speed and coordination that left the Green Berets struggling to keep up. Within seconds, five men had become invisible. What followed was not a firefight. It was not an ambush in any conventional sense. It was something that the Americans had no framework to comprehend.
The enemy patrol consisted of 12 Vietkong fighters moving through a narrow jungle trail. They were experienced. They were alert. They had survived years of warfare against the most technologically advanced military force on the planet. None of that would save them. The Australians did not open fire.
They did not call for artillery support or helicopter gunships. Instead, they waited. They waited until the enemy patrol had passed directly through their position. They waited until the last VC fighter had moved beyond visual range. And then they did something that made the Green Berets question everything they thought they knew about special operations. They followed.
For the next six hours, the Australian patrol tracked the enemy unit through some of the most difficult terrain in Vietnam. They moved closer with each passing hour. By nightfall, they were so close that the Americans could hear individual enemy soldiers speaking in hushed Vietnamese. The Green Berets expected an attack at any moment. They were wrong.
The Australians waited for the enemy to make camp. They waited for centuries to be posted. They waited for the main body to fall asleep. And then one by one they began to move. This was not war as the Americans understood it. This was something far more ancient, something that belonged to a different age of human conflict.
By morning, seven enemy fighters had ceased to exist without a single shot being fired. The remaining five fled into the jungle, their screams echoing through the pre-dawn darkness as they discovered what had been done to their comrades during the night. The psychological impact on the survivors would be incalculable.
But the true horror was only beginning. These survivors would spread stories through every Vietkong unit in the province. Stories about the Maung, the jungle ghosts. Stories that would make hardened fighters refuse to patrol certain areas. Stories that would accomplish more than a thousand American air strikes ever could.
But it was what the Australians did next that finally broke the Green Beretss. The patrol leader gave a series of hand signals that the Americans did not understand. The other Australians nodded and began moving through the enemy camp with a purposefulness that suggested well practiced routine. What followed was a display that violated every principle of conventional warfare the Americans had been taught.
The bodies were arranged in specific positions. Items were removed and placed in configurations that carried meanings the Americans could not decipher. The scene that was left behind was designed not for military purposes, but for psychological impact. It was a message, a warning, a declaration that would spread terror through every enemy unit that discovered it.
One of the Green Berets vomited. Another simply sat down and stared at nothing. The patrol leader glanced at them with an expression that was not hostile, but held no sympathy either. This was war as the Australians fought it. This was the method that achieved those impossible kill ratios and this was why the Pentagon would never officially acknowledge what they had learned.
The patrol returned to Nui dot 4 days later. The Green Berets said nothing during the debriefing. They submitted minimal reports that contained almost no useful intelligence. Within 72 hours, every American operator had requested immediate transfer to different units. The official explanation was cultural incompatibility.
The truth was far more disturbing. But the story of what those Green Berets witnessed was only one chapter in a much larger narrative. The Australians who served in Vietnam were not typical soldiers by any measure. Many came from backgrounds that had prepared them for the jungle in ways that no amount of formal training could replicate.
Sheep farmers from the vast Australian outback brought skills in tracking and patience that astonished their American counterparts. Aboriginal soldiers contributed knowledge that traced back thousands of years. Men who had grown up hunting kangaroos across endless wilderness found that the Vietnamese jungle, while different in many respects, responded to the same fundamental principles.
And the Australian military had made a decision that would prove devastating to the enemy. Rather than rotating individual soldiers through Vietnam on 12-month tours as the Americans did, the Australians rotated entire squadrons. This meant that teams who had trained together for years fought together in combat.
The level of coordination this produced was something American units could rarely match. A five-man Australian SAS patrol that had worked together for 3 years developed an almost telepathic understanding of each other’s movements and intentions. They could communicate entire tactical concepts with a single glance. They could predict each other’s reactions in combat situations with uncanny accuracy.
But unit cohesion alone did not explain the Australian effectiveness. What truly set them apart was their willingness to embrace methods that American forces considered either impractical or unacceptable. The standard Australian SAS patrol operated on a principle that American commanders found almost incomprehensible.
Absolute minimal footprint. Where American special forces called in helicopter resupply every few days, Australian patrols carried everything they needed for operations lasting up to 3 weeks. Where Americans relied on air support and artillery to solve tactical problems, Australians considered any call for external support to be a failure of fieldcraft.
The results defied everything American doctrine predicted. This philosophy produced patrols that could remain undetected in enemy territory for periods that seemed physically impossible. American units estimated that the maximum sustainable patrol duration without resupply was approximately 7 days. Australian SAS routinely conducted operations lasting 14 to 21 days with no external support whatsoever.
The physical toll was enormous. Patrol members frequently returned to base having lost 15 to 20% of their body weight. Jungle diseases and infections were constant companions. The psychological strain of remaining in hostile territory for weeks on end, maintaining absolute silence, constantly expecting enemy contact, pushed men to the limits of human endurance.
But the enemy paid a far higher price. Australian patrols developed an intimate knowledge of their operational areas that no amount of aerial reconnaissance could provide. They learned the rhythms of enemy movement, the locations of hidden trails, the subtle signs that indicated nearby encampments. They became, in the words of one Vietkong commander captured later in the war, ghosts who knew the jungle better than the jungle knew itself.
And this brings us to perhaps the most controversial aspect of Australian operations in Vietnam. The Australian SAS had studied the history of jungle warfare extensively. They understood that in an environment where the enemy had home advantage, where every villager might be an informant and where conventional military superiority meant nothing, psychological warfare was not an optional addition to operations.
It was fundamental. The techniques they developed drew on sources that ranged from British colonial campaigns in Malaya to Aboriginal hunting traditions to psychological operations theory that was still considered experimental in Western military circles. What emerged would terrify an entire region. The approach to warfare that the Australians perfected prioritized enemy fear over enemy destruction.
This was a crucial distinction that American forces never fully grasped. US military doctrine emphasized body counts. The more enemy soldiers eliminated, the theory went, the closer to victory. Australian doctrine emphasized something different. Psychological dominance. A terrified enemy was more valuable than a deceased one because a terrified enemy would spread that fear to others.
The implications of this philosophy were profound and disturbing. When an Australian patrol eliminated enemy fighters, the bodies were not simply left where they fell. They were arranged in ways designed to create maximum psychological impact. Sometimes this meant positioning that suggested the fighters had been caught completely unaware.
Sometimes it meant removing items that held cultural or spiritual significance. Sometimes it meant leaving signs that would tell other VC units exactly who had been there. The Australians developed a reputation so fearsome that Vietkong commanders began issuing specific orders about what to do when Maung signs were encountered. The instructions were simple.
Retreat immediately and report the sighting. Do not engage. Do not pursue. do not remain in the area. This fear had concrete tactical value that American commanders could measure but not replicate. Enemy units that believed Australian patrols were operating in their area became less aggressive, more prone to mistakes, and more likely to avoid routes and positions that might bring them into contact.
The psychological weapon multiplied the effectiveness of every Australian soldier many times over. But the methods that created this fear were not ones that American military leadership could officially acknowledge or endorse. The incident in 1970 that drove the Green Berets from Nuidat was not an isolated event. Throughout the war, American special forces who operated alongside Australian SAS returned with similar stories.
Stories of methods that produced results but violated principles that American forces considered inviable. One special forces sergeant who served three tours in Vietnam and participated in joint operations with both American and Australian units would later provide testimony that captured the essential difference between the two approaches.
His words would echo through decades of special operations history. Americans, he observed, fought to win the war. Australians fought to become the thing the enemy feared most. This distinction might seem abstract, but its practical implications were enormous. American operations were designed around objectives. Take this hill.
Clear this village. Interdict this supply route. Success was measured against these objectives. Australian operations were designed around presence. Establish absolute psychological dominance over a defined territory. Success was measured by enemy behavior change. The statistics supported this approach beyond any reasonable dispute.
Fuakt Thai province, where Australian forces had primary responsibility, experienced dramatic reductions in enemy activity compared to adjacent American controlled areas. Vietkong recruitment in the province dropped substantially. Local villagers who had previously supported the enemy began providing intelligence to Australian forces.
American commanders attributed these results to various factors. better population control, more effective pacification programs, simpler tactical environment. What they could not officially acknowledge was the uncomfortable truth. Australian methods were producing a level of enemy fear that American operations never approached.
But the success came at a cost that would not become fully apparent until decades after the war ended. The men who served in Australian SAS squadrons during Vietnam were changed by their experiences in ways that conventional warfare did not produce. They had not simply fought an enemy. They had become something different, something that did not transition easily back to civilian life.
Post-traumatic stress among Australian Vietnam veterans would eventually prove to be proportionally higher than among American veterans. The intimate personal nature of Australian operations created psychological burdens that industrial-cale American warfare, despite its horror, did not impose. Men who had spent weeks living as predators, who had eliminated enemies at ranges measured in feet rather than hundreds of meters, who had employed psychological warfare techniques designed to create maximum terror, carried those
experiences in ways that their American counterparts often did not. And the rivalry between American and Australian forces reflected something far deeper than professional competition. It represented fundamentally different philosophies about what war was and how it should be fought. American military doctrine had evolved from the experience of World War II where industrial capacity and overwhelming force had proved decisive.
The US military believed in firepower, technology, and attrition. Australian military doctrine had evolved from different experiences entirely. The British campaigns in Malaya during the 1950s had demonstrated that conventional superiority meant nothing against an insurgent enemy who controlled the population. The Australians had learned that small, highly skilled units employing unconventional methods could achieve results that massive conventional forces could not.
These philosophies clashed repeatedly throughout the Vietnam War, but nowhere more dramatically than in the interactions between American and Australian special forces. The collision at Nuidot was inevitable. The Green Berets who fled that base in 1970 were not cowards. They were elite soldiers who had volunteered for some of the most dangerous assignments the US military could offer.
They had completed training programs that eliminated the vast majority of candidates. They had proven themselves in combat situations that would break ordinary men. But they had been trained in a specific understanding of warfare. They knew how to navigate hostile terrain, how to survive behind enemy lines, how to coordinate complex operations under fire.
What they had not been prepared for was encountering allies who played by completely different rules. The Australian patrol leader who led that joint operation in 1970 was not a monster. He was a professional soldier doing what his training and experience had taught him was effective. The methods that so disturbed the Americans were not innovations or aberrations.
They were standard Australian SAS doctrine developed through careful study and refined through operational experience. The disconnect between American expectations and Australian reality was so profound that no amount of pre-eployment briefing could have bridged it. The Green Berets arrived expecting to find soldiers similar to themselves.
Elite operators using advanced techniques to accomplish conventional military objectives. What they found was something that existed outside their conceptual framework entirely. And this gap in understanding would have consequences that extended far beyond that single patrol. The American military establishment responded to Australian success in predictable ways.
They acknowledged that the Australians achieved impressive results. They studied Australian techniques and classified reports that would remain sealed for decades. and they ultimately concluded that Australian methods were not transferable to American forces. The official reasoning was practical. American units were too large, American operations too complex, American doctrine too established to incorporate Australian approaches.
The unofficial reasoning was something no general would ever admit publicly. Australian methods crossed lines that American forces could not officially cross. This determination had consequences that extended throughout the remainder of the Vietnam War and beyond. American special forces continued developing doctrine that emphasized technology and firepower over the intimate, psychologically focused approach that the Australians had perfected.
The lessons that could have been learned were instead classified and forgotten. Military historians would later argue that this decision represented one of the great missed opportunities of the Vietnam era. The techniques that Australian SAS had developed were not simply brutal. They were effective in ways that American methods never achieved.
They accomplished with fiveman patrols what American operations required battalions to attempt. But effectiveness alone could not overcome institutional resistance. The story of the Green Berets at Nui Dat would be repeated in various forms throughout the war. American officers who witnessed Australian operations returned with reports that were simultaneously impressed and disturbed.
The Pentagon collected these reports, analyzed them, classified them, and ultimately decided that the political costs of officially adopting Australian methods outweighed the tactical benefits. This decision would shape American special forces doctrine for decades to come. The US military would continue developing increasingly sophisticated technology, increasingly powerful weapon systems, increasingly complex support infrastructure.
They would not develop the patient, predatory, psychologically focused approach that had made Australian SAS so devastatingly effective. Whether this was the right decision remains debated among military historians to this day. What is not debated is that the Australian experience in Vietnam represented a fundamentally different approach to special operations.
One that produced results that American forces never matched. And at the center of that story stands the incident at Nui Dot in 1970 when America’s finest encountered something they had no framework to understand. They chose retreat rather than confront the implications. The smell that greeted those green berets as they approached the Australian base was not simply the odor of the jungle or the residue of combat operations.
It was the smell of a different kind of warfare, one that operated according to rules they had never been taught and employed methods they could not accept. In the decades since the war ended, veterans from both nations have occasionally shared their memories of joint operations. The stories that emerge consistently echo the themes of that 1970 incident.
Profound professional respect combined with deep personal discomfort. Acknowledgement of Australian effectiveness alongside inability to embrace their methods. Recognition that something important was being witnessed without the ability to fully comprehend it. The Australian SAS veterans, for their part, have generally maintained the silence that characterized their wartime operations.
Few have spoken publicly about the specific techniques they employed. Fewer still have addressed the controversy surrounding their methods. The official regimental history discusses operations in general terms that reveal little about the psychological warfare aspects that so disturbed American observers. This silence has allowed myths and rumors to proliferate over the decades.
Stories about Australian SAS in Vietnam have grown in the retelling. Some becoming more extreme than the reality. Others failing to capture just how different Australian operations actually were. The truth, as is often the case with classified military history, remains partially obscured even now. What can be stated with certainty is that the Australian SAS achieved documented results that no other allied unit in Vietnam matched.
Their kill ratios were not myths, but verified statistics that Pentagon analysts spent years trying to explain. Their psychological impact on enemy forces was not propaganda, but operational reality that changed Vietkong behavior throughout their area of operations. The cost of these achievements, both to the Australians who carried them out and to the American allies who witnessed them, remains a subject that neither nation has fully reckoned with.
The Green Berets who fled Newat in 1970 were not running from danger. They had faced danger throughout their careers and never flinched. They were running from a confrontation with a form of warfare that challenged their understanding of what soldiers were and what soldiers did.
In that response, they were perhaps more honest than the military establishments that sent them there. They recognized what the generals refused to admit. They recognized that what they had witnessed could not be easily integrated into American military culture. They understood that the Australian way of war, however effective, represented a path that American forces were not prepared to walk.
Their retreat was not a failure of courage. It was an acknowledgement that some truths are easier to flee than to face. and the smell that drove them away would linger in their memories for decades. That primal stench that announced Australian methods before any words could be spoken. It was the smell of effectiveness unconstrained by conventional limits.
It was the smell of psychological warfare taken to its logical conclusion. It was the smell of what happens when elite soldiers are given permission to become something more than soldiers. It was in the final analysis. The smell that victory produces when winning matters more than how you win. The Australian SAS departed Vietnam in 1971.
Their mission technically complete, their methods officially unexamined. They returned to a nation that, like America, was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the war they had fought. They carried experiences that would take decades to process and memories that many would never share. But the legend they created would outlast them all.
In special forces circles around the world, the reputation of Australian SAS in Vietnam became something approaching mythology. Stories were told and retold about patrols that operated for impossible durations, about methods that achieved impossible results, about warriors who had become something the conventional military terminology could not adequately describe.
The Americans who had witnessed these operations firsthand, rarely spoke publicly about what they had seen. Some processed their experiences through psychological treatment. Others simply buried them alongside other wartime memories too difficult to examine. A few late in life began to share fragments of what they had witnessed.
Their accounts emerging in memoirs and oral histories that finally began to fill in the classified gaps. What emerges from these accounts is not a simple narrative of Australian brutality or American squeamishness. It is a far more complex story of two military cultures confronting a challenge that neither was fully prepared for and responding according to their deepest institutional values.
The Americans brought technology, firepower, and numerical superiority. They believed that these advantages, which had proved decisive in every previous conflict, would eventually overwhelm the enemy. They were wrong in ways that aligned perfectly with their military tradition. The Australians brought patience, fieldcraft, and psychological insight.
They believed that understanding and exploiting enemy fears would prove more effective than simply destroying enemy bodies. They were right in ways that their allies could not embrace. The encounter at Nuidat in 1970 crystallized these differences in a single unforgettable moment. When American special forces met Australian special forces in the field, the gap between their approaches became impossible to ignore.
The Green Berets recognized something in the Australian methods that they could not accept, and they made the only choice their training allowed. They left. Their departure solved nothing and proved nothing. The war continued. The methods persisted. The results accumulated. But that moment of recognition, that instant when elite American soldiers confronted the implications of Australian effectiveness and chose retreat, represents something important in the history of special operations.
It represents the acknowledgment that effectiveness and acceptability are not the same thing. It represents the recognition that allies fighting the same war can be fighting completely different wars. And it represents the uncomfortable truth that sometimes the most disturbing thing a soldier can encounter is not an enemy, but an ally who has found a different answer to the same question.
The smell of that answer hung over Newi dot in 1970. It drove away men who had never retreated from any enemy. And it lingered in the historical record as evidence of a rivalry, a methodology and a mystery that the passage of decades has still not fully resolved. This is the story that the official histories do not tell.
This is the truth that both militaries preferred to leave classified. And this is the legacy that continues to provoke questions about what special forces are, what they do, and what they should be permitted to become in pursuit of victory. The Green Berets who fled Newat knew the answers to those questions. They simply could not live with them.
And that perhaps is the most honest response anyone has ever had to what Australian SAS became in the jungles of Vietnam. The war ended. The veterans returned. The classified files accumulated dust in Pentagon archives. But the story persisted, passed from one generation of special operators to the next, growing and changing with each retelling, but always returning to the same essential question.
What are you willing to become to win? The Australians had one answer. The Americans had another. And in the space between those answers lies a history that neither nation has fully confronted. That history begins with a smell. A smell that announced before any words or actions could. That something different was happening here.
Something that operated outside normal boundaries. Something that achieved results through methods that could not be officially acknowledged. The smell of effectiveness. The smell of methods. The smell of what happens when warriors become hunters. The smell that made America’s finest
