Like so many stories on Facebook, you get half (or less) of what looks like a good story, then it says "Continued in comments". This usually means that there is a link in the first comment to the rest of the story, but often the link is missing, or links to an entirely different story. In this case, the link was missing. However, here is what was displayed.
Five American soldiers walked into the jungle alongside four Australians. 4 days later, the Americans walked out, changed men. Their afteraction report contained a single phrase that would echo through Mayv headquarters for months. We are not ready for this. Wait, not ready. These were Rangers from the 101st Airborne.
Men who had survived firefights that would break most soldiers. And yet, after 96 hours moving through Vietnamese jungle with Australian SAS operators, they filed a report that read, "Less like a military assessment and more like a confession of inadequacy." Oh, this story gets so much stranger than you think because what those American soldiers witnessed in those four days.
The methods, the silence, the way those Australians moved through triple canopy jungle like they owned every shadow was so fundamentally different from everything they had been trained to believe about warfare that some of them requested never to patrol with the Aussies again. One lieutenant came back and told his commanding officer three words that got immediately classified. They're not human.
You're about to discover why the most powerful military on Earth started sending its elite soldiers to learn from 120 men from a country most Americans knew only for kangaroos and beer. And trust me, by the end of this video, you'll understand why the Vietkong stopped referring to them as soldiers at all.
They called them something else. Maang, the jungle ghosts. Stay with me. Natrang, September 1966. The May TV Recondo School had just opened its doors to train American long- range reconnaissance patrol personnel in the dark arts of jungle warfare. The facility sprawled across a compound near the massive naval air base, its training schedule designed to push soldiers to the absolute limits of endurance and skill.
three weeks, 260 hours of classroom and field instruction culminating in an actual combat patrol through enemy controlled territory. The school's commonant, Major AJ Baker, had assembled what he believed to be the finest reconnaissance instructors in the American military. Green Berets who had run operations from the demilitarized zone to the Meong Delta.
Veterans of Project Delta, men who had earned their reputations tracking communist forces through some of the most hostile terrain in Southeast Asia. But Baker knew something that troubled him deeply, something he would not speak about publicly, but that kept him awake on humid Vietnamese nights. His instructors, skilled as they were, were teaching methods developed for a different kind of war.
And there was one group operating in country who had already solved the puzzle that American forces were still trying to figure out. The Australians had arrived in Puaktoy province in April of 1966 with a mandate that differed fundamentally from American doctrine. While US forces measured success in body counts and territory seized, the Australians had been given a single objective.
Pacify the province using whatever methods necessary. The key phrase was whatever methods. Within the Australian task force operated a unit so small it barely registered on American organizational charts. The Special Air Service Regiment. three squadrons rotating through Vietnam, never more than 120 men in country at any given time.
Their official designation was reconnaissance. Their actual function was something far more primal, something that would force American military doctrine to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of jungle warfare. The first American personnel to observe Australian SAS operations did so almost by accident. In May of 1967, a squad of US Longrange Reconnaissance Patrol soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division had been attached to one squadron SAS for what was supposed to be a routine exchange program.
The Americans arrived at Nuiidat, the Australian base, expecting to find familiar patterns. Professional soldiers conducting professional operations with perhaps a few tactical variations that came from operating in a different area of operations. What they found instead would fundamentally challenge everything they understood about warfare in Vietnam.
Sergeant Michael Patterson had served two tours in Vietnam before his assignment to the Australian Exchange Program. He had run patrols through the Iron Triangle, conducted search and destroy operations in the Central Highlands, and survived firefights that had earned him two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He was not, by any measure, a novice to jungle combat.
His first morning at New Dat Patterson watched an Australian SAS patrol prepare for insertion. Five men, each carrying approximately 80 lb of equipment. M16 rifles with modified flash suppressors. Enough ammunition to simulate the firepower of a force three times their size. Rations for 5 days. No air support pre-positioned. No artillery fire plan.
No quick reaction force on standby, just five men who would walk into enemy controlled territory and not make contact with base for 72 hours. What struck Patterson immediately was the silence. American patrols buzzed with lastminute activity before insertion. Radio checks, weapons checks, final coordination with helicopter crews.
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This is where the link should have been. Some of the replies, apparently from American members, commented on how great the Special Forces soldiers were and how undertrained they made the Yanks look. Unfortunately when you leave a Facebook page to do something like create this post, then go back for more, the screen refreshes and you lose it. There were a couple of replies I would like to have copied.
