The True HORRORS Of Australian SAS In Vietnam
In a five-year war in the jungles of Fuaktui province, a small Australian unit killed 492 enemy soldiers in close-range jungle ambushes.
They captured 11 prisoners.
They wounded another 47.
And across all of that, across more than 1,100 patrols deep behind enemy lines, only two of their own were killed by enemy fire.
The Vietkong reportedly called them Maung, the phantoms of the jungle.
And what they did and what was done to them is one of the most extraordinary and unsettling stories to come out of the entire Vietnam War.
To understand what happened, you have to understand who these men actually were.
The Australian Special Air Service Regiment was formally raised on the 4th of September 1964 at Campbell Barracks in Perth.
It grew out of the older one SAS company and by the time Australia committed combat troops to Vietnam, the regiment had already lost its first man.
His name was Paul Denah.
He was on a crossber patrol in Borneo in June 1965 when he was gored by a rogue bull elephant.
He died in the jungle several days later.
His patrol couldn’t get him out in time.
That was the regiment that boarded the troop ship to Vietnam.
On the 16th of June 1966, three squadron landed at Vongtao and moved the next day to a feature called Nui Dat, the new base of the first Australian task force.
The SAS set up on a small piece of high ground inside the wire that they nicknamed SAS Hill.
Their job was simple to describe and almost impossible to execute.
The infantry battalions held the base.
The SAS were sent out beyond the wire in fiveman teams to find the enemy, not to fight them, to find them, to watch them, to map their routes, to call in artillery on their bunkers, and when the opportunity came, to spring an ambush that left the enemy wondering what battalion had just hit them.
For over five years, three squadrons rotated through Newat.
Each one did two tours.
Around 580 Australians served alongside an integrated New Zealand SAS troop that ran another 130 patrols of its own.
And they would become, by any reasonable measure, the most lethal small unit in the history of Australian arms.
The basic unit was the patrol.
Five men, sometimes four, sometimes six.
A patrol commander, a second in command, a signaler carrying the radio, a medic, and a scout out front.
Each man carried his own water, his own ammunition, his own food, and enough explosives to ruin somebody’s day.
They were inserted by helicopter.
Number nine, squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force flew UH1 Irakcoy helicopters at treetop height, kicked the patrol out into a small clearing and lifted away before the enemy could fix their position.
And then the five men were alone for up to a week, sometimes longer.
They moved at a crawl.
Patrol veterans describe covering a few hundred meters in a full day.
They communicated with hand signals.
They didn’t cook.
They didn’t smoke.
They didn’t talk above a whisper.
When they stopped to rest, one man stayed awake at all times.
The jungle itself was a constant enemy.
The monsoon turned the ground into a swamp.
Leeches climbed up boots and into clothing.
Snakes, of which Vietnam has around 30 venomous species, lived in the same trees and grasses the patrols slept under.
Dysentery, malaria, deni, and a dozen other diseases waited for any soldier who let his discipline slip.
And underneath all of that was the knowledge that you were five men deep inside territory, controlled by an enemy that outnumbered you, often by hundreds to one.
One SAS veteran in an oral history recorded for the Department of Veterans Affairs described arriving at NewIDAT for the first time.
His words, “It stank and it was hot.
Incredibly hot.
We’ve got heat in Australia, but I don’t know.
The thermometer must lie because 36° in Australia seems cooler than 36° of Vietnam.”
That was the easy part of the job.
The hard part was what happened when the enemy found you, or worse, when you found them.
In March of 1968, a fiveman patrol from two squadron, led by a 25-year-old sergeant named Frank Cashmore, was inserted along a track in the jungle known to the Australians as the Firestone Trail.
The Vietkong were using the trail at night to move supplies.
They had a captured Fordson major tractor doing the heavy lifting, towing trailers full of equipment for fighters in the surrounding area.
The patrol set what military planners call a demolition ambush.
Claymore mines arranged along the killing zone.
Beehive charges packed with steel pellets.
Small arms positioned to sweep anyone who survived the first blast.
Then they waited.
When the tractor came down the trail, the patrol let it move all the way into the kill zone.
Then they triggered the ambush.
Aerial reconnaissance the next morning assessed 15 enemy dead.
A Vietkong defector debriefed later put the figure at 21.
Five Australians, one ambush, 21 dead.
The official regimenal history of the SAS written by Professor David her and titled Phantoms of the Jungle opens with this exact action.
Her calls it one of the most outstanding patrols the regiment ever ran.
And the tractor ambush was not unique.
Across the war, across more than a thousand patrols, SAS-led teams claimed 492 enemy killed, another 106 possibly killed, 47 wounded, and 11 prisoners taken alive.
The Australian SAS in Vietnam killed almost 250 enemy soldiers for every one of their own that died in combat.
That was the lethality.
That is one half of the story.
The other half is what it cost them.
Full automatic is um not very useful.
It’s a it was a difficult weapon to control because they’re a very big round with a lot of recoil.
Um and in um in situations where uh we had the time to use the weapon correctly, we would fire aim single shots.
Um but if we were in trouble, um we’re really good at running away.
Running away saved more lives in Vietnam or better than anything else, I think.
Um um and the way we would run away would be put so much fire down range and make so much noise that the enemy would wonder what they’ bumped.
And when you had probably three SLRs, so firing on full automatic.
So you got three sectionsiz weapons.
So the enemy saying we’ve bumped at least a platoon here, maybe more.
His name was David Fiser.
He was 23 years old, a national serviceman from Sydney, drafted into the army who had volunteered with his best friend Dennis Mitchell to attempt SAS selection.
On the 27th of September 1969, Fiser was the second in command of a five-man patrol from three squadron operating near the Newi Mao Mountains in southeastern Lan Province.
They had been on the ground for 7 days.
It had rained continuously.
That morning, the patrol made contact with the enemy.
Then they made contact again.
By the early afternoon, they had been in five separate engagements and had killed five Vietkong soldiers.
Then, a force estimated at 30 enemy soldiers began pursuing them through the jungle.
The patrol called for emergency extraction.
There was no clearing big enough for a helicopter to land.
Instead, an RAF Irakquoy from Nine Squadron hovered above the canopy and dropped long ropes down through the trees.
The patrol clipped themselves in with carabiners.
The pilot pulled up and accelerated forward, lifting all five men clear of the jungle as gunships engaged the enemy below.
It was only after the helicopter had cleared the canopy and was racing away at altitude that the rest of the patrol realized David Fiser was no longer on his rope.
He had fallen from a height of around 30 m back into the jungle.
A 10-man SAS ground search began that afternoon.
Infantry from a rifle company joined them.
They searched for six days.
They found nothing.
David Fischer had two months of his tour left to run.
For the next 39 years, his family had no body to bury.
His best friend, Dennis Mitchell, who was on the same squadron, returned to Australia 36 hours after a hot extraction of his own and was told on landing that Fiser was missing.
Mitchell has spoken about the survivor’s guilt that followed.
This is the cost, not statistics, not kill ratios.
A 23-year-old man who fell into a jungle and stayed there for 39 years.
In August 2008, an Australian recovery mission working from declassified records and witness accounts found human remains near a hilltop in Longan Province.
A small fragment of plastic from an Australian issue collapsible water bladder used only by SASR Vietnam patrols helped confirm the identification.
David Fiser came home in October 2008.
The officer commanding three squadron during David Fischer’s tour was a major named Reginald Beasley.
Earlier in the war, Australian squadrons had erected what the men called kills boards inside the squadron lines tallying confirmed enemy dead.
It was, depending on who you ask, either a morale tool or a sign of something else creeping into the regiment.
When Beasley took command of three squadrons second tour, he kicked the kills boards down.
In an oral history later recorded by the Australian War Memorial, Beasley is recorded saying something that captures in one sentence the moral argument inside the regiment about what it had become.
His words, “We were not there to kill people, but to gain information.”
It is a sentence that sits oddly against 492 confirmed enemy dead.
But it is the truth of how Three Squadron’s second tour was actually run.
Under Beasley, Three Squadron methodically mapped Vietkong routes through the Newi MTA mountains.
That intelligence enabled a month-long sweep by six R and the New Zealanders in December 1969 that cleared an enemy sanctuary the artillery from Newat had never been able to reach.
The kills happened, but the killing was no longer the point.
By 1970, the next squadron in rotation noticed something else.
The Vietkong had finally learned the SAS insertion pattern.
Helicopters were being fired on within minutes of landing.
The Phantom Advantage, the one that had kept these patrols alive for 4 years, was running out.
The last SAS patrol of the war went out on the 1st of October 1971.
Five men on the ground for 4 days.
No contact.
They came back into Nuidat.
The advance party flew home a few days later.
The main body followed on the 10th.
Total Australian casualties from over 5 years.
More than 1,100 patrols.
580 men deployed.
One killed in action.
One died of wounds.
Three killed accidentally.
One missing presumed dead.
One died of illness.
28 wounded.
Six dead.
Six.
When the regiment came home, the postvietnam contraction nearly destroyed it.
Two squadron was disbanded on return to Australia.
Dennis Mitchell in his DVA interview remembers a moment when the SAS was nearly removed from the Australian Army’s order of battle entirely.
It was the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing in February 1978 when a bomb in a rubbish bin killed two council workers and a police officer.
That gave the regiment a new mission, counterterrorism.
The tactical assault group, which still exists today, was authorized in August 1979.
The Vietnam Regiment became the modern regiment.
The doctrine the Vietnam patrols wrote in blood is still the regiment’s doctrine today.
The Vietkong reportedly called them phantoms of the jungle.
The phrase comes from David her, the official historian, who borrowed it from the testimony of the men who had fought.
What is true is this.
Across 5 years of war in a province most Australians could not find on a map, 600 or so Australian soldiers walked into a jungle they did not own and came back out having killed almost 500 enemy fighters at the cost of six of their own.
A small number of them carry it still.
The ones who came home, the ones who waited 39 years for a friend to come home with them.