Why The Viet Cong Feared Australia’s SAS More Than The US Army D

By the late 1960s, the Viet Cong had developed a fairly reliable playbook for fighting the Americans. When a US patrol made contact, Charlie knew exactly what was coming next. The artillery, the helicopter gunships, the deafening sound of a force trying to kill a problem with mass and firepower. The VC would break contact, fade into the jungle, and live to fight another day.

But sometimes a Viet Cong unit would walk into a contact that didn’t follow the playbook. No helicopters, no artillery, no noise at all. Just a five-man patrol that had been watching them for 2 days, less than 30 m away, and had detonated the kill zone before anyone heard a sound. These were the men the Viet Cong feared more than the entire US Army.

And this is the story of how they did it. In 1966, while half a million American troops were fighting a different kind of war further north, the Australian Army was given its own piece of the country to manage. Phuoc Tuy Province. About 2,000 sq km of jungle, rubber plantations, and rice paddies, sitting between Saigon and the South China Sea.

The first Australian Task Force set up its base at a place called Nui Dat. And on a small hill inside that base, they put a unit that was about to make the local Viet Cong commanders rewrite their tactical doctrine. The Special Air Service Regiment. Between June 1966 and October 1971, around 580 Australian SAS soldiers cycled through Vietnam.

Three Sabre squadrons, each doing two one-year tours with a New Zealand SAS troop attached from late 1968 onwards. According to David Horner, the official historian of the regiment and the man who wrote SAS Phantoms of War, the Viet Cong gave them a name in their own language, Ma Rung, the Phantoms of the Jungle.

Now, before we go any further, a small note. That name comes to us through Horner’s regimental history, drawn from interviews with the SAS men who served there. We don’t have a captured Viet Cong document with the words written down. But what we do have is something more interesting and arguably, to understand why the Viet Cong feared the Australians, you have to understand that the Americans and the Australians were fighting two completely different wars in the same country.

The American doctrine was built on the size of America. Mass, firepower, mobility. If you found the enemy, you fixed him in place, then you brought down everything in the sky on top of him. It was the doctrine of a wealthy industrial superpower fighting a poor agrarian one.

And on paper, it should have worked. But the Viet Cong figured it out very quickly. As one anonymous former Viet Cong leader told the Australian historian, Bob Breen, years after the war, the American style was to hit us, then call for planes and artillery. Our response was to break contact and disappear if we could.

The Australian war looked nothing like that. Where the Americans used battalions, the Australians used squads. Where the Americans called in artillery, the Australians moved quietly into ambush positions and One Australian infantryman wrote home in a letter that’s now archived at the Australian War Memorial.

He said, and I’m quoting directly here, “Our patrols do not fire off ammo or shoot up flares like the Yanks. They listen and move quietly. The Americans think we are mad.” Another Australian soldier wrote that the Americans always told them, “You guys don’t get many Viet Cong.” And the Australians would reply, “That’s because the Viet Cong come looking for you.

They’re scared of us.” And this wasn’t just Australian self-mythology. The same observation came from the other side of the alliance. Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most decorated American infantryman since the Second World War, watched the Australians operate up close. He wrote that the Australians used squads to make contact and brought in reinforcements to do the killing.

They planned, in his words, with the belief that a platoon on the battlefield could do anything. If that was the philosophy of the Australian infantry, the SAS took it to its logical extreme. Where the Australian battalions used squads, the SAS used five-man patrols. Where the battalions patrolled for days, the SAS patrolled for weeks.

And where everyone else used noise and firepower to win contacts, the SAS used silence to make sure contacts happened on their terms, in their kill zone, with the enemy unaware they were even being watched. A 1ATF tactical analysis later found that about half of all Australian patrol contacts in Vietnam lasted under 5 minutes, and three-quarters ended within 20.

That was the SAS philosophy bottled. The first 10 seconds were everything, but surviving those 10 seconds against a Viet Cong unit that could outnumber you 10 to 1 required a kind of soldier the Australian Army wasn’t sure it could actually produce. To get into the SAS, you first had to survive the selection cadre, and the cadre had one job.

To break you. Don Barnby was a 19-year-old former forklift driver from a small town in New South Wales when he applied. He’s one of the SAS veterans whose oral history is now archived by the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs. He remembers his cadre course like this. 74 men started.

By the time it was finished a few weeks later, four were left standing. Another Vietnam era SAS veteran, Dennis Mitchell, told the same archive that the typical pass rate during the war years sat at around 15%. 117 men in, 18 out. The men who made it through went to the jungle training center at Canungra in Queensland.

Then they did more specialist training, and then finally, they got the sandy beret and the wing dagger and the chance to do the job. The job looked like this. A five-man patrol would be inserted by helicopter into a piece of jungle. Often near a known or suspected Viet Cong supply route. Patrol commander, second in command, signaler, medic, scout.

Every man cross-trained on every role because if one went down, the patrol still had to function. The helicopter that dropped them in came from nine squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force, who lived alongside the SAS at Nui Dat. According to a recent paper by Wing Commander Brian Derou, 9 Squadron made roughly 1,130 SAS insertions during the war.

Roughly one in 10 was a hot extraction under fire. And in all that time, not one SAS man or 9 Squadron aircraft was lost to direct enemy action during an insertion or pickup. By 1970, the Viet Cong had learned to swarm landing zones within 20 minutes of a helicopter touchdown. The SAS responded with what they called cowboy insertions.

Two helicopters would land two patrols. Both patrols would walk a few minutes into the jungle, then the first patrol would carry on with the mission, and the second would quietly walk back to a different pickup point. The VC would arrive at the original landing zone to find empty jungle and nothing to shoot at. Once they were on the ground, they moved at a pace that has to be heard to describe to be understood.

The main purpose of SAS was to conduct deep reconnaissance of enemy areas. To where they pinpoint or locate areas of enemy concentration or enemy camps, bunkers, tracks that are being used, uh gather intelligence. Speed of patrolling depending on the terrain used to vary from I think the slowest day we ever did was about 350 m in the day up to about 2 km, but it was very, very slow.

So, you take one step, you’d look around, do watch all your arcs up in the trees, down the ground looking for possible baby traps, and turn around to the guy behind you, and you’d wait till he looked at you, and you’d just go like that. And then you’d do your arc on the other side, and then take another step, and then you do it all again. And that’s how slow it was.

Every step was like literally going into the unknown. You didn’t know what was around. 350 m a day. That’s the pace of a man stalking, listening for the click of a safety catch, or the snap of a twig that’s a Viet Cong sentry signal. That patience is how you build the numbers we’re about to look at, and the numbers are difficult to believe even when you’ve read the citation.

Across roughly 1,200 patrols over the course of the war, the combined Australian and New Zealand SAS killed at least 492 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers in action. Another 106 were listed as probably killed, 47 wounded, and 11 captured. Total Australian SAS deaths during the war were seven men.

Of those seven, only two died from direct enemy action. Two were accidentally killed by friendly fire on patrol. One died in a grenade accident. One was lost during a hot helicopter extraction when his rope broke. One died of illness. The one Australian SAS soldier killed in action was Trooper Russell Copeman, three squadron, shot by a Viet Cong sniper in early 1967 while acting as tail end Charlie on a four-man patrol.

His mate, Trooper John Maton, carried him out under fire. Copeman was evacuated to Australia, and he died at the Ingleburn Military Hospital on the 10th of April, 1967. He was 20 years old. If you do the basic arithmetic, the Australian War Memorial’s official position is the most accurate one. The SAS had, in their words, the highest kill-to-loss ratio of any Australian unit in Vietnam.

Some pop history sites have run with that and quoted ratios of 500 to 1. The verified ratio, depending on which deaths you count, sits somewhere between roughly 70 to 1 and 240 to 1. The exact number isn’t really the point. The point is that across six years and over a thousand patrols inside enemy territory, this unit lost two men to enemy fire and the war did not lay a glove on the rest of them.

That’s the statistical asymmetry. The human one is what made the Viet Cong start changing how they moved through their own country. That same anonymous Viet Cong commander interviewed by Bob Breen had more to say about Australians than just their relationship to artillery. He told Breen, and again I’m quoting directly, “The Australians were more patient than the Americans.

Better guerrilla fighters. Better at ambushes. They like to stay with us instead of calling in the planes. We were more afraid of their style.” That quote is about Australian infantry in general, not the SAS specifically. The Viet Cong made tactical distinctions between the units they were fighting, and the fear they described was about the style, the patience, the willingness to sit in an ambush position for hours, the refusal to call in firepower and announce themselves.

That style was the entire Australian doctrine. And the SAS were the purest expression of it. In 1969, the second tour of three SAS Squadron arrived at Nui Dat under a new commanding officer. His name was Major Reginald Beasley. When he walked into the squadron lines, he found that previous squadrons had been keeping what they called kill boards, tally boards, the kind of thing you might expect from a unit that measured success in body count.

According to the regiment’s own unit history, archived at the Australian War Memorial, Major Beasley had the kill boards torn down. And he told his squadron, “We were not there to kill people, but to gain information.” That one sentence is probably the closest thing the Australian SAS in Vietnam ever produced to a regimental philosophy. The killing was a tool.

The point was reconnaissance. The point was knowing where the enemy was, what he had, and what he was about to do, so that the rest of the task force could be in the right place when he tried to do it. The kills came as a consequence of being so good at not being seen. And that’s why the Viet Cong began to fear them in a way they never quite feared the Americans.

You can shoot back at an artillery strike. You can move away from a helicopter. You can’t fight a ghost you never knew was there. The asymmetry came at a cost the regiment carried home with it. On the 27th of September, 1969, a five-man patrol from three squadron was hunting through the Nui May Tao mountains when they made contact, killed five Viet Cong, and called for a hot extraction with around 30 more closing in.

Three Bushranger gunships and three slick helicopters came in to lift them out. The patrol clipped onto ropes hanging beneath a Huey, and the helicopter pulled them up through the canopy. Private David Fisher, a 22-year-old national serviceman, fell from his rope at roughly 60 m. He was listed as missing in action.

He was the last Australian SAS man unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. 39 years later in October 2008, a Vietnamese local in Long Khanh province pointed an Australian Army recovery team to the spot where he had buried a soldier in October 1969. The team found David Fisher’s remains, his dog tags, and a piece of his Australian water bladder.

They flew his coffin home into RAAF Base Richmond on the 10th of October 2008. The escort party included the men of his original patrol. Two SAS men died from direct enemy action in Vietnam. Five more died from other causes, and the rest came home mostly without ceremony, mostly without parades, to a country that wasn’t sure what to make of the war they just fought.

But, the lessons stayed. The five-man patrol, the reconnaissance first ethos, the patience that wins 10-second contacts. Every Australian special forces deployment since Vietnam, from East Timor to Afghanistan, has been built on the doctrine that 580 men proved in the jungles of Phuoc Tuy. The Viet Cong feared them more than the US Army.

And the reason wasn’t a magic weapon or a secret training school. The reason was that the Australian SAS understood something simple. The most dangerous soldier in a jungle is the one you never see. If this story is the kind of history you want more of, the parts of the Vietnam War that don’t get told in the American documentaries, there’s a lot more where it came from.

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