Five American soldiers walked into the jungle alongside four Australians. 4 days later, the Americans walked out, changed men. Their afteraction report contained a single phrase that would echo through Mayv headquarters for months. We are not ready for this. Wait, not ready. These were Rangers from the 101st Airborne.
Men who had survived firefights that would break most soldiers. And yet, after 96 hours moving through Vietnamese jungle with Australian SAS operators, they filed a report that read, “Less like a military assessment and more like a confession of inadequacy.” Oh, this story gets so much stranger than you think because what those American soldiers witnessed in those four days.
The methods, the silence, the way those Australians moved through triple canopy jungle like they owned every shadow was so fundamentally different from everything they had been trained to believe about warfare that some of them requested never to patrol with the Aussies again. One lieutenant came back and told his commanding officer three words that got immediately classified. They’re not human.
You’re about to discover why the most powerful military on Earth started sending its elite soldiers to learn from 120 men from a country most Americans knew only for kangaroos and beer. And trust me, by the end of this video, you’ll understand why the Vietkong stopped referring to them as soldiers at all.
They called them something else. Maang, the jungle ghosts. Stay with me. Natrang, September 1966. The May TV Recondo School had just opened its doors to train American long- range reconnaissance patrol personnel in the dark arts of jungle warfare. The facility sprawled across a compound near the massive naval air base, its training schedule designed to push soldiers to the absolute limits of endurance and skill.
three weeks, 260 hours of classroom and field instruction culminating in an actual combat patrol through enemy controlled territory. The school’s commonant, Major AJ Baker, had assembled what he believed to be the finest reconnaissance instructors in the American military. Green Berets who had run operations from the demilitarized zone to the Meong Delta.
Veterans of Project Delta, men who had earned their reputations tracking communist forces through some of the most hostile terrain in Southeast Asia. But Baker knew something that troubled him deeply, something he would not speak about publicly, but that kept him awake on humid Vietnamese nights. His instructors, skilled as they were, were teaching methods developed for a different kind of war.
And there was one group operating in country who had already solved the puzzle that American forces were still trying to figure out. The Australians had arrived in Puaktoy province in April of 1966 with a mandate that differed fundamentally from American doctrine. While US forces measured success in body counts and territory seized, the Australians had been given a single objective.
Pacify the province using whatever methods necessary. The key phrase was whatever methods. Within the Australian task force operated a unit so small it barely registered on American organizational charts. The Special Air Service Regiment. three squadrons rotating through Vietnam, never more than 120 men in country at any given time.
Their official designation was reconnaissance. Their actual function was something far more primal, something that would force American military doctrine to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of jungle warfare. The first American personnel to observe Australian SAS operations did so almost by accident. In May of 1967, a squad of US Longrange Reconnaissance Patrol soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division had been attached to one squadron SAS for what was supposed to be a routine exchange program.
The Americans arrived at Nuiidat, the Australian base, expecting to find familiar patterns. Professional soldiers conducting professional operations with perhaps a few tactical variations that came from operating in a different area of operations. What they found instead would fundamentally challenge everything they understood about warfare in Vietnam.
Sergeant Michael Patterson had served two tours in Vietnam before his assignment to the Australian Exchange Program. He had run patrols through the Iron Triangle, conducted search and destroy operations in the Central Highlands, and survived firefights that had earned him two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He was not, by any measure, a novice to jungle combat.
His first morning at New Dat Patterson watched an Australian SAS patrol prepare for insertion. Five men, each carrying approximately 80 lb of equipment. M16 rifles with modified flash suppressors. Enough ammunition to simulate the firepower of a force three times their size. Rations for 5 days. No air support pre-positioned. No artillery fire plan.
No quick reaction force on standby, just five men who would walk into enemy controlled territory and not make contact with base for 72 hours. What struck Patterson immediately was the silence. American patrols buzzed with lastminute activity before insertion. Radio checks, weapons checks, final coordination with helicopter crews.
The Australians conducted their pre-mission brief in whispers so soft that Patterson, standing less than 10 feet away, could not hear what was being discussed. They loaded into the Irakcoy helicopter without a word. No hand signals, no verbal confirmation, nothing but a series of touches on shoulders and arms that communicated information Patterson could not decode.
And then they were gone, swallowed by the green that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Patterson’s own patrol was scheduled to insert the following day into an area northeast of Newui Dat where intelligence suggested Vietkong courier activity. Standard reconnaissance mission observe and report.
His patrol leader, Lieutenant James Kowalsski, had coordinated with the Australian operations officer to ensure no overlap with ongoing SAS operations. The Americans would stay in their sector. The Australians would stay in theirs. professional courtesy between Allied forces, except the jungle does not respect operational boundaries drawn on maps in aironditioned headquarters.
And what happened over the following four days would reveal a truth that American military leadership was not prepared to acknowledge. Patterson’s patrol moved through the jungle using techniques they had been taught at Fort Benning and refined through months of operations in country. They maintained tactical spacing, 5 meter intervals between men.
They used hand signals for communication. They moved deliberately, clearing their path, establishing security at each halt. By American standards, they were conducting a textbook patrol. By Australian standards, they might as well have been banging drums. On the second day, approximately 14 hours into their patrol. Patterson’s pointman froze.
The signal rippled back through the formation. Something ahead. Movement in the vegetation approximately 30 m to the front. The Americans dropped into defensive positions, weapons oriented toward the potential threat. Standard immediate action drill. What happened next would be seared into Patterson’s memory for the rest of his life.
The vegetation ahead parted without a sound, and a figure emerged from shadows that should not have been able to conceal a human form. Australian SAS camouflage paint, transforming his face into something that belonged to the jungle itself. He materialized so close to Patterson’s position that the American sergeant could see the grain of dirt on the man’s forearm.
The Australian did not speak. He simply raised one finger to his lips in the universal gesture for silence, then pointed to the ground three meters to the right of Patterson’s position. Patterson looked where the Australian indicated and felt ice water replace the blood in his veins. Footprint, fresh, less than an hour old based on the moisture content.
Vietkong patrol had passed within 3 meters of where Patterson’s team had established their security halt 45 minutes earlier. The Americans had not seen them, had not heard them, had not even suspected their presence. But the Australians, moving through the same jungle, had tracked the enemy patrol for over 2 kilometers and positioned themselves to observe Patterson’s team, specifically to warn them.
The Australian SAS operator made a series of hand gestures that Patterson did not understand, then simply melted back into the jungle. No sound, no disturbance of vegetation. One moment present, the next moment gone, as if he had never existed at all. Kowalsski made the decision to abort the patrol and return to base. The mission had been compromised.
The Americans had been operating in an area with active enemy presence and had been completely unaware. But more disturbing was the realization that the Australians had been tracking both the Vietkong and the Americans simultaneously moving through the same terrain with a level of stealth that rendered them effectively invisible.
The afteraction debrief at NUI DOT lasted three hours. The Australian operations officer, a captain, whose name would remain classified in official reports, explained with clinical precision exactly how his patrol had observed Patterson’s team from the moment of insertion. The Americans, he noted, had made 47 distinct tactical errors that would have resulted in casualties if the Vietkong had been actively hunting them rather than simply moving through the area.
The radio checks every two hours created a predictable pattern. The movement techniques generated noise audible from over 100 meters in dense jungle. The tactical spacing was too regular, creating a visual signature recognizable even through triple canopy. The Americans were, in the Australians assessment, operating as if the jungle was their enemy rather than their ally.
Patterson’s report to his commanding officer upon return to his unit was blunt to the point of insubordination. American long range patrol doctrine as currently taught and practiced was inadequate for operations in Vietnamese jungle. The techniques that worked in the pine forests of Fort Benning did not translate to Southeast Asian vegetation.
More critically, the American approach to reconnaissance was fundamentally compromised by assumptions that had no basis in the reality of jungle warfare. The report concluded with a recommendation that would ripple through MACV headquarters. American LRRP personnel should receive training from Australian SAS operators before conducting independent operations.
The recommendation landed on Major Baker’s desk at the Ricondo School like a hand grenade. Baker was a career special forces officer who had built the curriculum based on the accumulated wisdom of American reconnaissance doctrine. The suggestion that his program was inadequate, that American soldiers needed to learn from foreign forces struck at the core of professional pride.
But Baker was also a pragmatist who understood that ego had no place in combat operations. If the Australians had developed methods superior to American techniques, those methods needed to be studied, understood, and integrated into US training. In September of 1966, the first Australian SAS instructors arrived at the MACV Recondo School at Natrang.
What those instructors brought with them was not simply a different set of tactics. It was an entirely different philosophy of warfare. The Americans approached jungle operations as a technical problem to be solved through superior firepower and technology. Helicopter insertion to avoid ground movement. Radio communications to maintain command and control.
Artillery support prepositioned to provide fire support on demand. The jungle was the obstacle to be overcome through American industrial and technological superiority. The Australians approached jungle warfare from a perspective that seemed almost mystical to their American counterparts. The jungle was not the enemy. The jungle was the weapon.
Every sound, every shadow, every pattern of vegetation could be used either against you or for you depending on whether you understood the language the jungle spoke. The first Australian instructor to address a class of recondo students was a sergeant whose name appears in declassified documents only as warrant officer S.
His opening statement to the assembled American soldiers would be quoted in afteraction reports for years. Everything you have been taught about moving through jungle is designed to get you killed. We are going to teach you how to become invisible. The Americans, products of a military culture that valued aggression and decisive action, struggled with concepts that seemed almost passive.
The Australians taught movement techniques that prioritized silence over speed, observation over action, patience over aggression. A typical American patrol might cover 5 to 8 km in a day. An Australian patrol might cover less than 2 kilometers, but would do so with such complete awareness of their environment that enemy forces could pass within meters without detecting their presence.
The technical aspects were teachable. The Australians demonstrated how to move through dense vegetation by feeling with hands rather than pushing through with body weight. How to place each foot by testing ground before committing weight. How to navigate at night using ambient light filtered through canopy rather than artificial illumination.
How to identify enemy presence through environmental indicators, disturbed insects, changes in bird calls, the smell of rice and new aokam carried on wind from hundreds of meters away. But the deeper lesson, the one that American soldiers found most difficult to internalize, was psychological. The transformation from soldier to hunter.
American military doctrine of the 1960s was built on World War II experience, large unit operations, overwhelming firepower, the assumption that superior resources would inevitably defeat inferior forces. This doctrine had crushed the Vermacht and the Imperial Japanese Army. It had fought the Chinese and the North Koreans to a standstill.
But in the jungles of Vietnam, where the enemy refused to mass for conventional battle, where victory could not be measured in territory taken or cities captured, American doctrine encountered its limitations. The Australians had learned different lessons from different wars. The Boore war taught them that conventional forces could be defeated by mobile enemies who refused to fight by European rules.
The Malayan emergency demonstrated that counterinsurgency required patience, intelligence, and the ability to operate for extended periods in hostile territory without support. The Indonesian confrontation in Borneo refined these lessons into a doctrine specifically adapted for jungle warfare. The result was a military culture that approached reconnaissance as hunting rather than as information gathering.
And hunting, the Australians understood, required a specific mindset that could not be taught through technical training alone. You had to want to become predator rather than soldier. You had to accept that the rules of civilized warfare did not apply when you were alone in enemy territory with no support available.
You had to be willing to do things that would seem excessive, even disturbing to conventional forces. The first American LRRP teams trained by Australian instructors returned to their units changed. Not just tactically proficient, but psychologically different. They moved differently, spoke less, approached patrols with an intensity that made their fellow soldiers uncomfortable.
Some unit commanders embraced the transformation. Others requested that their personnel be withdrawn from Australian training programs because the methods being taught were inconsistent with American military values. The controversy came to a head in November of 1967 when an American LRRP team trained by Australian instructors conducted an ambush that resulted in seven enemy killed without a single shot being fired.
The team had positioned claymore mines along a trail intersection and waited in absolute silence for 18 hours until a Vietkong courier element walked into the kill zone. The ambush itself was textbook. But what happened afterward triggered an investigation that reached the desk of MACV Commander General William West Morland. The American team had arranged the bodies in a specific pattern before withdrawing.
Three dead Vietkong positioned sitting upright against trees, weapons across their laps, playing cards tucked into their collars. The ace of spades, death card. The psychological warfare technique had been taught to them by their Australian instructors as a method of inducing fear in enemy forces who discovered the bodies.
Vietkong units operated on tight schedules. When couriers failed to report, search teams were dispatched. Those search teams would find their comrades arranged in ways that suggested supernatural intervention. The psychological impact was devastating, but American military doctrine had specific prohibitions against desecration of enemy dead.
The line between tactical psychological warfare and violation of the laws of war was subject to interpretation. The American team had not mutilated the bodies, had not taken trophies, had simply positioned them in a manner calculated to induce maximum psychological impact on whoever discovered them.
Was this a legitimate military tactic or a war crime? The investigation concluded that no regulations had been violated. The bodies had not been desecrated. No prohibited actions had been taken. But the incident revealed a deeper tension within American military culture. The Australians were teaching methods that worked, that achieved results, that reduced friendly casualties while increasing enemy losses.
But those methods operated in a gray zone that made conventional military leadership uncomfortable. The Australian approach to psychological warfare went far beyond body positioning. They understood that in guerilla warfare, perception was as important as reality. A Vietkong unit that believed Australian patrols could move through jungle without leaving trace, that could track enemy forces across kilometers of dense vegetation, that could kill without sound or warning.
would modify their behavior based on that fear, even if the reality was less dramatic. The Australians cultivated this reputation deliberately. They cut the soles from their boots and replaced them with strips of tire rubber that matched Vietnamese sandals. Their footprints, if noticed at all, appeared to be local forces rather than Western soldiers.
They practiced movement techniques until they could patrol for hours without disturbing a single leaf. They learned to smell enemy positions from hundreds of meters downwind by recognizing the distinct odor of Vietnamese diet. Rice and fish sauce and tobacco carried on the breeze. But perhaps most disturbing to American observers was the Australian practice of what they called pattern disruption.
The Vietkong, like any military force, operated on patterns, supply routes used on specific schedules, couriers moving between bases at predictable times, guard rotations following established procedures. The Australians would identify these patterns through patient observation over days or weeks, and then they would disrupt them in ways calculated to induce maximum confusion and fear.
A supply cache would be discovered with items rearranged, but nothing stolen. A guard post would find signs of intrusion, footprints leading to and from their position, but no actual attack. Centuries would disappear during routine movements. Bodies found days later in locations that seemed impossible given the security measures in place.
The effect on Vietkong morale was measurable through capture documents and interrogation reports. Unit commanders reported increasing difficulty maintaining discipline in areas where Australian SAS operated. Desertion rates spiked. Soldiers refused night patrol assignments. Some units conducted elaborate spiritual rituals before entering areas known to be patrolled by the jungle ghosts.
American military intelligence struggled to quantify this effect in conventional metrics. There was no body count associated with psychological degradation. No territory seized. No enemy units destroyed in decisive battle, but the intelligence assessments were clear. In areas where Australian SAS conducted sustained operations, enemy effectiveness declined dramatically, even though their numerical strength remained largely intact.
By mid 1968, the Australian training program at Ricondo School had expanded significantly. Australian instructors were now teaching not just movement and reconnaissance techniques, but the broader philosophy of jungle warfare. Classes on tracking methods drew heavily from Aboriginal techniques that had been passed down through thousands of years of hunting in hostile environments.
The Australians had recruited indigenous soldiers specifically for their traditional tracking skills, and these methods were now being taught to American LRRP personnel with remarkable results. The concept seemed almost absurd at first. Aboriginal trackers from the Australian outback teaching American soldiers how to move through Vietnamese jungle.
But the underlying principles transcended specific terrain. Reading sign, understanding how humans disturbed their environment through passage, identifying age of tracks through moisture content and vegetation recovery, predicting enemy movement based on environmental factors rather than tactical doctrine. One American LRRP soldier interviewed decades later for a declassified oral history project described the experience of learning from an Australian instructor who had trained with Aboriginal trackers. He could tell you
how many men had passed through an area, how long ago, whether they were carrying heavy loads, even estimate their morale based on how they walked. He would smell the ground and tell you if cooking fires had been lit in the area within the last 24 hours. It was like learning from someone who could read a language you didn’t even know existed.
The transformation of American LRP capabilities was measurable. Units that had undergone Australian training reported higher success rates in reconnaissance missions, lower casualty rates, and significantly improved intelligence gathering. But the integration of Australian methods into American doctrine faced institutional resistance at multiple levels.
Some commanders viewed the Australian approach as insufficiently aggressive. General West Morland had famously complained that Australian forces were not being aggressive enough compared to American units conducting large-scale search and destroy operations. The Australian focus on patience, observation, and psychological warfare did not align with American metrics of success based on body counts and territory seized.
But other American commanders recognized that the Australian approach achieved strategic effects disproportionate to the resources invested. A five-man patrol operating for 2 weeks could degrade enemy effectiveness more than a battalionized sweep and clear operation that generated hundreds of casualties on both sides, but ultimately changed nothing about control of the area.
The debate over tactical philosophy revealed fundamental differences in how the two allies conceptualized the nature of the Vietnam War. Americans saw it as a conventional conflict that could be won through attrition and superior firepower. Australians saw it as a counterinsurgency requiring patient intelligence gathering, selective application of force, and sustained psychological pressure.
The Australian SAS kill ratio in Vietnam would eventually reach estimates exceeding 30-1 in some operations. Over the course of their deployment from 1966 to 1971, approximately 580 Australian SAS soldiers would conduct nearly 1,200 patrols. They would kill an estimated 500 to 600 enemy soldiers while suffering one killed in action, one died of wounds, three accidental deaths, one missing, and one death from illness.
28 would be wounded. These statistics represented the highest kill ratio of any unit operating in Vietnam, allied or enemy. But the numbers only told part of the story. The real impact of Australian SAS operations was in areas that could not be quantified through conventional military metrics.
The Vietkong referred to them as ma run, jungle ghosts, phantoms. The terminology was significant because it revealed the psychological dimension of Australian effectiveness. The vivby did not fear the Australian simply because they were skilled soldiers. They feared them because they seemed to operate according to rules that made no sense within conventional military frameworks.
They appeared without warning. They killed without sound. They moved through areas that should have been secure with apparent impunity. And most disturbing to Vietnamese peasant soldiers raised on folktales of forest spirits, they left signs of their presence that seemed designed to suggest supernatural intervention.
American soldiers who conducted joint operations with Australian SAS units came back changed by the experience. Some requested additional training, wanting to learn more of the methods that made the Australians so effective. Others requested never to patrol with the Aussies again, disturbed by approaches to warfare that seemed to exist in a moral gray zone.
One Marine officer in a classified afteraction report that would not be declassified until 2008 wrote that observing Australian SAS operations was like watching men who had stopped pretending that warfare in the jungle had anything to do with honor or civilized behavior. They had become hunters in the most primal sense, and it was both impressive and deeply unsettling.
The tension between effectiveness and acceptability would define the American relationship with Australian methods throughout the war. The Pentagon wanted the results that Australian techniques achieved. Lower friendly casualties, higher enemy losses, improved intelligence gathering, psychological dominance over defined areas of operations.
But American military culture struggled with methods that seemed to prioritize stealth and patience over decisive action. That used enemy dead as instruments of psychological warfare. That required soldiers to transform themselves psychologically in ways that might make reintegration into civilian society problematic.
This concern was not theoretical. Post-traumatic stress rates among Australian Vietnam veterans would eventually exceed those of American veterans despite the Australians serving in smaller numbers and sustaining fewer casualties. The transformation that made them devastatingly effective operators, the psychological adaptation to hunting humans in hostile territory, came at a cost that Australian authorities would spend decades attempting to minimize.
The men who learned to move through jungle like predators, who developed the patience to lie motionless for hours while enemy patrols passed meters away, who cultivated the mindset necessary to use every tool, including fear and superstition to degrade enemy effectiveness, did not simply return to civilian life unchanged.
The final American assessment of Australian SIS operations in Vietnam would not be completed until 1974, 3 years after the last Australian combat troops departed. Classified top secret and distributed to fewer than 50 recipients, the report reached conclusions that 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 kill ratio far exceeded American averages across all unit types. Second, indigenous tracking methods 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 resources invested. And fourth, most controversially, Australian methods achieve these results while operating under significantly fewer restrictions than American forces.
The classified annex noted that certain Australian practices regarding treatment of enemy dead and conduct of psychological operations would likely violate standing MACV directives if conducted by US personnel. This observation ensured the report would remain classified for decades. The Pentagon had no interest in publicizing that their most effective allies in Vietnam had succeeded partly by doing things American forces were prohibited from doing.
The political implications were too dangerous. The moral implications were too uncomfortable. Better to let the Australian contribution fade into historical obscurity. But the soldiers who served alongside Australian SAS operators never forgot. In the decades following Vietnam, American special operations forces would study Australian methods as examples of unconventional warfare at its most effective.
The tracker programs, the psychological operations, the long range patrol doctrine, all would be incorporated into modern special forces training. What was once considered too controversial to acknowledge became standard curriculum. Delta Force, founded in 1977, drew heavily on lessons learned from Australian SAS operations in Vietnam.
The emphasis on small unit tactics, extended operations without support, and psychological preparation for operating in morally ambiguous environments all reflected Australian influence. Yet something was lost in translation. Modern American special operations could replicate Australian tactics. They could teach the movement techniques, the tracking methods, the ambush procedures, but they struggled to replicate the psychology, the transformation from soldier to hunter, the willingness to become something other than a
conventional warrior, the acceptance that effective operations in counterinsurgency required methods that civilized society found uncomfortable to acknowledge. The Australians had been willing to cross boundaries that American military culture could not fully embrace. The legacy of Australian SAS operations in Vietnam extends beyond tactical innovations and training curricula.
It represents a fundamental question about the nature of warfare in the modern era. When facing enemies who refuse to fight by conventional rules, who blend into civilian populations, who use terror and guerilla tactics to achieve strategic objectives, how far can democratic militaries go in adopting similar methods while maintaining the moral high ground? The Australians demonstrated that it was possible to defeat insurgents through patience, intelligence, and selective application of force rather than through
overwhelming firepower and attrition. But they also demonstrated that such methods required soldiers to operate in psychological spaces that conventional military training did not prepare them for. The American soldiers who filed reports saying, “We are not ready for this.” after patrolling with Australian SAS were identifying more than tactical inadequacy.
They were recognizing that the transformation required to fight effectively in the jungle to become hunters rather than soldiers demanded a psychological commitment that American military culture was ambivalent about requiring from its personnel. The Australians were willing to pay that price. The results spoke for themselves. Areas where Australian SAS operated saw dramatic declines in enemy effectiveness without corresponding increases in civilian casualties or violations of the laws of war.
They achieved what American forces struggled to accomplish, psychological dominance over territory without resorting to the wholesale destruction that characterized much of the American approach. Today, when special operations forces around the world study Vietnam era unconventional warfare, Australian SAS operations appear as case studies in how small numbers of highly trained personnel can achieve disproportionate strategic effects.
The lessons extend far beyond jungle warfare tactics. They touch on fundamental questions about military culture, the psychology of combat, and the boundaries of acceptable methods in counterinsurgency operations. The phrase stay behind me that American soldiers learned to say when moving with Australian patrols was more than acknowledgment of superior tactical skills.
It was recognition that the Australians had gone to places both physical and psychological that American military doctrine was not prepared to follow. The jungle ghosts of Buaktui province returned home to Australia in 1971. Carrying knowledge that civilian society did not want to acknowledge. They had learned to hunt humans through terrain so hostile that survival required becoming part of the landscape itself.
They had mastered the art of inducing fear through psychological manipulation and calculated violence. They had demonstrated that wars could be won through patience and intelligence rather than through firepower and destruction. And they had shown that the transformation required to achieve such results could not be easily reversed when soldiers returned to civilian life.
The methods live on in special operations training programs around the world. The men who developed and perfected those methods in the jungles of Vietnam largely disappeared from public view. their contributions classified or simply forgotten in the broader narrative of a war that America wanted to move past.
But their legacy endures in every special operations unit that emphasizes stealth over aggression, intelligence over firepower, psychological preparation over technical training. The Australian SAS in Vietnam proved that 120 men willing to transform themselves into something other than conventional soldiers could achieve what 500,000 American troops could not.
They won their war and in doing so they forced American military doctrine to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of warfare in the modern era. Truths that remain relevant today as Western militaries continue to grapple with insurgencies and unconventional threats around the world. The jungle ghosts taught American soldiers that sometimes the most effective weapon is not the one you carry, but the fear you can induce in your enemy’s mind.
that sometimes victory comes not from decisive battle but from patient degradation of enemy morale and capability. That sometimes the rules of civilized warfare must be bent if not broken to achieve objectives that conventional methods cannot accomplish. These lessons were written in the classified reports that American liaison officers filed after patrolling with Australian SAS.
They were encoded in the training curricula that Australian instructors brought to Ricondo school. They were embodied in the transformed soldiers who returned from Australian exchange programs with new understanding of what it meant to operate effectively in hostile territory. And they echo still in the operations of special forces units that trace their lineage directly or indirectly to lessons learned from 120 Australian operators who became ghosts in the jungles of Vietnam.
