Five Australian soldiers crouched in the mud of a jungle track in Phuoc Tuy province watching 45 North Vietnamese regulars walk past them at a distance of less than 10 m. The Australians did not move. They did not breathe heavily. They had been lying in that exact spot for 7 hours.
By the time the last North Vietnamese soldier disappeared down the trail, the patrol commander had counted weapons, identified rank insignia on three officers, sketched the unit’s movement direction, and decided not to engage. They were outnumbered 9 to 1. They were 30 km from the nearest friendly position, and their entire mission was to come back alive with the information.
This was the Australian Special Air Service Regiment in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese called them ghosts. The Viet Cong placed a personal bounty on every man in a sandy beret. And by the time the regiment rotated home for the last time in 1971, they had compiled one of the most disturbing kill ratios in the history of modern war.
This is the story of what they did out there and why almost no one talks about it. If you’re into forgotten special forces history, real battlefield stories, and the untold operations most documentaries skip, hit like and subscribe. I cover this kind of military history every week. To understand the Special Air Service Regiment in Vietnam, you have to start with where these men came from.
Most of them did not look like the special forces operators in modern recruiting videos. They were quiet. They were lean. A lot of them came from rural towns in Queensland and Western Australia, places where boys grew up tracking pigs through scrub country and learned how to sit still for hours waiting for game.
The Australian Army figured out something useful during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s. The fight in Southeast Asia was not going to be won by big infantry sweeps through the bush. It was going to be won by small teams moving slowly, watching, listening, and selectively killing the right people at the right time.
So, in 1957, the regiment was born at Swanbourne Barracks in Perth, Western Australia. The selection course was designed to break men. It still is. Candidates ran for hours under full pack through the sand dunes outside Perth, then ran some more. They navigated alone across hundreds of kilometers of bush country with no map check from instructors and no permission to fail.
They were dropped into freezing rivers in the middle of the night. They were stripped of sleep for days at a time and then asked to recite radio procedures under interrogation. Around nine out of every 10 men who showed up at Swanbourne washed out. The ones who passed were not the strongest.
They were the ones who could keep [music] thinking when their body was telling them to lie down and quit. These were the men Australia sent to Vietnam. By June of 1966, the first squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment was on the ground at Nui Dat, the sprawling Australian Task Force [music] base in Phuoc Tuy Province.
Their job was unlike anything the regular infantry was doing. They were not going to clear villages or fight set piece battles. They were going out beyond the wire in five-man teams, sometimes for two weeks at a stretch, into terrain so thick with enemy activity that the rest of the Australian force treated it as suicide ground.
And here is where the horror really started. A standard SASR patrol in Vietnam carried no markings on their uniforms. They wore the South Vietnamese tiger stripe camouflage instead of regular Australian green. They blacked their faces with camel cream and the backs of their hands. They taped down anything that could rattle or reflect the light, including their belt buckles and dog tags.
Many of them carried the American M-16 rifle instead of the Australian SLR because it was lighter and the round count was higher. [music] When the patrol left the helicopter, the rules changed. They could not speak above a whisper for the entire duration of the mission. They communicated using a system of hand signals >> [music] >> so refined that two men could discuss enemy strength, weapon types, and a flanking plan without making a sound.
They did not cook food. Hot meals produced steam, and steam carried smell, and smell carried for kilometers in still jungle air. They ate cold rations straight from the can, [music] sometimes for 14 days. They never walked on jungle tracks. Tracks were where you got ambushed. Tracks were where the Viet Cong set bouncing betty mines that would detonate at chest height.
SASR patrols moved through the thickest secondary growth they could find, sometimes covering less than 500 m in a full day of patrolling. And at night, they did not sleep on the ground. They slept in trees. The patrol commander would pick a stand of large hardwoods, and each man would tie himself with a length of nylon webbing to a thick branch, sometimes 10 or 15 m above the jungle floor.
They slept in their boots with their weapons across their laps, listening for the rustle of NVA patrols moving below them in the dark. If a man fell asleep too deeply, the webbing would catch him. If he made too much noise turning in his harness, it could compromise the entire team. You did this for 2 weeks at a time, Then you came back to Nui Dat, ate a hot meal, slept for 36 hours, and went out again. This was the job.
Now the kill ratio, because this is the part most people do not believe when they hear it. Across roughly 5 years of operations in Vietnam, the three rotating SASR squadrons compiled around 500 confirmed enemy killed in action. Some sources put the number significantly higher when you include probables. The unit was small.
There were never more than around 120 SASR operators in country at any given time, and only a fraction of those were on patrol on any given day. And the cost on the Australian side, across the entire deployment, the regiment lost one man killed in direct enemy contact. One. Other operators died during the war. Some were killed in helicopter crashes.
Some died in accidents during cross training with American forces. One was lost in a friendly fire incident. The regiment was not invincible. They paid a real price. But when you look at men killed by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army in direct firefights across roughly 5 years of high-tempo special operations, [music] one man fell.
There is nothing else like that in modern military history. The American long-range reconnaissance patrols, the LRRPs, took heavier losses by a wide margin. The British SAS during the Malayan Emergency suffered more killed in action. Even the New Zealand SAS, who often operated alongside the Australians and used the same doctrine, lost men in higher numbers.
So what made the Australian SASR different? The answer is something the regiment called initiative of fire, and it is one of the most ruthless small unit combat doctrines ever developed. In a normal infantry unit, when you make contact with the enemy, you take cover, identify the threat, and engage according to a chain of command.
You wait for orders, and you coordinate. In an SASR patrol, the rules were different. The first man to see the enemy open fire immediately on full automatic, putting every round he had into the lead element of the enemy column within the first 3 seconds. While he was firing, the rest of the patrol was already moving. They were not advancing.
They were already turning and running in a pre-rehearsed direction known as the rally point. The man who initiated contact would empty his magazine, change magazines while moving, and then run himself. The next man in the patrol order would cover his withdrawal with a second burst. Each man in turn would shoot and run, shoot and run until they had broken contact and reached a covered rally point, sometimes a kilometer away.
The entire engagement from first contact to broken contact often lasted less than 30 seconds. It was a doctrine designed around one truth. A five-man patrol cannot win a sustained firefight against a platoon-sized enemy. So, you do not have one. You hit the enemy with maximum violence in the first 3 seconds. You kill as many as you can in that that initial volley, and then you disappear before they can organize a response.
The North Vietnamese learned this the hard way, and they learned to fear the silence of the jungle. One of the most famous examples came during Operation Overlord in June of 1971. An SASR patrol of five men contacted what they initially believed was a small Viet Cong unit moving through a ravine. The patrol commander opened fire on the lead element and called for an immediate withdrawal.
What happened next was the kind of thing that became legend inside the regiment. The unit they had walked into was not a small Vietcong [music] section. It was the lead element of a much larger North Vietnamese force, possibly a full battalion. The Australians realized this within seconds as the volume of return fire built into something that sounded like a sustained roar through the jungle canopy.
They were outnumbered by something close to 40 to 1. The patrol broke contact under heavy fire, called in helicopter gunship support, and extracted from a clearing while American Cobras worked the ridgeline above them with rockets and mini guns. Every single Australian operator made it out. Estimates of enemy casualties from the contact and the air support that followed ran into the dozens.
Five men against a North Vietnamese battalion, and the Australians walked out. This is the kind of story that gets repeated inside special forces communities to this today. And it is one of dozens of similar contacts the regiment fought during its time in Vietnam. But the patrols were not all about killing.
In fact, the killing was often the smallest part of the job. The primary mission of an SASR patrol in Vietnam was reconnaissance. Going out into enemy-controlled territory, sometimes 30 km beyond the nearest [music] friendly position, and watching. Watching trails, watching base camps, watching cache sites, counting weapons, identifying unit insignia, mapping bunker complexes.
A patrol might lie on a ridge above a Vietcong rest area for 3 days, never moving more than what was needed to relieve cramped muscles, watching everything that happened below them. Then they would crawl out the same way they came in, walk back to a helicopter pickup point, and deliver the intelligence to the task force.
That intelligence was used to direct artillery strikes, B-52 raids, and full infantry assaults. A single SASR patrol could effectively destroy an enemy battalion without firing a shot, just by pinpointing its location and watching long enough to confirm it. This was one of the reasons the North Vietnamese hated them so much. The Viet Cong could fight infantry on equal terms.
They could not fight artillery they never saw coming, called in by men they could never find. By 1968, captured Viet Cong documents and intercepted radio traffic confirmed something the regiment had long [music] suspected. North Vietnamese forces had placed a specific bounty on Australian special forces operators. The exact figure varied across sources and time, but the principle was clear.
Bring in the sandy colored beret of a SASR operator and a reward followed. The Viet Cong even gave them a name. In captured radio chatter and intelligence documents, the SASR were referred to as Ma Rong. The phrase meant the phantoms of [music] the jungle, and in some translations, the ghosts. A small Australian regiment operating in a province the size of a single American county had become so feared by the local communist insurgency that they were tracked in enemy communications by a nickname and hunted by a bounty.
Think about what that means. The regiment knew. They knew the enemy was looking for them. They knew that being captured was not an option because the propaganda value of a captured SASR operator paraded in front of cameras in Hanoi was something the North Vietnamese would have given a great deal to obtain.
This led to one of the unspoken rules of patrolling. SASR operators carried what was sometimes called a last round, and in some patrol traditions, kept their last grenade close. The understanding inside the regiment was that no one was getting taken alive. The horror of what was waiting in a North Vietnamese interrogation room was considered worse than anything the jungle could do.
To this day, no SASR operator was captured during the Vietnam War. Whether that was luck, planning, or the willingness to take that last step, the historical record is clear. They did not go on the wire. Now, the patrols themselves produce moments that veterans of the regiment still find difficult to talk about.
There are accounts of patrols lying motionless while North Vietnamese Army cooking parties built fires within 5 m of their position. There are accounts of operators having to slowly cut leeches out from under their eyelids without making a sound because an enemy soldier was standing just on the other side of a bamboo thicket.
There are accounts of a patrol going to ground when a tiger walked through their lying up position in the middle of the night. One former Australian Special Air Service Regiment Sergeant later described a contact in which his patrol initiated fire on a small enemy group at point-blank range. After the engagement, while they were searching the bodies for documents, they found a photograph in one man’s pocket.
The photograph showed the dead Viet Cong soldier holding a small child. The Australian operator looked at the photograph, put it in his pack, and the patrol kept moving. He still has that photograph. This is the part of special operations that does not get into the recruiting videos. The job was killing. Killing produces things you carry home with you in your head, regardless of how legitimate the target was or how clean the contact was.
The men of the SASR understood this when they signed up. They understood it during selection. They understood it during the first patrol, but understanding something and living with it for the rest of your life are two different things. By 1971, the political situation back in Australia had shifted. The war was deeply unpopular.
The Whitlam government was beginning to position itself for withdrawal. Australian forces, including the SASR, were drawing down. The last squadron rotated out of Vietnam [music] in October of that year. Across roughly five years of deployment, the regiment had run more than 1,100 patrols.
They had identified more than [music] 2,000 enemy sightings. They had produced intelligence that directly shaped the Australian task force’s entire operational picture in Phuoc Tuy province. And by every measurable metric, they had defeated the enemy in their area of operations more decisively than almost any other unit involved in the war.
When the men came home, there were no parades. The Vietnam War was over for Australia, and the country wanted to forget it. Operators of the Special Air Service Regiment went back to their lives. Some stayed in the regiment. Some went to civilian jobs. Many of them did not talk about what they had done in Vietnam for decades.
A few wrote books in the 1990s and the 2000s. Veterans like Robert Mack and Gary McKay began to put their experiences on the page, and the Australian public slowly started to understand what these men had actually done in the jungles of Phuoc Tuy. The regiment itself went on to fight in Somalia, East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Vietnam patrols became the foundation of every doctrine that followed.
The five-man patrol structure, the initiative of fire doctrine, the long-range reconnaissance techniques, all of it traces back to those early years at Nui [music] Dat. And the legacy of those men is complicated. The regiment has faced serious controversy in recent years, particularly around conduct in Afghanistan. [music] The Brereton inquiry released in 2020 raised questions [music] about a small number of operators that the regiment is still working through.
But the men who served in Vietnam, by every credible account from veterans, commanders, and historians who studied the period, conducted themselves under rules of engagement that the unit was designed to honor. What they did in Faluja >> [music] >> was war at its most lethal and most isolated. Five men in a jungle the size of a small country hunting an enemy that wanted them dead more than any other unit in the Australian order of battle.
And they did it well enough that the North Vietnamese gave them a name and the historians gave them a place that no other small unit of the war can claim, Phantoms of the Jungle, Ghosts in the sand berets, the most lethal snipers and reconnaissance operators of a war that most Australians even now would rather not think about too closely.
If this kind of story interests you, the next video on screen breaks down the most decorated operators of the Special Air Service Regiment and the patrols that earned them their medals. The ones whose names are still spoken with quiet respect inside Swanbourne Barracks today. Watch it next.
The HORRORS of Australian SASR Snipers in Vietnam
Five Australian soldiers crouched in the mud of a jungle track in Phuoc Tuy province watching 45 North Vietnamese regulars walk past them at a distance of less than 10 m. The Australians did not move. They did not breathe heavily. They had been lying in that exact spot for 7 hours.
By the time the last North Vietnamese soldier disappeared down the trail, the patrol commander had counted weapons, identified rank insignia on three officers, sketched the unit’s movement direction, and decided not to engage. They were outnumbered 9 to 1. They were 30 km from the nearest friendly position, and their entire mission was to come back alive with the information.
This was the Australian Special Air Service Regiment in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese called them ghosts. The Viet Cong placed a personal bounty on every man in a sandy beret. And by the time the regiment rotated home for the last time in 1971, they had compiled one of the most disturbing kill ratios in the history of modern war.
This is the story of what they did out there and why almost no one talks about it. If you’re into forgotten special forces history, real battlefield stories, and the untold operations most documentaries skip, hit like and subscribe. I cover this kind of military history every week. To understand the Special Air Service Regiment in Vietnam, you have to start with where these men came from.
Most of them did not look like the special forces operators in modern recruiting videos. They were quiet. They were lean. A lot of them came from rural towns in Queensland and Western Australia, places where boys grew up tracking pigs through scrub country and learned how to sit still for hours waiting for game.
The Australian Army figured out something useful during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s. The fight in Southeast Asia was not going to be won by big infantry sweeps through the bush. It was going to be won by small teams moving slowly, watching, listening, and selectively killing the right people at the right time.
So, in 1957, the regiment was born at Swanbourne Barracks in Perth, Western Australia. The selection course was designed to break men. It still is. Candidates ran for hours under full pack through the sand dunes outside Perth, then ran some more. They navigated alone across hundreds of kilometers of bush country with no map check from instructors and no permission to fail.
They were dropped into freezing rivers in the middle of the night. They were stripped of sleep for days at a time and then asked to recite radio procedures under interrogation. Around nine out of every 10 men who showed up at Swanbourne >> [music] >> washed out. The ones who passed were not the strongest.
They were the ones who could keep [music] thinking when their body was telling them to lie down and quit. These were the men Australia sent to Vietnam. By June of 1966, the first squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment was on the ground at Nui Dat, the sprawling Australian Task Force [music] base in Phuoc Tuy Province.
Their job was unlike anything the regular infantry was doing. They were not going to clear villages or fight set piece battles. They were going out beyond the wire in five-man teams, sometimes for two weeks at a stretch, into terrain so thick with enemy activity that the rest of the Australian force treated it as suicide ground.
And here is where the horror really started. A standard SASR patrol in Vietnam carried no markings on their uniforms. They wore the South Vietnamese tiger stripe camouflage instead of regular Australian green. They blacked their faces with camel cream and the backs of their hands. They taped down anything that could rattle or reflect the light, including their belt buckles and dog tags.
Many of them carried the American M-16 rifle instead of the Australian SLR because it was lighter and the round count was higher. [music] When the patrol left the helicopter, the rules changed. They could not speak above a whisper for the entire duration of the mission. They communicated using a system of hand signals >> [music] >> so refined that two men could discuss enemy strength, weapon types, and a flanking plan without making a sound.
They did not cook food. Hot meals produced steam, and steam carried smell, and smell carried for kilometers in still jungle air. They ate cold rations straight from the can, [music] sometimes for 14 days. They never walked on jungle tracks. Tracks were where you got ambushed. Tracks were where the Viet Cong set bouncing betty mines that would detonate at chest height.
SASR patrols moved through the thickest secondary growth they could find, sometimes covering less than 500 m in a full day of patrolling. And at night, they did not sleep on the ground. They slept in trees. The patrol commander would pick a stand of large hardwoods, and each man would tie himself with a length of nylon webbing to a thick branch, sometimes 10 or 15 m above the jungle floor.
They slept in their boots with their weapons across their laps, listening for the rustle of NVA patrols moving below them in the dark. If a man fell asleep too deeply, the webbing would catch him. If he made too much noise turning in his harness, it could compromise the entire team. You did this for 2 weeks at a time, Then you came back to Nui Dat, ate a hot meal, slept for 36 hours, and went out again. This was the job.
Now the kill ratio, because this is the part most people do not believe when they hear it. Across roughly 5 years of operations in Vietnam, the three rotating SASR squadrons compiled around 500 confirmed enemy killed in action. Some sources put the number significantly higher when you include probables. The unit was small.
There were never more than around 120 SASR operators in country at any given time, and only a fraction of those were on patrol on any given day. And the cost on the Australian side, across the entire deployment, the regiment lost one man killed in direct enemy contact. One. Other operators died during the war. Some were killed in helicopter crashes.
Some died in accidents during cross training with American forces. One was lost in a friendly fire incident. The regiment was not invincible. They paid a real price. But when you look at men killed by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army in direct firefights across roughly 5 years of high-tempo special operations, [music] one man fell.
There is nothing else like that in modern military history. The American long-range reconnaissance patrols, the LRRPs, took heavier losses by a wide margin. The British SAS during the Malayan Emergency suffered more killed in action. Even the New Zealand SAS, who often operated alongside the Australians and used the same doctrine, lost men in higher numbers.
So what made the Australian SASR different? The answer is something the regiment called initiative of fire, and it is one of the most ruthless small unit combat doctrines ever developed. In a normal infantry unit, when you make contact with the enemy, you take cover, identify the threat, and engage according to a chain of command.
You wait for orders, and you coordinate. In an SASR patrol, the rules were different. The first man to see the enemy open fire immediately on full automatic, putting every round he had into the lead element of the enemy column within the first 3 seconds. While he was firing, the rest of the patrol was already moving. They were not advancing.
They were already turning and running in a pre-rehearsed direction known as the rally point. The man who initiated contact would empty his magazine, change magazines while moving, and then run himself. The next man in the patrol order would cover his withdrawal with a second burst. Each man in turn would shoot and run, shoot and run until they had broken contact and reached a covered rally point, sometimes a kilometer away.
The entire engagement from first contact to broken contact often lasted less than 30 seconds. It was a doctrine designed around one truth. A five-man patrol cannot win a sustained firefight against a platoon-sized enemy. So, you do not have one. You hit the enemy with maximum violence in the first 3 seconds. You kill as many as you can in that that initial volley, and then you disappear before they can organize a response.
The North Vietnamese learned this the hard way, and they learned to fear the silence of the jungle. One of the most famous examples came during Operation Overlord in June of 1971. An SASR patrol of five men contacted what they initially believed was a small Viet Cong unit moving through a ravine. The patrol commander opened fire on the lead element and called for an immediate withdrawal.
What happened next was the kind of thing that became legend inside the regiment. The unit they had walked into was not a small Vietcong [music] section. It was the lead element of a much larger North Vietnamese force, possibly a full battalion. The Australians realized this within seconds as the volume of return fire built into something that sounded like a sustained roar through the jungle canopy.
They were outnumbered by something close to 40 to 1. The patrol broke contact under heavy fire, called in helicopter gunship support, and extracted from a clearing while American Cobras worked the ridgeline above them with rockets and mini guns. Every single Australian operator made it out. Estimates of enemy casualties from the contact and the air support that followed ran into the dozens.
Five men against a North Vietnamese battalion, and the Australians walked out. This is the kind of story that gets repeated inside special forces communities >> [music] >> to this today. And it is one of dozens of similar contacts the regiment fought during its time in Vietnam. But the patrols were not all about killing.
In fact, the killing was often the smallest part of the job. The primary mission of an SASR patrol in Vietnam was reconnaissance. Going out into enemy-controlled territory, sometimes 30 km beyond the nearest [music] friendly position, and watching. Watching trails, watching base camps, watching cache sites, counting weapons, identifying unit insignia, mapping bunker complexes.
A patrol might lie on a ridge above a Vietcong [music] rest area for 3 days, never moving more than what was needed to relieve cramped muscles, watching everything that happened below them. Then they would crawl out the same way they came in, walk back to a helicopter pickup point, and deliver the intelligence to the task force.
That intelligence was used to direct artillery strikes, B-52 raids, and full infantry assaults. A single SASR patrol could effectively destroy an enemy battalion without firing a shot, just by pinpointing its location and watching long enough to confirm it. This was one of the reasons the North Vietnamese hated them so much. The Viet Cong could fight infantry on equal terms.
They could not fight artillery they never saw coming, called in by men they could never find. By 1968, captured Viet Cong documents and intercepted radio traffic confirmed something the regiment had long [music] suspected. North Vietnamese forces had placed a specific bounty on Australian special forces operators. The exact figure varied across sources and time, but the principle was clear.
Bring in the sandy colored beret of a SASR operator and a reward followed. The Viet Cong even gave them a name. In captured radio chatter and intelligence documents, the SASR were referred to as Ma Rong. The phrase meant the phantoms of [music] the jungle, and in some translations, the ghosts. A small Australian regiment operating in a province the size of a single American county had become so feared by the local communist insurgency that they were tracked in enemy communications by a nickname and hunted by a bounty.
Think about what that means. The regiment knew. They knew the enemy was looking for them. They knew that being captured was not an option because the propaganda value of a captured SASR operator paraded in front of cameras in Hanoi was something the North Vietnamese would have given a great deal to obtain.
This led to one of the unspoken rules of patrolling. SASR operators carried what was sometimes called a last round, and in some patrol traditions, kept their last grenade close. The understanding inside the regiment was that no one was getting taken alive. The horror of what was waiting in a North Vietnamese interrogation room was considered worse than anything the jungle could do.
To this day, no SASR operator was captured during the Vietnam War. Whether that was luck, planning, or the willingness to take that last step, the historical record is clear. They did not go on the wire. Now, the patrols themselves produce moments that veterans of the regiment still find difficult to talk about.
There are accounts of patrols lying motionless while North Vietnamese Army cooking parties built fires within 5 m of their position. There are accounts of operators having to slowly cut leeches out from under their eyelids without making a sound because an enemy soldier was standing just on the other side of a bamboo thicket.
There are accounts of a patrol going to ground when a tiger walked through their lying up position in the middle of the night. One former Australian Special Air Service Regiment Sergeant later described a contact in which his patrol initiated fire on a small enemy group at point-blank range. After the engagement, while they were searching the bodies for documents, they found a photograph in one man’s pocket.
The photograph showed the dead Viet Cong soldier holding a small child. The Australian operator looked at the photograph, put it in his pack, and the patrol kept moving. He still has that photograph. This is the part of special operations that does not get into the recruiting videos. The job was killing. Killing produces things you carry home with you in your head, regardless of how legitimate the target was or how clean the contact was.
The men of the SASR understood this when they signed up. They understood it during selection. They understood it during the first patrol, but understanding something and living with it for the rest of your life are two different things. By 1971, the political situation back in Australia had shifted. The war was deeply unpopular.
The Whitlam government was beginning to position itself for withdrawal. Australian forces, including the SASR, were drawing down. The last squadron rotated out of Vietnam [music] in October of that year. Across roughly five years of deployment, the regiment had run more than 1,100 patrols.
They had identified more than [music] 2,000 enemy sightings. They had produced intelligence that directly shaped the Australian task force’s entire operational picture in Phuoc Tuy province. And by every measurable metric, they had defeated the enemy in their area of operations more decisively than almost any other unit involved in the war.
When the men came home, there were no parades. The Vietnam War was over for Australia, and the country wanted to forget it. Operators of the Special Air Service Regiment went back to their lives. Some stayed in the regiment. Some went to civilian jobs. Many of them did not talk about what they had done in Vietnam for decades.
A few wrote books in the 1990s and the 2000s. Veterans like Robert Mack and Gary McKay began to put their experiences on the page, and the Australian public slowly started to understand what these men had actually done in the jungles of Phuoc Tuy. The regiment itself went on to fight in Somalia, East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Vietnam patrols became the foundation of every doctrine that followed.
The five-man patrol structure, the initiative of fire doctrine, the long-range reconnaissance techniques, all of it traces back to those early years at Nui [music] Dat. And the legacy of those men is complicated. The regiment has faced serious controversy in recent years, particularly around conduct in Afghanistan. [music] The Brereton inquiry released in 2020 raised questions [music] about a small number of operators that the regiment is still working through.
But the men who served in Vietnam, by every credible account from veterans, commanders, and historians who studied the period, conducted themselves under rules of engagement that the unit was designed to honor. What they did in Faluja >> [music] >> was war at its most lethal and most isolated. Five men in a jungle the size of a small country hunting an enemy that wanted them dead more than any other unit in the Australian order of battle.
And they did it well enough that the North Vietnamese gave them a name and the historians gave them a place that no other small unit of the war can claim, Phantoms of the Jungle, Ghosts in the sand berets, the most lethal snipers and reconnaissance operators of a war that most Australians even now would rather not think about too closely.
If this kind of story interests you, the next video on screen breaks down the most decorated operators of the Special Air Service Regiment and the patrols that earned them their medals. The ones whose names are still spoken with quiet respect inside Swanbourne Barracks today. Watch it next.
