10 days. Not a single word spoken, just hand signals in absolute silence through swamps so thick you couldn’t see 3 feet ahead. Navy Seal Roger Hayden had been through Army Ranger School, raider school, every elite training program the United States military offered. But in those 10 days with the Australians, he learned more about staying alive in the jungle than everything else combined.
And when it was over, when those Australian SAS operators finally broke their silence, Hayden said something that would echo through classified briefings for the next decade. Two words that made American commanders realize they’d been fighting the wrong war. Those two words were amateurs. You’re about to discover why the most elite naval commandos in American history, the men the Vietkong called devils with green faces, looked at a handful of Australians and saw something they’d never encountered before. Not
better soldiers, something else entirely. Something that couldn’t be taught in any school, replicated in any training program, or copied in any manual. And by the end of this story, you’ll understand why the Pentagon spent years trying to bottle what the Australians had and why they ultimately failed. Stay with me. February 1966.
The Meong Delta stretched before Seal Team 1 like a green maze of death. Waterways twisted through mangrove swamps, villages perched on stilts above brown water. And somewhere in all that vegetation, the Vietkong waited. The SEALs had arrived in South Vietnam just weeks earlier, operating from Na Bay Base near the Rangot Special Zone, 7 mi south of Saigon. They were confident.
They had reason to be. These weren’t ordinary sailors. The naval special warfare community traced its lineage back to World War II. To the underwater demolition teams who’d cleared beach obstacles under fire at Normandy and across the Pacific, the Frogmen of Korea had perfected their craft along hostile coastlines, moving inland when necessary, developing the kind of maritime raid capabilities that made conventional commanders nervous.
And in January 1962, responding to President Kennedy’s call for unconventional warfare capabilities, the Navy had created something new. SEAL teams one and two, sea, air, and land. Warriors who could operate anywhere. The training was legendary. Basic underwater demolition seal training, shortened to BUD/S, had evolved from the brutal conditioning programs developed by Draper Kaufman, the father of naval combat demolition.
Hell week separated those who would make it from those who wouldn’t. 5 and a half days of continuous physical activity with a maximum total of 4 hours of sleep. surf torture, log drills, boat carries through the sand. Men who survived that went to Army Airborne School at Fort Benning. Then came six more weeks of SEALP specific training taught by veterans who’d already been in the fight.
But here’s what nobody told them. Nobody warned them that all that training, all that preparation, all those carefully developed skills for maritime operations were about to slam head first into a reality that the United States military didn’t fully understand yet. The jungle wasn’t the ocean, and the Vietkong weren’t defending beaches.
In those first months of 1966, SEAL platoon deployed to the Rangad Special Zone learned through blood what works and what doesn’t. 14 to 16man platoon, sometimes operating as smaller squads, conducting direct action missions against an enemy who knew every creek, every trail, every hiding place in terrain that had swallowed armies for centuries.
The Vietkong called them the men with green faces because of the camouflage paint the seals wore. They put bounties on seal heads. They feared these American commandos. But fear and respect are different things. Roger Hayden arrived in country with his Seal Team One platoon and immediately understood they had a problem. in UDT, you just didn’t have the field craft to be out in the jungle looking for people.
He would later explain to fellow SEAL Jako Willink. The transition from underwater demolition specialist to jungle warrior happened overnight, literally. Hayden and his team took over from the platoon they were replacing on the same day they arrived. No turnover, no gradual introduction to the area of operations.
They flew into a South Vietnamese base near the Uman Forest, today called Umemen Thuang National Park, and started operating immediately. The Uman forest. Dense mangrove swamps interspersed with patches of high ground, channels of water winding through vegetation so thick you moved in perpetual twilight, even at noon. Perfect ambush country.
The kind of place where sound carried strangely, where your nose told you more than your eyes, where every sense had to work overtime just to keep you breathing. And the seals were learning all of this through trial and error. We didn’t have intel. We didn’t have anything, Hayden recalled.
We were pretty isolated out at a Vietnamese base camp in the middle of nowhere. They were doing what they later called dart board operations. Throw a dart at the map. Go wherever it hits. Hope you find the enemy before the enemy finds you. It was dangerous. It was inefficient. And according to Hayden, it was getting seals killed. The problem wasn’t courage.
Seals had that in abundance. The problem wasn’t weapons. By 1967, they were carrying an impressive arsenal. The Stoner Light machine gun capable of sustained fire rates that could cut through vegetation like a chainsaw. Shotguns with duck build chokes that spread the pattern wide enough to clear a trail in close quarters.
M16 rifles, CR15 carbines, Swedish K submachine guns. Seals could bring overwhelming firepower to any engagement. The problem was they were being seen first in the waterways of the Meong. SEAL tactics evolved quickly. They mastered riverine insertions using light seal support craft, medium seal support craft, and seal team assault boats operated by mobile support teams specially trained to get seals in and out of hot zones.
They developed helicopter assault tactics, working with Army and Navy helicopters in both transport and gunship configurations. They learned to set devastating ambushes along canal banks, to snatch prisoners from villages, to gather intelligence through methods the CIA found useful enough to integrate SEALs into the Phoenix program, targeting Vietkong infrastructure and leadership.
But in the jungle, away from the water, the SEALs struggled with something more fundamental than tactics. They struggled with invisibility. And that’s where the Australians come in. Three squadron special air service regiment arrived at New Daty 1966. 120 men, give or take, from a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map, with a military force that seemed almost quaint compared to the half million American troops pouring into Vietnam.
Australian commanders were used to this reaction. They’d seen it before. The British in Malaya, the Americans in Korea. Everybody looked at the small numbers and wondered what possible difference they could make. The Australians didn’t bother to explain. They just went to work. The Australian Special Air Service Regiment traced its origins to July 1957 when the first Special Air Service Company was formed at Campbell Barracks in Swanborn, Western Australia.
Modeled on the British SAS, the Australians had refined their approach through a decade of jungle warfare that Americans were only beginning to understand. The Malayan emergency from 1948 to 1960 had taught them how to fight communist insurgents in terrain where conventional military power meant nothing. The Indonesian confrontation in Borneo from 1962 to 1966 had honed those skills to a razor edge.
By the time they reached Vietnam, the SASR operated according to principles that seemed almost contradictory to American military doctrine. where American forces measured success in body counts and territory seized. The Australians focused on psychological dominance. Where American units moved in company or battalion strength supported by artillery and air power, Australian SAS patrols consisted of five men. Five.
Moving through territory controlled by Vietkong battalions, sometimes operating for weeks without resupply or extraction capability. The American liaison officers at first Australian task force headquarters watched these tiny patrols disappear into the jungle and waited for disaster. Instead, they got results that made no tactical sense.
A five-man patrol would ambush a Vietkong company, kill 10 or 15 enemy soldiers, and extract without casualties. Another patrol would spend three weeks gathering intelligence deep inside enemy territory, mapping supply routes and base camps, never once being detected. The kill ratios started climbing, 10:1, 20 to1.
Eventually, some Australian SAS squadrons in Vietnam would achieve ratios exceeding 30 to1. But numbers don’t tell the real story. The real story is what those patrols did to the Vietkong psychologically. The real story is in the captured documents, the interrogation reports, the observable change in enemy behavior in areas where Australian SAS operated.
The Vietkong started calling them ma run jungle ghosts. Soldiers who’d operated in the same area for years, who knew every trail and hiding spot, suddenly refused to patrol. Entire units would bypass zones where the Australians had been reported, even when tactical objectives demanded they go through. This was the force that Roger Hayden encountered sometime in late 1967 or early 1968 during an exchange program between the Australian SAS and US Navy Seals.
Hayden’s platoon was operating in the Meong Delta, the vast network of waterways and rice patties that formed the southern tip of South Vietnam. The area had become SEAL country. By 1968, there were typically eight SEAL platoon deployed continuously throughout the region, working out of bases like Seafoat and Solid Anchor on the Cayama Peninsula.
The SEALs had adapted to riverine warfare, developing tactics that combined water-based insertions with land-based ambushes and raids. They were good at it. damn good. But Hayden knew they could be better. So when the opportunity came to operate with an Australian SAS patrol, he jumped at it. His team invited the Aussies to come out into their area of responsibility to see how the seals worked and maybe share some techniques.
The Australians agreed. And for the next 10 days, Roger Hayden got an education that changed how he thought about jungle warfare forever. From the moment they stepped off, the Australians operated under rules that shocked the American SEALs. No talking, none. For 10 straight days, the only communication was through hand and arm signals.
So subtle Hayden missed half of them at first. The Australians moved through the jungle with a patience that bordered on geological. Where seals might cover two or three kilometers in an hour, the Australians would take 4 hours to move 200 m, stopping constantly to listen, to smell the air, to read signs in the vegetation that Hayden couldn’t even see.
They didn’t wear boots the way Americans did. The Australians had removed the hard soles from their standardisssue footwear and replaced them with strips of cut tire rubber shaped to match the profile of Vietnamese sandals. From a distance, their footprints looked local. They didn’t carry extra equipment. Every item had a purpose.
Every movement had a reason. They didn’t just try to avoid making noise. They seemed to exist in a permanent state of near invisibility, blending into the jungle in ways that made Hayden realize his green face paint and camouflage uniform were just theater. On the third day, they set an ambush. The Australian patrol leader, a sergeant whose name Hayden never learned, selected a position overlooking a trail intersection that intelligence suggested was used by Vietkong couriers.
The SEALs would have established a conventional ambush, setting up fields of fire, preparing to engage with overwhelming firepower. The Australians did something different. Four men melted into the undergrowth on either side of the trail. Literally melted. One second Hayden could see them. The next they were gone, absorbed into vegetation that didn’t look thick enough to hide a man.
The fifth Australian, the scout, moved forward to examine the trail itself. Hayden watched him lower his face to within inches of the ground, sniffing, touching leaves with his fingertips, reading the path like a book written in a language Hayden didn’t speak. 11 hours later, two Vietkong walked into the killing zone.
The entire engagement took maybe 4 seconds. The Australians didn’t use their primary weapons. They used knives silently, efficiently. Two enemy combatants neutralized without a single shot that could be heard beyond 50 meters. Then came the part that made Hayden understand these men operated according to rules he’d never encountered.
Standard seal doctrine called for immediate extraction after contact. Hit hard. Get out before reinforcements arrive. Live to fight another day. The Australians stayed in position for six more hours. They remained absolutely motionless, watching that trail. And at 14:30 hours, exactly as the patrol leader had predicted, a seven-man Vietkong search team arrived, sent to investigate.
When the couriers failed to report, the Australians let them come. Let them find the bodies. Let them react with visible terror to what they saw because the Australians had arranged the dead in a specific way. The two couriers sat upright against trees, their eyes open, their weapons placed across their laps as if they were resting.
Playing cards, the Ace of Spades had been tucked into each man’s collar. Hayden watched the Vietkong search team cluster together, abandoning tactical spacing, gesturing frantically as they tried to comprehend what had happened. One soldier vomited. Another began firing blindly into the jungle, emptying his magazine at shadows. The Australians observed all of this without engaging.
They simply watched as the Vietkong collected their dead and retreated at twice the speed they’d arrived. All pretense of military discipline abandoned. Psychological warfare using enemy bodies as the primary medium of communication. It was effective in ways that Hayden had never considered. You didn’t just kill the enemy.
You made the enemy afraid to operate in your area. You made them see ghosts. Over the next seven days, Hayden learned fieldcraft techniques he’d never been taught. The Australians showed him how to read disturbed vegetation to determine not just that someone had passed, but when they’d passed and how many there were. They demonstrated methods of moving through dense jungle that left virtually no trace.
techniques for crossing open areas without being silhouetted. Ways of using natural cover that made concealment almost effortless. They taught him about smell. The Australians could identify the Vietkong diet of rice and newokm fish sauce from 400 meters downwind. They could smell fear sweat versus work sweat.
They could detect the distinct odor of gun oil, unwashed uniforms, the slightly sweet smell of blood. Senses that most Americans had allowed to atrophy became survival tools in Australian hands. They taught him about patience. Real patience. Not the 30inut kind where you set an ambush and wait for something to happen.
The kind where you might spend three days in the same position, barely moving, eating and drinking just enough to stay functional because you knew that trail would eventually produce a target worth the wait. The kind of patience that required a different mental state, a different relationship with time itself.
And they taught him about noise discipline. Absolute noise discipline. The kind where you don’t speak for 10 days. Not because someone ordered you to maintain silence, but because speaking would make you visible to an enemy who listened the way you breathed. The Australians moved through the jungle the way water moves through rock, finding paths of least resistance, never forcing their way through obstacles.
never creating sounds that didn’t belong. On the eighth day, they encountered a Vietkong patrol. The enemy walked within 20 m of where Hayden lay frozen against a fallen log. Six armed soldiers moving along a trail with weapons ready, clearly searching for something. The Australians had known they were coming. Aiden never understood how.
some combination of small sounds, disturbed birds, a change in the ambient noise of the jungle that registered in Australian ears, but not American ones. The patrol leader had simply touched Hayden’s shoulder and pointed to a specific spot on the ground. Hayden had gone motionless there and stayed that way for 40 minutes while the Vietkong searched the area and moved on, never once suspecting that seven men lay hidden within rifle shot.
After the Vietkong left, after they’d waited another two hours to be certain, the Australian patrol leader finally spoke. First words in eight days. Your breathing gave you away,” he whispered. “They didn’t hear it, but I did. Slow it down. Make it shallow. Become part of the ground.” When the 10 days ended, when they finally returned to base, and the Australians broke their operational silence, Hayden tried to thank them, tried to express what he’d learned.
The Australian sergeant just shrugged. “Mate, you SEALs are good operators. best water skills I’ve ever seen. But the jungle’s different. The jungle doesn’t care about your training. It only cares if you belong. That’s when Hayden said it. That phrase that would get repeated in classified briefings and afteraction reports.
We’re amateurs, not an insult, a statement of fact. The SEALs were amateur jungle fighters compared to these men who’d spent years perfecting skills that couldn’t be compressed into a training course or codified in a manual. The exchange program between Australian SAS and US Navy Seals continued throughout the war. New Zealand SAS soldiers attached to Australian squadrons from late 1968 also participated.
American special forces came to respect what the Australians brought to the fight even as they struggled to replicate it because replication requires understanding and understanding requires a framework that didn’t exist in American military doctrine. American special operations in Vietnam evolved rapidly.
SEAL tactics improved through hard experience. By 1970, platoon operating from bases like Seafloat and Solid Anchor were conducting 50 or more operations per six-month deployment. They mastered the art of ambush, prisoner snatching, intelligence gathering. They worked alongside South Vietnamese provincial reconnaissance units, advising and sometimes leading indigenous forces in operations that dismantled Vietkong infrastructure piece by piece.
But the fundamental difference remained. Seals approached the jungle as a hostile environment to be overcome through skill and firepower. Australians approached it as a medium they inhabited. Seals were visitors. Australians belonged. This distinction showed up in unexpected ways. Seal platoon typically operated from established bases, conducting operations that lasted hours or perhaps a day or two before returning to relative safety.
Australian SAS patrols routinely operated for weeks at a time, completely cut off from support, living off what they carried and what the jungle provided. Seals relied heavily on firepower and supporting arms. When things went wrong, they called in helicopter gunships, artillery, extraction birds.
Australians designed their operations to never need extraction, to fade back into the jungle if detected, to avoid decisive engagements unless the tactical situation overwhelmingly favored them. The statistics tell part of the story. Between 1966 and 1971, approximately 580 men served in the Australian SASR in Vietnam.
Their losses totaled one killed in action, one died of wounds, three accidentally killed, one missing, and one death from illness. 28 wounded. The last Australian soldier listed as missing in action who fell from a helicopter during a suspended rope extraction in 1969 wasn’t found until August 2008. Before leaving Vietnam in 1971, the Australian and New Zealand SAS forces killed approximately 600 enemy troops, achieving the highest kill ratio of any Allied unit in the entire war.
But numbers don’t capture the psychological impact. Documents captured after the war revealed the effect Australian SAS operations had on Vietkong morale and effectiveness. Units that had operated successfully for years suddenly became combat ineffective. Not because they’d been destroyed, but because their soldiers refused to patrol in areas where the Australians had been reported.
Political officers struggled to maintain communist ideology in the face of soldiers who believed they were being hunted by supernatural forces. The Americans tried to learn. They tried to copy. Long range reconnaissance patrol units modeled their operations on Australian techniques. Training programs incorporated Australian fieldcraft instruction.
Some Australian SAS personnel served as instructors at the MACV Recondo School and later at the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol Training Wing at the Vankeep Training Center. Individual Australian soldiers even served on exchange with MACVSOG units conducting classified operations across borders into Laos and Cambodia. But something essential got lost in translation.
The Americans could replicate the tactics. They could learn the hand signals, the movement techniques, the ambush procedures. What they couldn’t replicate was the psychology, the transformation that turned ordinary men into hunters. The willingness to exist in the jungle for weeks at a time without support, without communication, without the safety net of overwhelming firepower.
The acceptance that effective hunting requires becoming a predator in your mind, not just your training. Part of the problem was scale. The Australian SAS Regiment operated in Vietnam with never more than one squadron, roughly 120 men in country at any given time. This small size allowed for intensive selection and training.
Only one in 12 candidates who began SAS selection completed it. Those who passed underwent 18 months of training, three times longer than US Army Special Forces training of the same era. Much of that training took place not in jungle warfare schools, but in the Australian outback, learning tracking techniques from Aboriginal instructors whose methods had never been written down because they’d been passed down orally for 40,000 years.
The Australians deployed soldiers like Private Dorian Walker, a Pentubi man from the Western Desert whose people had survived in one of Earth’s most hostile environments by developing sensory capabilities that Western science struggled to explain. Walker could track a man through jungle so dense that American infrared sensors registered nothing.
He could determine a footprint’s age to within 6 hours by examining moisture content in disturbed vegetation. He could smell a Vietnamese solders’s diet from 400 meters downwind. Men like Walker brought capabilities to the fight that couldn’t be taught in any Western military training program. American special operations forces had no equivalent.
They had brave men, skilled operators, warriors willing to face any danger. But they didn’t have 40,000 years of indigenous tracking knowledge to draw from. They didn’t have a cultural tradition of small unit operations dating back to colonial frontier warfare. They didn’t have the institutional memory of the Malayan emergency or the Borneo confrontation, conflicts that had taught the Australians how to fight communist insurgents in jungle terrain under conditions where conventional military power meant nothing. So the Americans
did what Americans do. They studied the problem. They analyzed the data. They wrote reports. One such report, classified top secret and distributed to fewer than 50 recipients, wouldn’t be completed until 1974, 3 years after the last Australian combat troops departed Vietnam. The conclusions contradicted fundamental assumptions of American military doctrine.
First, small unit operations conducted by highly trained personnel achieved better results than large unit operations supported by overwhelming firepower. The Australian SAS kill ratio significantly exceeded both the MACVS average and the conventional infantry average. Second, indigenous tracking methods, specifically Aboriginal techniques adapted to jungle warfare, provided intelligence capabilities that no technological system could replicate.
Proposals to recruit Native American trackers for similar programs were submitted, but never implemented. Third, psychological warfare operations targeting enemy morale could achieve strategic effects disproportionate to the resources invested. A single fiveman patrol operating for two weeks could degrade enemy effectiveness more than a battalionized sweep and clear operation.
Fourth, and most controversially, Australian methods achieve these results while operating under significantly fewer restrictions than American forces. Certain Australian practices regarding treatment of enemy dead and conduct of psychological operations would likely violate standing MACV directives if conducted by US personnel.
That last point ensured the report remained classified for decades. The Pentagon had no interest in publicizing that their most effective allies had succeeded partly by doing things American forces were prohibited from doing. The political implications were dangerous. The moral implications were uncomfortable. better to let the Australian contribution fade into historical obscurity.
But for the men who served with them, who operated alongside them, who learned from them, the Australian SAS represented something that couldn’t be forgotten. Roger Hayden went on to complete multiple tours in Vietnam. He survived firefights, ambushes, operations that killed men to his left and right.
He attended every advanced school the Navy offered. He became an instructor himself, passing on hard one knowledge to new generations of SEALs. But he never forgot those 10 days. Never forgot the lesson of what it meant to truly inhabit the jungle rather than just operate in it. Years later, speaking on Joo Willings podcast, Hayden would describe that experience as more valuable than anything else he’d learned.
In UDT, you just didn’t have the field craft to be out in the jungle looking for people, he explained. Their field craft was so good, and you got to have your things together. According to Hayden, a lot of seals died because of inadequate fieldcraft preparation. That admission cuts deep. Seals weren’t supposed to be inadequately prepared for anything.
They were supposed to be the best of the best. But the jungle exposed a truth that American military culture struggled to accept. Some skills can’t be mass- prodduced. Some capabilities can’t be created through institutional training programs, no matter how rigorous. Some transformations require time, cultural context, and knowledge that exists outside Western military tradition.
The Vietkong understood this instinctively. They’d been fighting in that jungle for decades. First against the French, then against the Americans. They knew every trail, every hiding spot, every ambush position. They moved through the terrain with the confidence of men who belonged there. Until they encountered the Australians.
Then they met something they’d never faced before. Foreigners who moved through the jungle better than they did. Outsiders who understood the terrain more intimately than locals who’d lived there their entire lives. That’s why the Vietkong called them jungle ghosts. Not because the Australians were supernatural, because they were incomprehensible.
Enemy soldiers would set up in positions they considered perfectly concealed. Positions that had hidden them from American patrols for months, and the Australians would walk right up to them without being detected and eliminate them silently. Supply routes that had functioned safely for years would suddenly become impassible because Australian patrols would appear out of nowhere, conduct devastating ambushes, and vanish before reinforcements arrived.
The psychological toll of fighting an enemy you can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t predict is immense. It degrades unit cohesion. It creates paranoia. It makes soldiers hesitant. jumpy, prone to mistakes. By 1969, Vietkong units operating in Peuak toy province, the area of operations for the first Australian task force, had become combat ineffective, not through attrition, but through terror.
Their commanders issued orders that went unexecuted because subordinates were too frightened to enter the jungle where the Australians operated. American military intelligence officers observed this phenomenon with fascination and frustration. Fascination because it represented exactly the kind of asymmetric advantage they’d been trying to achieve.
Frustration because they couldn’t replicate it. The methods could be copied. The results couldn’t. Seal team operations in Vietnam evolved significantly between 1966 and 1972. Early platoon learned through trial and error, often paying for lessons in blood. Later platoon benefited from that accumulated knowledge from veterans who’d survived multiple tours and could teach new men what worked and what didn’t.
The SEALs developed into one of the most effective unconventional warfare forces in American military history. They pioneered techniques for riverine operations that are still taught today. They perfected methods of intelligence gathering, prisoner snatching, and infrastructure targeting that influenced special operations doctrine for decades.
They proved that small teams of highly trained personnel could achieve disproportionate effects against numerically superior forces. By the end of American involvement in Vietnam, 48 SEALs had been killed in action, but estimates of their kill count reached as high as 2,000. Three Navy Seals received the Medal of Honor for actions in Vietnam.
Lieutenant Bob Kerry, Lieutenant Tom Norris, and Engineman Secondass Mike Thornton. But they remained fundamentally different from the Australians. SEALs were specialists who excelled at specific mission sets. Australians were something else, not specialists, predators, men who’d undergone a transformation that went beyond training into something more fundamental.
something that changed how they perceived the environment, how they moved through it, how they thought about their relationship to the terrain and the enemy. American observers who witnessed Australian SAS operations came away shaken, not frightened, shaken, because they’d seen capabilities that challenged basic assumptions about what was possible, about what trained men could achieve, about the limits of human performance in hostile environments.
Some, like the American liaison officer, Captain Morrison in the Template Story, requested transfers just to get away from methods that seemed to cross lines they weren’t comfortable crossing. Because here’s the thing about the Australians that made American commanders uncomfortable. They didn’t just fight the Vietkong, they hunted them.
And hunting requires a different mindset than fighting. Fighting has rules, conventions, limits. Hunting has one objective. Bring down the prey. The Australians approached counterinsurgency warfare with the psychology of hunters. And that psychology produced results that were both incredibly effective and deeply disturbing to observers raised on Western military tradition.
the body display doctrine, the playing cards, the way dead enemies were arranged to send specific psychological messages. These weren’t just battlefield tactics. They were calculated psychological operations designed to exploit Vietnamese superstitions about death and spirits. The Australians studied their enemy’s culture, identified pressure points, and applied psychological leverage with surgical precision.
American forces tried similar techniques. The Death Card Initiative distributed Ace of Spades, playing cards throughout Vietnam, trying to replicate Australian psychological warfare methods. But the American imitation missed the essential point. Leaving a calling card on a body you’ve killed is theater.
Leaving a calling card on a body you’ve staged to communicate a specific message to a specific audience is psychological warfare. The difference is intent, understanding, and execution. The Australians grasped all three. Most Americans grasped none. This isn’t a criticism of American capabilities. The SEALs were extraordinary warriors who achieved extraordinary results under extraordinarily difficult conditions.
They fought with courage, skill, and determination that honored their service and their sacrifice. But they were products of American military culture, trained according to American military doctrine, operating within American military constraints. And that culture, that doctrine, those constraints didn’t produce jungle phantoms.
The Australians came from a different tradition. A country that had spent a century operating on the margins of empire, fighting enemies who couldn’t be overwhelmed with firepower because there was no overwhelming firepower available. The Boore War taught Australians that patient riflemen could defeat superior numbers.
The Malayan emergency taught them that psychological operations could turn populations against insurgents. The Indonesian confrontation taught them that small, highly capable teams operating independently could achieve strategic effects. By the time they reached Vietnam, the Australian SAS had refined these lessons into an operational philosophy fundamentally different from American doctrine.
They didn’t try to destroy the enemy through attrition. They tried to make the enemy ineffective through fear. They didn’t clear and hold territory. They made territory psychologically hostile to enemy operations. They didn’t measure success in body count. They measured it in enemy behavior modification. And it worked.
In Fuaktoy province, the area of operations for the first Australian task force, Vietkong effectiveness declined dramatically between 1966 and 1971, despite the enemy maintaining adequate strength, supplies, and weapons. Their will had been broken by an enemy they couldn’t comprehend. Their operations had been disrupted by forces they couldn’t predict.
Their morale had been shattered by psychological pressure they couldn’t resist. American commanders wanted to bottle that capability. Wanted to replicate it across their forces. Wanted to create American jungle phantoms who could achieve the same results the Australians achieved. They never succeeded. Not because American soldiers lacked capability.
Because the transformation required to become what the Australians were couldn’t be achieved through Western training methods and institutional programs. Today, special operations forces around the world study Australian SAS methods from Vietnam as examples of unconventional warfare at its most effective.
The tracker programs, the psychological operations, the long range patrol doctrine have all been incorporated into modern special forces training. What was once classified as too controversial to acknowledge has become standard curriculum. Yet something has been lost in the translation. Modern special operations can replicate Australian tactics.
They struggle to replicate Australian psychology. The transformation that turns soldiers into hunters. The willingness to become something other than conventional warriors. The acceptance that effective predation requires becoming a predator not just in your training but in your soul. Roger Hayden understood this.
In those 10 days of silence, moving through swamps where you couldn’t see three feet ahead, watching men operate according to rules he barely comprehended, he glimpsed something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Not the horror of war. He’d seen plenty of that. The possibility of becoming something more than a trained operator, the possibility of transformation. He never achieved it.
Few Americans did. The cultural context wasn’t there. The institutional support didn’t exist. The training pipeline couldn’t produce it. American special operations forces became extraordinarily capable. But they remained fundamentally American, operating within American parameters, achieving American results.
The Australians were something else entirely. They’d taken Western military professionalism, combined it with indigenous knowledge systems that predated Western civilization, added psychological warfare techniques refined through generations of colonial conflict, and produced warriors who operated in dimensions American doctrine didn’t recognize existed.
That’s what those two words meant. We’re amateurs. Not false modesty, not self-deprecation, acknowledgment of a gulf that training couldn’t bridge, experience couldn’t close, and doctrine couldn’t explain. The SEALs were professionals operating at the peak of American military capability. The Australians were something beyond professional, something that required different foundations, different assumptions, different relationships with violence and terrain and the enemy.
The Vietnam War ended for Australia in 1971 when the last Australian combat troops departed. It ended for the United States in 1973. Though the fall of Saigon in 1975 provided the final punctuation mark, the lessons learned in those jungles, those swamps, those rice patties shaped special operations doctrine for the next 50 years. Some lessons were learned.
Others couldn’t be learned because they required cultural contexts that didn’t exist. The Australian SAS went on to become one of the world’s most respected special forces units. They deployed to East Teour, Afghanistan, Iraq. They developed capabilities in counterterrorism, hostage rescue, strategic reconnaissance.
They maintained the traditions and training methods that had made them effective in Vietnam. and they remained small, selective, elite in ways that mass cannot achieve. The Navy Seals evolved into a global force with multiple teams, thousands of personnel, capabilities spanning every domain of warfare.
They achieved legendary status through operations in Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq. They became household names through books, movies, television shows. They earned their reputation through decades of operations conducted in every hostile environment on Earth. But sometimes late at night when old warriors gather and the conversation turns to Vietnam, someone might mention the Australians and the ones who were there, the ones who operated with them, who learned from them, who witnessed what they could do. Those men get quiet
because they remember. They remember 10 days of silence. They remember fiveman patrols that made company-sized enemy units disappear. They remember footprints that looked local, movements that left no trace, men who became invisible in vegetation that shouldn’t hide a rabbit. They remember the Vietkong calling them jungle ghosts.
And they remember looking at those Australians and understanding that all their training, all their experience, all their proven capabilities amounted to amateur status compared to men who’d achieved transformation. Roger Hayden survived Vietnam. He served his country with honor and distinction. He trained new generations of seals, passing on everything he’d learned through blood and fear and experience.
He became a legend in the seal community, a warrior whose stories will be told as long as warriors gather. But he never forgot those 10 days. Never forgot the Australian sergeant who taught him that breathing could give you away. never forgot the lesson that the jungle doesn’t care about your training. It only cares if you belong.
Most Americans who served in Vietnam never encountered the Australian SAS. Most never knew they existed. But the ones who did, the ones who operated with them, who learned from them, who witnessed capabilities that seemed impossible, those men carry knowledge that can’t be fully articulated. Knowledge of what human beings can become.
When training combines with transformation, when skill merges with something deeper, when warriors evolve into something beyond warriors, they were just waiting to die. That’s what one observer said about enemy units that had to operate in areas where the Australians hunted, just waiting to die because there was no defense against an enemy you couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t predict.
No tactic that worked against men who’d become part of the jungle itself. No hope of survival when the jungle ghosts decided you were prey. The American military never replicated that capability. Never produced their own jungle ghosts. They produced extraordinary special operations forces. They developed tactics, techniques, and procedures that changed warfare.
They created warriors capable of achievements that earlier generations would have considered impossible. But they never created what the Australians were because some things can’t be created through institutional programs. Some transformations require elements that don’t exist in Western military culture. Some capabilities emerge only when specific conditions align in ways that can’t be engineered or replicated.
That’s the real lesson of the Australian SAS in Vietnam. Not that they were better soldiers than the Americans. They weren’t. Not that they had superior equipment or training programs. They didn’t. They had something else. something that emerged from the intersection of indigenous knowledge, colonial experience, small unit traditions, and psychological warfare doctrine refined through conflicts most Americans had never heard of.
They had become hunters and in the jungle when you’re hunting men who know that terrain better than you know your own home. When you’re operating behind enemy lines without support or extraction capability. When survival depends on becoming invisible to an enemy that’s looking for you. Hunters have all the advantages. The seals learned what they could.
They incorporated Australian techniques into their doctrine. They improved their field craft, refined their movement methods, enhanced their tracking capabilities. They became better operators through that exchange program, better warriors, but they remained operators. The Australians were predators.
And there’s a difference that training can’t bridge. That difference explained why 120 Australian SAS soldiers could dominate a province while 500,000 American troops struggled to control a country. Why fiveman patrols achieved what battalionsized operations couldn’t. Why the Vietkong, who’d successfully fought the French and were holding their own against the Americans, called the Australians jungle ghosts and refused to operate in their areas.
The difference explained why Roger Hayden, graduate of every elite school the United States military offered, veteran of multiple combat tours, operator with proven skills and courage, looked at those Australians and said two words that captured a truth American military culture didn’t want to acknowledge were amateurs.
Not in skill, not in courage, not in dedication or professionalism, in transformation, in the fundamental change required to become something the jungle accepts rather than something the jungle fights. In the psychology that separates operators from predators, warriors from hunters, trained professionals from men who’ve evolved into something else entirely.
The practical implications of this difference manifested in every aspect of operations. When SEALs planned a mission, they started with the objective and worked backward through logistics, insertion methods, firepower requirements, extraction plans, and contingency operations. Detailed planning that accounted for every variable they could anticipate.
Professional military planning at its finest. When Australians planned a mission, they started with the terrain. How does the jungle want us to move through it? Where are the natural paths of least resistance? What does the enemy expect? And how can we do the opposite? What psychological impact will our presence create? And how can we maximize it? They didn’t fight the terrain.
They used it. They didn’t impose their will on the environment. They found the environment’s will and aligned with it. This philosophical difference produced tactical differences that compounded over time. Seals carried impressive amounts of firepower because American doctrine emphasized overwhelming force at the point of contact.
Stoner machine guns, M60s, grenade launchers, claymore mines, enough ammunition to sustain extended firefights. The weight was substantial, but the payoff was undeniable. When SEALs made contact with the enemy, they could bring devastating firepower to bear. Australians carried minimal equipment because their doctrine emphasized avoiding detection entirely.
If the enemy never knew you were there, you didn’t need overwhelming firepower, a suppressed weapon for silent kills, basic load of ammunition, minimal rations, water purification tablets, and absolute trust in fieldcraft to keep them invisible. The weight savings allowed for faster movement, longer operations, and reduced noise signature.
But it required confidence that detection wouldn’t occur. seals inserted via helicopter or boat, making their presence known from the moment they entered an area of operations. The sound of rotor blades or boat engines announced that Americans were coming. The enemy might not know exactly where, but they knew someone was hunting. This had tactical advantages.
Sometimes you want the enemy to know you’re there, to react, to make mistakes born of fear or haste. Australians inserted on foot, walking into operational areas from kilometers away, sometimes taking days to reach their objective. No sound signature, no telltale signs of foreign presence. They appeared as if they’d always been there, as if they were part of the terrain itself.
This had different tactical advantages. An enemy who doesn’t know you’re there won’t change their behavior. They’ll continue operating according to established patterns, making themselves predictable, vulnerable. These differences extended to command and control. SEAL operations involved regular radio contact with base, situation reports, coordination with supporting elements, professional military communications discipline that kept commanders informed and allowed for rapid adjustment to changing circumstances.
The downside was electronic signature, the risk of radio direction finding, the possibility that even encrypted communications created a pattern the enemy could exploit. Australian operations often involved complete radio silence for days or weeks. The patrol leader had discretion to make tactical decisions without consulting higher authority.
trust that the men in the field understood the situation better than anyone at base could. The upside was complete electronic silence. Zero signature for enemy direction finding. Absolute operational security. The downside was commanders at base had no idea what was happening until the patrol returned. Different approaches, different philosophies, different results.
American special operations forces excelled at direct action missions, raids on specific targets, prisoner snatches, quick strikes designed to achieve specific objectives, and extract before enemy reinforcements arrived. The SEALs perfected this approach. Their operations in the Meong Delta disrupted Vietkong operations, captured valuable intelligence, eliminated key personnel.
Tactical successes that accumulated into strategic impact. Australian special operations forces excelled at reconnaissance and psychological operations. long range patrols that mapped enemy infrastructure, identified supply routes, tracked movement patterns, not destroying the enemy directly, but gathering information that allowed conventional forces to destroy them efficiently and in the process creating psychological pressure that degraded enemy effectiveness independent of physical destruction.
Both approaches worked. Both achieved results, but they achieved different kinds of results through different methods based on different assumptions about the nature of warfare in jungle environments. The SEALs assumed the jungle was hostile terrain where Americans needed to impose their will through superior skill and firepower. Work harder than the enemy.
Move faster, hit harder, use technology and training to overcome environmental disadvantages. Very American, very effective within certain parameters. The Australians assumed the jungle was neutral terrain that would favor whoever understood it better. Don’t impose your will.
Find the jungle’s rhythms and work within them. become part of the ecosystem rather than an intrusion into it. Use patience and understanding to achieve advantages that firepower couldn’t create. Very Australian, very effective within different parameters. Neither approach was inherently superior. They were optimized for different objectives under different constraints.
American forces had access to overwhelming firepower, helicopter support, artillery, air strikes. It made sense to develop tactics that leverage those advantages. Australian forces operated under tight resource constraints with limited support available. It made sense to develop tactics that required minimal external support.
But in Vietnam, in the specific context of counterinsurgency warfare against an enemy who’d been fighting in that terrain for decades, the Australian approach produced some results that American methods couldn’t achieve. Specifically, the psychological dominance that made enemy units combat ineffective without destroying them physically.
This fascinated American military intelligence. How do you make an enemy stop fighting without killing them? How do you degrade their effectiveness without engaging them directly? How do you achieve strategic objectives through psychological pressure rather than physical destruction? These questions drove research programs that continued long after the Vietnam War ended.
The answers were complex and culturally specific. The Vietkong were peasant soldiers, many of them conscripted, fighting far from home in terrain that was familiar but not necessarily friendly. They relied on ideological commitment to sustain morale in the face of superior American firepower. They used knowledge of terrain and local support networks to offset technological disadvantages.
They believed they could win through patience and endurance, outlasting American commitment to a war that cost American lives, but didn’t directly threaten American territory. Australian SAS operations attacked every one of those foundations. The psychological warfare demonstrated that the jungle itself could turn hostile.
Local knowledge didn’t protect you when the enemy moved through terrain better than you did. Ideological commitment wavered when comrades disappeared without trace or died under circumstances that suggested supernatural intervention. Patience and endurance became liabilities when the enemy could appear anywhere at any time without warning.
The result was combat ineffectiveness. achieved through psychological pressure rather than physical destruction. Units that maintained adequate strength, supplies, and weapons, but refused to operate because their soldiers believed they were being hunted by forces they couldn’t fight. From a counterinsurgency perspective, this was the holy grail.
enemy forces that took themselves off the battlefield without requiring resources to destroy them. American commanders wanted to replicate this capability at scale. Wanted to create psychological pressure across all of South Vietnam that would degrade Vietkong effectiveness without requiring the resources that conventional military operations demanded.
They never achieved it. The cultural context that made Australian methods effective didn’t exist in American operations. American soldiers were products of a society that valued technological solutions, overwhelming force, and decisive victory. They’d been raised on movies where the good guys won through superior firepower and courage.
They’d been trained in military schools that emphasized planning, coordination, and combined arms operations. They excelled at what they’d been trained to do. Australian soldiers, particularly SAS operators, were products of a different tradition. A society that had fought colonial wars on shoestring budgets where cleverness mattered more than firepower.
a military tradition that emphasized individual initiative, small unit operations, and achieving objectives through indirect approaches. A selection and training process that filtered for specific psychological profiles and developed capabilities over 18 months rather than weeks. You couldn’t transform American soldiers into Australian SAS operators through a training course.
The foundations were different. The cultural context was different. The institutional support was different. The objectives were different. American special operations needed to be scalable, deployable globally, capable of operating within American military command structures. Australian SAS needed to be elite, highly selective, optimized for specific mission sets within specific constraints.
Both forces were elite. Both were effective, but they were elite and effective in different ways for different reasons toward different ends. This brings us back to Roger Hayden and those 10 days of silence. What he learned wasn’t just fieldcraft techniques or tactical procedures. He learned that there were valid approaches to jungle warfare that his training had never addressed.
that capabilities existed outside American military doctrine. That transformation was possible beyond what institutional training programs could achieve. He also learned the limits of what could be transferred between cultures. He could learn Australian techniques. He could practice their movement methods. He could study their tactical approaches.
But he couldn’t become Australian. couldn’t transform into something his culture and training hadn’t prepared him to become. The gap wasn’t about individual capability. It was about systemic differences in how two militaries approached the same problem. The SEALs incorporated lessons from the Australians into their doctrine.
Improved fieldcraft training became standard. Noise discipline was emphasized more strongly. patients in ambush positions was cultivated. Tracking skills were developed. The exchange program produced tangible improvements in SEAL capabilities. But the fundamental difference remained. SEALs were elite operators within American military culture.
Australians had become something else through a process that couldn’t be replicated within American institutional constraints. not better, different, optimized for different conditions through different evolutionary pressures. This is perhaps the most important lesson from the meeting between US Navy Seals and Australian SAS in Vietnam.
Different doesn’t mean better or worse. Different means optimized for different conditions under different constraints toward different objectives. The challenge for military institutions is recognizing when capabilities developed in one cultural context can’t be directly transferred to another context, no matter how valuable they might be.
American special operations forces today are arguably the most capable in the world. They operate globally across every domain. They’ve learned from experiences in Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq. They’ve incorporated lessons from allied forces, including the British SAS, Australian SASR, Canadian JTF2, and others.
They represent the cutting edge of what institutional military training can produce, but they’re still fundamentally American, still optimized for American ways of warfare, still operating within American military culture. And that’s not a criticism. Its recognition that military forces are products of the societies that create them, shaped by cultural values, institutional constraints, and historical experiences that can’t be easily changed or transferred.
The Australian SAS demonstrated that different approaches to special operations warfare could produce extraordinary results under specific conditions. They didn’t invalidate American methods. They expanded understanding of what was possible, what alternatives existed, what capabilities could emerge from different cultural contexts and institutional frameworks.
That’s what those two words meant. We’re amateurs, not because seals lacked capability, because they’d encountered a different kind of capability, developed through different processes, optimized for different conditions, amateur relative to that specific capability, in that specific context, for that specific approach to jungle warfare, professional in everything else.
The humility required to acknowledge this is rare in military culture. Admitting that others might have capabilities you don’t, approaches you can’t replicate, advantages you can’t overcome through training or technology alone. But that humility is necessary for learning, for growth, for recognizing that military excellence takes many forms and that your excellence doesn’t invalidate others excellence developed through different paths.
Roger Hayden had that humility. So did many of the SEALs who operated with Australians. They saw men who could do things they couldn’t do, operating according to principles they hadn’t been taught, achieving results through methods that seemed impossible. Instead of dismissing it or making excuses, they acknowledged the gap, called themselves amateurs relative to that specific capability.
And in acknowledging the gap, they learned what could be learned and incorporated what could be incorporated. That’s professional growth. That’s how elite forces become better. Not by assuming they’re already the best at everything, but by recognizing specific capabilities others have developed and determining what can be learned, what can be transferred, and what remains unique to specific cultural contexts.
The meeting between US Navy Seals and Australian SAS in Vietnam represents one of the most significant exchanges in special operations history. Not because it revolutionized American tactics, though it did improve them, because it demonstrated that elite status is context dependent, that different approaches to warfare can coexist and complement each other, and that learning requires humility to acknowledge when others have achieved mastery in areas where you’re still developing.
The SEALs learned. They grew. They incorporated Australian lessons into their doctrine and became better operators because of it. They never became Australian, but they didn’t need to. They became better versions of themselves by understanding that excellence takes many forms and that learning from others doesn’t diminish your own capabilities.
That’s what 10 days of silence taught. That’s what the jungle ghosts showed. That’s what the meeting between two elite forces in the heat and horror of Vietnam demonstrated for anyone willing to learn. Different isn’t better or worse. Different is just different. And sometimes understanding that difference is the first step toward excellence.
We’re amateurs. two words that changed how American special operations forces thought about jungle warfare, about learning from allies, about the limits of institutional training programs, and the possibilities of cultural knowledge systems developed over generations. Two words that captured humility, respect, and professional growth in the face of capabilities that seemed impossible.
They weren’t better soldiers. They were different creatures. And in the Vietnam jungle, where conventional warfare meant nothing and psychological dominance meant everything, that difference changed the war.
