What US Special Forces Said When Australian SASR Did This at Balikatan
April 2025 Luzon Island, Philippines A United States Army Special Forces Sergeant with 14 years of service and three combat deployments stood at the edge of a Philippine jungle and watched something he still cannot find the right words for. He had worked alongside British soldiers, Canadian soldiers, French Foreign Legionnaires, some of the finest units on Earth.
None of them had done what he witnessed that morning in that wet green jungle. So, what exactly did the Australian SASR do inside that Philippine exercise that left some of America’s most experienced soldiers unable to explain what they had seen? The exercise was called Balikatan. The word is Filipino.
It means shoulder to shoulder. The Philippines and the United States have been running it together since the mid-1980s and every year it grows larger and more serious because every year the water to the west of the Philippines gets a little more contested and a little less safe. By April 2025, Balikatan was not a training formality. It was a rehearsal.
The South China Sea had spent the preceding three years becoming a place where ships were being shadowed, where aircraft were being intercepted, where the distance between a diplomatic incident and something worse was narrowing in ways that every defense planner in Washington, Canberra, and Manila was quietly tracking.
Thousands of soldiers from the United States, the Philippines, Australia, and Japan had assembled across multiple training sites in the Philippines for the 2025 exercise. The land phase was running in northern Luzon in training areas pressed against dense secondary jungle that climbed the lower ridges of the Sierra Madre mountain range.
The heat here was nothing like the dry desert heat that most American special forces soldiers knew from Iraq and Afghanistan. This heat was wet. It sat in your clothing from the first minute and did not leave. It turned every task into twice the effort. Insects moved in clouds above every patch of standing water. The vegetation in the densest sections was so thick that a man could step into it 3 m and cease to exist from the perspective of anyone standing at the edge.
Staff Sergeant Marcus Delgado was 33 years old from San Antonio, Texas. His father had run a small construction business and his mother had taught elementary school. And Delgado had grown up in the gap between those two things. Comfortable with his hands and with his mind and suspicious of anything that wanted him to choose between them.
He had joined the army at 19 and been selected for special forces 8 years later. After three deployments had shown his selection board that he possessed whatever quality they were looking for. By 2025, he had been in uniform for 14 years and had developed a very precise internal scale for measuring other soldiers.
It did not move easily and it did not move often. He had worked alongside Australian soldiers before, briefly, in Afghanistan. His impression had been simple. Professional. Capable. Exactly what you expected from a well-trained allied unit. That was the word. Expected. They were exactly what he expected.
What happened in that Philippine jungle in April 2025 would change that assessment completely. And he knew it was changing in the same moment it happened. The jungle phase of the exercise had a specific task. Units were assigned either as hunter teams or as defended objectives. The hunter teams had to get eyes on the objective, a position manned by Philippine Marine Corps soldiers who knew their terrain and were not playing lightly.
The counter-reconnaissance teams, drawn from USSF and Philippine special operations, were tasked with detecting and identifying any approaching teams before they could reach the objective. It was, in the language of exercises, a very hard task for the hunters. The defenders had thermal imaging, working dogs, and 2 days of pre-positioning before the exercise began.
Soldiers with serious experience had described the approach as close to impossible without detection. The Australians drew the hunter task on day two. Delgado was running the outer security cordon with a mixed team of 12 American and Philippine special operations soldiers covering a 3-km perimeter around the objective in 24-hour rotations.
He had positioned his teams at every logical approach. He had men on the high ground and men in the low ground. He had been thorough in the way he was always thorough. One of his soldiers, a staff sergeant from Georgia named Whitfield, had done a joint exercise with SASR operators in Western Australia 2 years earlier and had mentioned once and briefly that they were not ordinary.
Delgado had registered this and moved on. He would think about it again on the second morning of the exercise, standing in a Philippine jungle that had just handed him something his 14 years had not prepared him to receive. The first day of the phase passed without significant contact. The counter-reconnaissance teams logged two successful detections, a Filipino SF team and a US Marine unit.
Both caught well short of the objective. Standard outcomes. Delgado rotated his teams on schedule, ate cold rations at his command post, and checked the thermal sensor readouts on the main approach corridors. Everything the sensors showed, he could account for. That would not last. The morning of the second day. Delgado had been awake since 0400.
Not because anything had happened, because in jungle this dense, in an exercise this serious, the 2 hours before first light were the hours that required his attention most. He was sitting at his command post when his easternmost team checked in. Movement, tree line, 50 m east, single figure. Nobody scheduled on that side, Delgado said. Hold position, confirm.
A pause, long enough to register. It’s gone. He sent a reinforcement team to the east side. They found nothing. Flat earth, leaf litter, water pooled from overnight rain. The thermal log showed a signature that had been visible for 11 seconds before the sensor lost it. Not moved. Stopped. Eleven seconds of heat that appeared and then ceased, as if whatever produced it had resolved itself into the jungle floor and become part of it.
Reviewing the sensor log later, Delgado had no explanation for those 11 seconds. He still does not. What he did not know was that by the time his reinforcement team reached the east side of the perimeter, the Australian team was already inside it. All four of them. The single figure on the east had been deliberate.
[music] A timed exposure to identify which sector would draw reinforcement, and therefore, which sectors would thin. The flush had cost them 11 seconds of thermal signature, calculated in advance as an acceptable price for the information it returned. They had been running that calculation from the edge of the tree line in the pre-dawn dark for 40 minutes before committing to the move.
The four-man team spent the following 22 hours inside the cordon, covering approximately 800 m in total. Not because the terrain was difficult, because they chose to move at a rate the environment would absorb without registering. 200 m from the objective in a shallow depression where water had pooled between two tree roots, the team leader lay motionless for 6 hours watching the objective’s northern face.
He counted the guard rotations. He noted the sensor placement. He mapped a 30-m strip of dry vegetation between his position and the northern wall, a strip the defenders had assessed as too exposed for a hunter team to cross undetected. He crossed it at 03:30 on the third morning. Alone. On his stomach.
Over 45 minutes, coordinating each movement with the wind and the insect noise that shifted with the cloud cover, treating every change in ambient sound as a signal. He reached a position 12 m from the northern wall. He took three photographs on the exercise camera. He noted the call sign on the Philippine Marine Commander’s radio aerial.
None of that was what stopped Delgado cold. What stopped him came after. When the exercise concluded, the Australian team was required to walk out and identify their final position on the exercise map. Standard end of phase procedure. The team leader walked to the map table and placed his marker. Delgado looked at the marker.
He looked at the terrain. He looked at the marker again. The position the Australian had marked was inside Delgado’s inner security ring. Not near the edge of it. Inside it. 70 m from the defended objective. One of Delgado’s soldiers, a 12-year SF veteran from New Mexico named Torres, had eaten his lunch 2 days earlier at a position approximately 5 m from where the Australian had been lying at the time.
Torres had sat with his back against a tree root, eaten cold rations, and spent 30 minutes watching the surrounding jungle for movement before returning to his post. He had seen nothing. He had been 5 m from a man who had arrived in that position 2 hours before Torres sat down, and who had remained there motionless for 3 hours after Torres left.
Torres sat in the after-action briefing and looked at the map marker for a long time. He said nothing during the session. Afterwards, outside, he stood with Delgado in the humid afternoon air and watched the tree line. “I sat 5 m from him,” Torres said. “Yes, I was looking for movement.” “Yes.” Torres shook his head once, quietly, and went inside.
His name was Tom Mackay, and he was 28 years old. He was from Longreach in Outback, Queensland, where the red dirt roads run straight across the Mitchell grass for such distances that you can watch a vehicle traveling toward you for 20 minutes before it arrives. [music] His family had run cattle on the same property for three generations, 40,000 acres of open country that looked, to anyone who had not grown up inside it, like the most unlivable piece of Earth on the planet.
To Mackay, it was home. He knew its shape the way a sailor knows the behavior of water. He knew which creek beds held moisture in a dry year and which were decorative. He read birds the way other people read clocks, using their behavior to locate what was moving across the country and in which direction. He had learned to sit still on that property before he was 10 years old because movement alarmed the cattle.
And alarming the cattle had consequences, his father explained once and did not need to explain again. He had enlisted at 20, served two years in regular infantry and attempted SASR selection at 23. He passed. He did not discuss the details with his family. When his mother asked what selection had been like, he told her it was hard and changed the subject. It was not evasion.
He had come to understand early that some experiences do not translate into language that lands correctly for people who were not inside them. The attempt cost more than the silence. Delgado found him after the after action briefing at the edge of the exercise area cleaning equipment with the unhurried efficiency of a man for whom maintenance is not a task, but a habit.
The position you held for 6 hours, Delgado said, near the pooled water. How did you identify that as the right spot? Mackay thought about it for a moment. The guards looked at the high country when they were nervous. Never at the wet low terrain. People don’t think of wet earth as cover, so it’s always cover.
You read that from outside the perimeter. You watch long enough, you see what people ignore. Delgado sat down across from him. The jungle around them was loud with afternoon insects. A Philippine military helicopter crossed the valley somewhere to the north, its sound cutting through the canopy and dissolving.
Torres has been doing this 12 years,” Delgado said. “He didn’t see you.” McKay shrugged. Not dismissively. The shrug of someone with no particular investment in how the information landed. “He wasn’t looking in the wrong direction,” McKay said. “He was looking at the places you look.” “I was in the place nobody looks.
” “That’s a different thing.” They spoke for about 20 minutes. McKay answered everything directly and without decoration. He did not ask Delgado questions back. Not from indifference, Delgado came to sense, but because he had gathered what he needed from watching, across days of observation that Delgado had not known were happening.
Before the Australian team packed out, Delgado watched them move into the tree line. He had a clear line of sight for approximately 60 m and was watching specifically for them. The four men disappeared from his vision in 38 seconds. Not because they moved fast, because they moved in a way that the eye processed differently from normal human movement, a combination of pace and line and disrupted outline that did not trigger the same detection response.
38 seconds, broad daylight. Jungle he had been standing in for four days. And then they were simply gone. A younger soldier named Bressler came to stand beside him at the tree line edge. “What do you call that?” Bressler asked. “I don’t know,” Delgado said. “I don’t think there’s a word for it.” Bressler watched the empty trees for a moment.
“Should there be?” Delgado did not answer. He turned that question over for the rest of the exercise and for a long time after. Delgado flew home to San Antonio six days after the exercise concluded. In the transit lounge at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. He sat with 4 hours to fill and thought about Balikatan the way soldiers think about experiences that adjusted something in them.
He wrote a note in his personal log on the flight back. He wrote, “Australian SASR four men, jungle phase. They were not what I expected.” The word he kept returning to and could not replace with anything more precise was native. They moved through that jungle like something native to it. That is not a technique.
That is something else entirely. Australia’s investment in Balikatan had grown in the years before 2025, tracking almost directly with the rising tension in the South China Sea. By the time the 2025 exercise convened, the question of what happens if that water becomes a battlefield was no longer theoretical in any serious planning office in Canberra, Washington, or Manila.
The terrain around it, the islands and their jungles, the coastlines and their approaches, was where the answer would need to be written. Australia understood what it was sending to that exercise, and it was not sending it casually. Around 260 Australian Defense Force members participated, bringing conventional and special forces whose preparation for this specific type of environment ran far deeper than anyone on the other side of the exercise had anticipated.
The SASR has been operating in jungle environments since its founding as a company in 1957. Borneo through the Indonesian Confrontation in the 1960s. Five years of long-range patrol work in Phuoc Toy province in Vietnam. More than six decades of continuous refinement of the skills that Delgado had watched in that Philippine training area.
The regiment’s institutional memory holds more combined hours of sustained jungle reconnaissance than almost any comparable unit in the Western alliance. But more than the institutional memory, the regiment holds a selection standard that keeps producing men from the Australian bush who arrive at the jungle already knowing something about it that no training course was designed to teach.
The Philippine jungle is close enough to the Borneo jungle in the ways that matter that the transfer is direct. Dense canopy. Wet earth that holds track sign for 24 hours under the right conditions. A living environment that rewards patience the same way the Queensland Outback rewards it without sentiment and without margin.
The Australians had been operating in variants of this terrain continuously for the better part of seven decades by the time they walked into the Balikatan exercise area in 2025. That depth is visible. Not loudly. In the way that real depth is always visible. Quietly and in the moments no one is presenting for. Torres, back at his unit in the weeks after the exercise, told the story to anyone who would listen.
Not as a complaint. As a correction to something he had assumed without examining. He had assumed that 12 years of hard training and genuine operational experience had given him a full picture of what an allied special forces soldier could do. He had been wrong. Not embarrassingly wrong. Instructively wrong. The kind of wrong that recalibrates something if you pay it proper attention.
He said Mackay had been 5 m away, invisible, in the middle of his security position for 3 hours. He said the jungle floor had looked like jungle floor. He said he had eaten his lunch 5 m from one of the most capable soldiers he had encountered in his career and registered nothing. He said, “That man did not learn that in any building.
He brought it from somewhere else entirely.” Delgado had thought about this on the flight home and kept thinking about it in the weeks after. He thought about the Longreach property, 40,000 acres of Mitchell grass country in Western Queensland that had shaped Mackay before the army ever had the chance to.
Country that did not forgive inattention, that required a daily relationship with patience and stillness, an environmental reading that most people alive are never asked to develop. He thought about what the regiment had found when it looked for men like that in 1957 and what it had built on top of what it found across exercise after exercise and deployment after deployment and jungle after jungle until the thing being built became so absorbed into the institution that it stopped looking like something built. It started looking like something
grown. He thought about what Mackay had said. “He was looking at the places you look. I was in the place nobody looks.” That sentence, simple as it is, holds something worth sitting with for longer than it takes to read it. The most useful capability in a contested environment is not always the one that produces the largest immediate effect.
Sometimes it is the capability that produces no visible effect at all because it has positioned itself so completely inside the terrain that the terrain itself becomes the weapon. Four men in the right position, seeing everything, costing the other side nothing to confirm and everything to discount, that is not a lesser form of military power.
In the The and coastlines and island approaches where the next serious test of this alliance will most likely be written. It may be the most decisive form of military power available. Australia has been preparing for that environment for nearly seven decades. Not because it anticipated the specific situation of the current contest, because it built a regiment around men who came from country that had already taught them how to disappear inside difficult terrain.
And then gave those men the direction and the discipline to use that quality in service of something larger than themselves. Delgado put it plainly in his personal log. The last entry he wrote about Balikatan. He wrote, “I spent 14 years thinking I had seen the full range of what a special operation soldier could be.
I was wrong. The full range includes something that does not come from a training program. It comes from a country. And in a part of the world that is becoming very important, very quickly. That country is our closest neighbor and our oldest partner. I would not want to go into that jungle against them.” He paused after writing it, read it back, and decided it was accurate.
Then he closed his log and started preparing for the next exercise. In a shallow depression in a Philippine jungle, in terrain the Australians recognized before they set foot in it, shoulder to shoulder means something different when one of those shoulders has been shaped by country like that. It means the person beside you is not just trained for the terrain you are standing on.
They are, in the way that matters most when everything else is stripped away, already from it. That is what Balikatan showed in 2025. That is what it will show again.
