When American Small Arms Worked Beside the AUSTRALIAN SAS in Vietnam! D
For 10 days in the Mekong Delta, a team of American Navy SEALs patrolled alongside a handful of Australian SAS troopers, and the Australians didn’t say a single word. Not a whisper, not a hushed command, nothing. Every direction, every halt, every signal to drop and freeze passed between them entirely by hand.
Roger Hayden, the SEAL who was there, said years later on a podcast that he learned more about fieldcraft in those 10 silent days than he had in Army Ranger School, Raider School, or anywhere else in his career. Today, we’re covering when and how American special operations units, MACV SOG chief among them, alongside the Navy SEALs and the earliest American advisers in country, first crossed paths with the Australian SAS, and what’s actually documented about how impressed they were, as opposed to what’s generally widely spread. We’re going to cover as well a bit of the custom modified weapons from both sides, and what US troops thought about weapons such as the SAS modified L1A1 SLR rifle. The earliest connection actually predates the SAS regiment’s own deployment by four years. In August 1962, the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, 30 advisers under Colonel Ted Serong, arrived in South Vietnam to
train South Vietnamese forces operating as part of the American Military Assistance Command Vietnam structure from the outset. Most of these advisers were drawn from Australian infantry, SAS, and commando backgrounds, many with Malayan Emergency experience already behind them, and they worked in pairs or small teams scattered across the country rather than as a single unit, frequently embedded directly alongside American Special Forces advisers, and in some cases the CIA, training and occasionally leading the same South Vietnamese and Montagnard units the Americans were building. By the time 3 Squadron SAS actually landed as a formed unit in June 1966, individual Australian special operations trained soldiers had already been working shoulder to shoulder with American Green Berets for 4 years. The relationship didn’t start with a dramatic first meeting in the jungle. It started with a training team quietly doing the same job as the Americans next
to them for the better part of a decade. Once the SAS regiment itself was in country, the relationship deepened along exactly the lines that kind of long quiet cooperation tends to produce, personnel exchanges rather than isolated encounters. The regiment’s own association describes it plainly.
The SASR began operating with American Navy SEAL teams and special forces, contributed instructors to the American Recon School, and had some of its members serve with the highly secret MACV SOG units directly. That last detail is worth sitting with. SOG wasn’t a unit that took outside personnel lightly. It was compartmented at the top secret level. Its cross-border missions into Laos and Cambodia weren’t officially acknowledged for decades, and its own American members were bound by non-disclosure agreements that in some cases ran 20 years.
For a small number of Australian SAS soldiers to be folded into that organization at all is a real documented mark of trust, and it’s also exactly why detailed public accounts of what those men actually did with SOG barely exist. The record confirms the fact of their service.
The secrecy that defined the unit means the specifics mostly never made it into anything declassified or published. What we do have in much richer detail is Hayden’s account, because he told it himself on the record decades later. Hayden served with SEAL Team 1 process as dartboard ops, literally throwing a dart at a map and heading wherever it landed.
SEAL Team One’s normal work was riverine, ambushes and reconnaissance from the water, not sustained movement through jungle. When Hayden invited a small group of Australian SAS troopers into his own team’s area of operations, he was bringing in an entirely different skill set than the one his own training had given him, and he knew it going in.
“Underwater demolition training,” he said, “simply hadn’t prepared American frogmen for jungle fieldcraft the way it needed to.” What he watched over the following 10 days changed how he thought about reconnaissance for the rest of his career. The Australians moved through the jungle using nothing but hand and arm signals for the entire patrol without a single word spoken between them.
Hayden’s own description of it, “Their fieldcraft was so good,” is about as understated as the compliment gets, and he was blunt about the cost of not having that same standard. He said American forces lost personnel specifically because they hadn’t trained to that level of field discipline. This wasn’t a one-off patrol he half remembered.
It was, by his own account, more valuable instruction in reconnaissance than anything the American schools he’d already been through had given him. One place where that convergence between the Australians and the Americans shows up clearly and doesn’t require any classified record to prove is in the improvised weapons each side built for itself in the field.
Because independently, working thousands of kilometers apart with no shared design process, SAS armorers and SOG’s own recon men solved some of the same problems in strikingly similar ways. The SAS’s answer to a small patrol needing to convince a much larger enemy force it had walked into something far bigger than five men was the a standard L1A1 or L2A1 rifle with the barrel chopped down and the flash hider stripped off entirely, converted to full automatic fire, producing a genuine fireball and a roar closer to a machine gun than a rifle, the moment a patrol broke contact. MACV-SOG’s recon teams, carrying the XM177E2 carbine that had become their signature weapon, arrived at almost the identical trick from the opposite direction. The XM177 was purpose-built with a sound and flash moderator to keep its signature
down for stealth. Some SOG Green Berets deliberately tore that moderator off and bolted on a plain birdcage flash suppressor instead, trading the quiet weapon back in for a loud, fire-breathing one. For, in the words of firearms historians who’ve documented the swap, exactly the psychological effect the Australians were also chasing, making a five- or six-man team sound like something an enemy force would rather not find out the hard way.
SOG’s own machine gunners did the equivalent to captured Soviet RPDs, cutting the barrel down to just ahead of the gas tube for the same reasons the Australians cut down their SLR’s. A shorter, handier weapon that happened to trade some ballistic performance for exactly the kind of terrifying report a cornered patrol wanted. Neither side copied the other.
Both arrived at the same modification because the underlying problem, a tiny team needing to sound much larger than it was for just long enough to disappear, was identical on both The two forces solved a different shared problem just as convergently. How to kill quietly when killing loudly would end the mission.
The US Navy SEAL’s answer was the Mk 22 Mod 0, universally known as the Hush Puppy, a modified Smith & Wesson Model 39 pistol fitted with a threaded barrel, a screw-on suppressor, and a slide lock feature that stopped the slide from cycling at all, eliminating even the mechanical clack a normal suppressed pistol still made. It was developed specifically for silencing centuries and guard dogs before they could raise an alarm, and it worked well enough that some units carried it for years after the war ended. Some of those same Hush Puppies eventually found their way into MACV-SOG’s own kit alongside suppressed Swedish K submachine guns for teams that needed to eliminate a threat without alerting anyone 30 m further down the trail. SOG had its own separate reason for going non-standard on top of the tactical one. Before 1968, teams operating across the Cambodian and Laotian borders were required to carry
foreign-made weapons exclusively. Soviet AK-47s, Chinese Type 56s, captured RPDs, specifically so that if a team was killed or equipment was recovered, there would be nothing to prove American soldiers had ever been there. That’s a constraint the Australians never had to work around. Nobody was hiding the fact that the SAS was in Phuoc Tuy, but it meant SOG’s recon men were carrying an enemy’s weapon into an enemy’s jungle for reasons that had nothing to do with which rifle actually shot better. In the same period, the Australians were converting their own service rifle into something barely recognizable as standard issue. Different militaries, different constraints, and in both cases, soldiers deciding the rifle they’d been issued wasn’t the rifle the mission actually needed. It’s worth being honest about what a story like Hayden’s actually represents and what it doesn’t. It’s one American special operator describing one real 10-day patrol in his own words
decades after the fact. It isn’t evidence of some organized army-wide American reverence for the Australian SAS, and treating it that way would be exactly the kind of exaggeration this topic keeps attracting online. What it is, alongside the confirmed presence of Australian troopers inside MACV-SOG itself and the SASR’s documented role training the American LRRP pipeline is a small real verifiable window into something broader that clearly did happen.
American special operations forces across several different units and years kept finding reasons to work directly alongside the Australians, kept sending personnel to train with and learn from them, and at least one of those Americans said so by name on the record. If you served with any of these units, SOG, the SEALs, Special Forces, the AATTV, or the SASR itself, and have a first-hand account of this kind of joint work, the comments are yours.
Given how much of this history is still classified or simply never written down, personal testimony is close to the only way stories like Hayden’s ever surface at all. For everyone else, be skeptical of the version of this story with a named captain, a specific dramatic put-down, and a suspiciously novelistic ending. The real version doesn’t need the embellishment.
A Navy SEAL spending 10 silent days learning fieldcraft from men who never once had to speak is already the better story. Sources are in the description, and if you’d rather get the verified version of this history than the invented one, subscribe. And to Roger Hayden, to every AATTV advisor who worked alongside the Americans from 1962 onward, and to the SASR troopers whose service with MACV-SOG will likely never be fully told, thank you.
