“Shoot The Australians First” — How The SAS Became The Most Feared Soldiers In Vietnam
“Shoot The Australians First” — How The SAS Became The Most Feared Soldiers In Vietnam
Phuoc Tuy province, South Vietnam, May 1968. The jungle around fire support base Coral was still and heavy with heat, the kind of heat that presses against your chest, the kind that makes your uniform rot. A North Vietnamese army officer lay dead in the mud. He’d been found at the edge of the tree line after a pre-dawn assault. His uniform was soaked through.
His hands were still curled and pressed flat against his chest, folded tight inside the lining of his tunic was something he had clearly tried to protect. Three pages, crumpled, smeared with mud and sweat. An American intelligence officer carefully unfolded them. At first glance, it looked like routine battlefield guidance, standard tactical instruction, the kind of thing that moved through enemy units constantly.
Nothing unusual, nothing alarming. Then his eyes stopped. He read the line again, then he read it a third time. According to later accounts from intelligence officers present, what was written on those pages was not ambiguous. The directive was clear. In any engagement involving both American and Australian forces, the enemy had a standing order.
Neutralize the Australians first. Not the Americans, not the helicopters, not the artillery, the Australians. The officer looked up from the pages. Standing nearby was a young Australian lieutenant, barely 23 years old. His jungle uniform nearly rotting off his body, carrying the particular smell of a man who had spent weeks in the bush without anything resembling rest.
He didn’t look like something worth a standing order. The American raised an eyebrow. “You blokes got something we should know about?” The Australian just shrugged. “We just do our job, mate.” Within days, that document was on a desk at MACV headquarters in Saigon. Within weeks, it had crossed the Pacific. American commanders across the entire theater were being briefed on what it contained because what was inside those three pages didn’t just identify a threat.
It raised a question that no one at the senior levels of the US military could comfortably answer. Why were 8,000 Australians generating this level of fear while half a million American troops were not? That question would not have a comfortable answer. And the story behind it goes back two years, to a jungle clearing, a rubber plantation, and a force that most of the world had barely noticed arriving.
If you’ve never heard this story before, stay with it because what happened in Phuoc Tuy province is one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of modern warfare and almost nobody knows it. April 1966. The first elements of the first Australian Task Force arrived in Phuoc Tuy province and set up their base at a place called Nui Dat, a rubber plantation 8 km north of the coast, surrounded on every side by dense triple canopy jungle.
They came without overwhelming numbers, without a massive show of force, without ceremony. Roughly 8,000 men, a single task force, assigned a single province and told to hold it. The Americans who were already fighting across Vietnam watched this arrive with a degree of quiet skepticism. 8,000 men was a footnote in a war that already involved close to half a million.
The scale difference was almost mathematical in its dismissiveness, but nobody who was watching closely was dismissive for long. Phuoc Tuy was not a quiet province. It had been a Viet Cong stronghold for nearly a decade before the Australians set foot there. The jungle was thick enough that a man could disappear 3 m from his own patrol line and never be found.
The VC had built an entire shadow infrastructure beneath the canopy, tunnel networks, supply corridors, hidden base camps, village control systems, intelligence networks. They had held that province through ideology, intimidation, and violence. And when the Australians arrived, the Viet Cong leadership had good reason to believe the pattern would hold.
Foreign forces had come before. The approach was always the same. Avoid them when they were strong, ambush them when they were weak, wait until they left. But 3 months into the Australian presence, something was already different. The Australians weren’t leaving. And more unsettling than that, they weren’t behaving the way the enemy expected. August 18th, 1966.
A rubber plantation east of Nui Dat, just weeks after the Task Force had settled in. 108 men from D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, were out on a routine patrol when they walked into the edge of something that should not have existed. They didn’t know it yet, but there were approximately 2 and 1/2 thousand enemy soldiers moving through that jungle.
The shooting started in the afternoon under a sky that was already beginning to pour rain. 11 Platoon hit the forward screen of the enemy force and suddenly they were in it, pinned, outnumbered, and fighting for their lives through a rubber plantation in a tropical downpour so heavy that visibility dropped to almost nothing.
108 Australians, 2 and 1/2 thousand enemy. The math was simple and the math said D Company was dead. It went on for hours. Resupply ammunition was dropped by helicopter into the trees while the battle raged below. Reinforcements pushed through the jungle in the dark. Artillery hit in close, dangerously close, to keep the enemy from overrunning the perimeter.
When it was over, 18 Australians were dead, 24 were wounded, and the enemy, by confirmed body count, had lost at least 245 killed. Hundreds more wounded and dragged away. A force 1/23 the size had held against everything. The Viet Cong commanders in Phuoc Tuy province had a problem. The enemy they thought they understood had just done something that their tactical calculations said was impossible.
They began paying close attention to who exactly these men were and how they were fighting. What they discovered over the next 2 years would eventually force a decision that ended up on those three folded pages, pressed against the chest of a dead officer in the rain. Here is the thing that American commanders kept failing to understand about the Australians.
It wasn’t courage. Every army in that war had courage. It wasn’t firepower. American firepower was the most overwhelming on Earth. It wasn’t numbers. The Americans had armies. The Australians had a task force. It was something far harder to replicate. Methodology. The Australians did not approach Vietnam as a new war.
They had spent a decade before Vietnam refining jungle warfare in places most people have never heard of. Malaya in the 1950s during the communist insurgency and Borneo in the early 1960s during the Indonesian confrontation. They had learned lessons in those jungles that they paid for in blood and they carried every single one of them into Phuoc Tuy.
The central principle was this: in jungle warfare, the side that controls the night controls the war. The side that moves quietly controls the information. The side with patience controls the kill zone. American patrols, by the general pattern of the war, moved during daylight hours. They were large, they were loud, and they were searching for contact.
Australian patrols moved at night. They were small, four men, six men, occasionally eight, rarely larger. They would insert near dusk, move through darkness before first light, and then establish a hidden patrol base where they would remain almost completely motionless through the punishing heat of the day, watching, listening, studying.
No sound, no movement. The insects crawling across your neck and you don’t flinch. The rain starting and you don’t move. Hours passing in absolute stillness while the jungle around you breathes and shifts and reveals what it knows. They were studying trails, counting footprints, reading the compression patterns in vegetation that told them how many men had passed and how recently.
Tracking the movement of enemy units across ground the Viet Cong believed was invisible to foreign soldiers. They wanted to understand the system completely before they touched it. Only then did they prepare the ambush. And Australian ambushes were not firefights. They were not reactions. They were engineered traps.
Every weapon had an assigned field of fire. Every man knew precisely where his rounds would land. Escape routes were blocked before the enemy arrived. Crossfire zones overlapped so completely that movement inside the killing zone became geometrically impossible. And then they waited, not for minutes, for hours.
9 hours in one documented engagement, lying motionless in the jungle while leeches dropped from the canopy overhead and the humidity sat on your chest like a physical weight and every muscle in your body screamed for movement. You did not move. When the enemy column walked into the position in the late afternoon of that October 1966 engagement.
A six-man patrol from 6 RAR that had spent 3 days tracking a Viet Cong supply route northwest of Nui Dat. The geometry of the kill zone had already decided the outcome before the first shot was fired. The firefight lasted under 2 minutes. When the shooting stopped, a significant portion of the enemy column was dead. The survivors had broken contact and fled.
The Australians had fired several hundred rounds. Not one of them had been hit. Reports like this began circulating through Viet Cong command networks in Phuoc Tuy. And the guidance that followed was unambiguous. Avoid Australian patrols whenever possible. If contact cannot be avoided, break it immediately. Do not attempt to hold ground against Australian ambushes, but avoiding them was becoming almost impossible.
At any given time, according to operational records from the period, between 15 and 25 Australian patrols were moving through that jungle simultaneously. They were everywhere. In the areas the VC thought were safe. On the supply routes that had operated undetected for years. Near the villages that had been controlled by Viet Cong infrastructure for a decade.
A captured Viet Cong cadre member, speaking through an interpreter in a post-operation debriefing, offered a comparison that has been quoted in multiple histories of the campaign. “The Americans came like a storm,” he said, “loud and powerful. We would hide. When they left, we returned.” He paused. “The Australians were different.
They were always there, like mosquitoes. You could never escape them.” By 1967, something extraordinary was happening in Saigon. American commanders had begun requesting briefings on Australian tactics. Not as a courtesy, as students. The numbers coming out of Phuoc Tuy province were creating problems for people who believed they understood counterinsurgency warfare.
The kill ratios, the casualty exchange rates, the results of individual patrol engagements. One American colonel who later reviewed the figures described his initial reaction with characteristic bluntness. “I thought they were exaggerating. I figured national pride was inflating the numbers.
Then I went on patrol with them.” What he witnessed had nothing to do with superhuman soldiers. It had nothing to do with superior weapons. It had to do with something he struggled to articulate. A quality of attention, patience, and environmental integration that his own training had never produced. In 1967, Pentagon officials flew to Australia specifically to study the jungle warfare training system that was generating these results.
They sat in classrooms and walked through training exercises and watched the methodology being taught, and they flew home with something they had not expected to leave with. Humility. The Australian SAS, operating in Phuoc Tuy across the war’s duration, conducted over 1,100 patrols. Their operational records revealed a pattern that analysts who later studied them found almost mathematically implausible.
Kill ratios that bore no relationship to the relative size of the forces involved. Engagements where small teams of four to six men neutralized enemy units many times their number and extracted without casualties. Captured enemy documents from 1967 and 1968, documents separate from the one found at Coral, specifically warned Viet Cong units about Australian SAS operations.
The language described troops that appear from nowhere, kill with precision, and vanish without trace. The enemy’s intelligence apparatus had built a profile. They knew what Australian patrols looked like. They knew the patrol base procedures. They knew the ambush geometries. They had studied it all.
And their conclusion was not that the Australians were beatable with the right approach. Their conclusion was that Australian units should be avoided entirely wherever possible. And if they could not be avoided, eliminated with priority before they were allowed to set the terms of the engagement. Because if the Australians were allowed to choose the ground, choose the moment, and execute their method without interruption, the outcome had already been decided.
Now, come back to that intelligence officer in May 1968. Come back to those three crumpled pages pressed against the chest of a dead man. The document found near fire support base Coral was not the beginning of something. It was the result of something. Orders of that kind, eliminate the Australians first, do not appear in field directives without cause.
They are written only after repeated encounters have forced a command structure to acknowledge a dangerous truth about a specific opponent. By the time that directive was committed to paper, the North Vietnamese Army had already absorbed 2 years of education. They had absorbed the aftermath of Long Tan, where 108 men had shattered 2 and 1/2 thousand.
They had absorbed the consequences of their own supply networks being dismantled by patrols they never heard coming. They had absorbed the interrogation debriefs of prisoners who described Australians melting in and out of jungle that foreign soldiers were supposed to be unable to navigate. The paper was the acknowledgement.
The patrols were the education. And the education had been brutal. What made the directive so unsettling to American commanders who read it was not the insult it implied. That the enemy feared a force of 8,000 men more than a force of 500,000. What was unsettling was the logic behind it.
The North Vietnamese Army’s assessment was not emotional. It was not propaganda. It was a cold operational calculation based on battlefield data. And the battlefield data said that Australian units operating in Phuoc Tuy province were producing results entirely out of proportion to their size. Results that were disrupting enemy operations across the entire province in ways that much larger allied formations had not managed to replicate.
The document was not saying the Americans were cowards. It was saying the Australians were dangerous in a specific way that their numbers did not predict and their equipment did not explain. They had made the jungle their own. In a war being fought in a foreign country, in terrain that should have favored the defenders, 8,000 Australians had somehow become the element of the battlefield that the enemy feared most.
The priority was clear. Kill the Australians first. Because if you let them set the conditions, it is already over. There is a particular kind of military recognition that no metal ceremony can replicate. It does not come from your own command. It does not come in a parade or a citation or a handshake from a general who has never seen the inside of a jungle.
It comes from your enemy. It comes when the men trying to kill you sit down in a command post somewhere in the dark and decide that you, specifically you, are the most dangerous thing moving through that landscape. When they write it down. When they issue it as formal guidance. When they tell every unit operating in that theater of war, before you do anything else, deal with the Australians.
That is not something that can be manufactured. That is not something that politics can produce or propaganda can inflate. That is earned. In the mud. In the heat. In the silence of 9-hour through jungle so thick the man in front of you is invisible three steps ahead. In the accumulated discipline of thousands of hours of patience that most soldiers never develop and most armies never Australian Task Force who served in Phuoc Tuy province between 1966 and 1971 were not famous during the war.
Australia was a small country fighting a controversial war. The protests were already starting back home. The public conversation was bitter and fractured. But in a jungle province in the south of Vietnam, far from the front pages and the political arguments, those men were quietly building something that could not be argued with.
A record. An operational record so extraordinary that the enemy’s own intelligence apparatus was forced to write it down. The Americans came with overwhelming force and the enemy adapted. The Australians came with methodology, patience, and two decades of hard-won jungle knowledge. And the enemy found they could not adapt.
There is a line in the operational history of the Australian SAS in Vietnam that has stayed with every historian who has encountered it. It comes from a captured enemy assessment translated after the war. They are not like other foreign soldiers. They belong to the jungle in a way that cannot be explained. That line was not written as a compliment. It was written as a warning.
And it ended up inside a field directive that told every North Vietnamese and Viet Cong unit operating near Australian positions the same thing in the same cold operational language. Shoot the Australians first. Because if you don’t, they will shoot you last, and you will never see it coming.
The men who carried the weapons and the knowledge and the patience that produced that document never sought the recognition that came with it. They went home to a country that didn’t always know how to receive them. They returned to farms and timber yards and sheep stations and city streets, and they carried what they knew quietly. But somewhere in the archives of the military intelligence, in reports translated from the language of the enemy, the record exists.
8,000 men, one province, five years, and a standing order written by the people trying to kill them that said more about what they were than any decoration ever could. If you want more untold military stories like this, stories of courage, strategy, and the wars Australia fought in the shadows, subscribe to Australia’s secret wars.
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