In 1970, Viet Cong Ambushed New Zealand SAS Troopers. It Was A Fatal Mistake 

In 1970, Viet Cong Ambushed New Zealand SAS Troopers. It Was A Fatal Mistake 

The snap of a twig, that’s all it took. Six New Zealand SAS troopers deep in enemy country freezing in place behind whatever cover they could find. The lead scout, a man named Bill Taare, had heard it first. The North Vietnamese had been there all night. The Kiwis had listened to their voices through the dark.

 It was the 14th of January, 1970, Binh Tuy province, South Vietnam. In the next 6 minutes, one of these men would be dead. The other five would survive only because of what Bill Taare did next. He’d be put up for a medal he would never receive. This is the story of the faceless 26, the patrol that produced the only New Zealand SAS soldier killed in the Vietnam War, and the brother in arms whose name should be in every history book in the country.

 To understand how four New Zealanders ended up surrounded in a Vietnamese jungle at first light, you have to understand who they were. The New Zealand Special Air Service was small, tiny by any sensible measure. The entire troop sent to Vietnam was 26 men, not 26 men at a time, total active strength in country.

 By comparison, the Australian SAS regiment fielded full squadrons. They deployed in November 1968 under Captain Terry Culley. They didn’t get their own area of operations. They didn’t get their own helicopters. They were grafted on as a fourth troop into whichever Australian SAS squadron was rotating through the base at Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy province.

Their official designation was four troop. Their nickname was something else entirely. We were constantly under water discipline. I used to have a stone in my mouth all day. Just to walk all day carrying with a stone in my mouth and I would sip, not drink. And we’d have a good drink at night before we go to bed.

I drank tea a lot. And then in the morning I might have a half cup of tea in the morning for breakfast. And then I’d sip during the day, but not a lot of water. Jack Hayes, the last commander of four troop, once put it this way. He said the SAS should be able to go into an area and leave no sign that they had been there.

 No footprints, nothing. The Vietnamese, however, had a different name for them. Phantoms, ghosts, the men who weren’t supposed to be there. By January 1970, the second rotation of four troop had taken over. Their commander was a 30-something captain named Gray Shatky, who had already survived rocket fire during the Tet Offensive.

Under Shatky was a man named Sergeant Graham Campbell. Campbell was from the Hokianga in the far north of New Zealand. Born the 12th of April, 1941. Educated at Otahuhu College and Auckland University, where he had studied accountancy of all things. He had passed the brutal NZSAS selection course in 1965, served with the British 22nd SAS in Borneo, and was the first New Zealand SAS soldier to ever pass the Army’s Vietnamese language course.

He led from the front. He was the kind of soldier his superiors had already earmarked for officer training the moment he got home from his tour. He never made it home. On the 13th of January, 1970, Campbell, Bill Taare, and four other troopers got on an Australian Iroquois and flew northeast of Nui Dat into Binh Tuy province.

Their mission was simple. Their call sign was Faceless 26. But before we get into what happened in that jungle, you have to know who else was on that helicopter. The lead scout was Trooper Bill Taare, the man whose job it was to walk ahead of everyone else and read the jungle for what nobody else could see. The patrol commander was Sergeant Graham Campbell.

 The second in command was a Maori trooper named Sid Puia. The signaler was Greg Blue Sutherland. The medic was Thomas Sam Moka, and bringing up the rear, a teenager. His name was Warwick McCalian, but everyone called him Mac. He was 19 years old that month. Mac McCalian lied about his age to get into the SAS. He had completed selection at 17.

 Years later, he would describe it himself. You had to be 19 to enter, and he was a long way off 19. He completed the training with about a hundred different guys, and he was one of just three that made it through. He was about to find out the hard way what that decision meant. The Huey set them down in the late afternoon on the 13th of January.

No sooner had they cleared the landing zone than Taare heard a sound. Off in the distance, gunfire. Not a battle, single shots spaced out, signal fire. The enemy had figured something out about Australian and New Zealand SAS operations by January 1970. Where helicopters dropped men, SAS would be on the ground.

 They were now telling each other. The patrol slipped into the jungle and went silent. They moved slowly, carefully. By that evening, they had located something. A narrow track through the undergrowth, the kind of track a goat might use, the kind of track an enemy logistics column might also use. They settled into a listening position for the night and through the dark hours, they heard them.

Voices, Vietnamese, close. The enemy was moving on that goat track right next to them and they had no idea the Kiwis were there. This is what NZSAS patrols did. They didn’t fight battles. They watched, they listened, they mapped enemy supply routes, identified base areas, called in artillery and air strikes from miles away.

By 1970, 4 Troop had run dozens of patrols like this without firing a shot. But, Sergeant Campbell had a job to do. Reconnaissance was one thing, disrupting enemy operations was another. As lead scout, Tar would move out in front at first light. The patrol would follow that track.

 They would see what it was feeding. That was the plan. First light, the 14th of January, 1970. Bill Tar moved out, the other five followed in single file, separated by a few paces each. The standard NZSAS patrol formation. 60 seconds of silence between any two men breathing and then, the twig. A clean, sharp snap. The patrol froze.

Tar had noted a tree stump nearby. He filed it in his mind as cover. He didn’t move. The patrol held their positions. 60 seconds, 90, 2 minutes of jungle humidity and frozen muscle. Nothing. Tarhe gave the signal, move forward. Decades later, Sid Puia would say it plainly, he believed he was alive because of what Tarhe did.

 What happened next, the surviving members of the patrol would replay in their heads for the rest of their lives. The track opened into a small clearing. The patrol moved in and the jungle erupted. The North Vietnamese had been waiting. Not because they had heard the Kiwis, because they used that clearing as a rally point and they were occupying it in numbers.

 The gunfire was instant and it was close. Within meters. Campbell was hit immediately. The round was fatal. He went down. Behind him, Sutherland popped a smoke grenade. The signaller’s job at the moment of contact was to tell the world Bushranger gunships, Australian artillery from Nui Dat, the squadron operations room, every supporting element needed to know that Faceless 26 was in trouble right now at these coordinates.

 Sam Maka, the medic, was already on Campbell. So was Puia. They tried what medics try in those situations. They didn’t have long. Closing Campbell’s eyes, Puia rejoined the firefight. That was the moment the patrol broke through into something else. Tarhe was returning fire and reading the jungle at the same time, trying to figure out how many enemy were on them and where they were.

 The honest answer was too many and everywhere. They had walked into something bigger than a goat track. Behind Tarhe, Mac McCallion, the teenager, made a decision that would define the entire patrol’s survival. The NZSAS had a motto. One in, all in. One out, all out. McCallion hoisted Sergeant Campbell’s body onto the top of his already loaded pack.

 60 kilos of equipment, now on top of it, a dead man. The patrol’s motto wasn’t optional. They didn’t leave anyone behind, not even like this. Tarai turned and saw it. He could have ordered McCallion to drop the body. He didn’t. Instead, he made the only call that could save them. He pointed back the way they had come, deeper into the dense scrub, away from the rally point and into terrain the enemy would have to follow them through one or two at a time.

He keyed the radio. The universal SAS emergency signal went out across the network. Aircraft, now. By January 1970, the men of number nine squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, were the most experienced jungle extraction pilots in the war. They had to be because the SAS, Kiwi and Australian alike, were always somewhere they shouldn’t have been.

So, you winch them up. And then here is when I was taking, actually in the aircraft, and you can see the crewman gunner who operated the winch. So, he’s moved out of his seat. He had a gun, an M60, in his pilot’s seat there. He’s moved out of his seat to operate the winch. So, the first SAS guy that came on board, his first role was to get straight into the uh pilot’s seat with the crewman gunner’s gun, and he’d be firing into the jungle with whatever was appropriate.

But, so he did a defensive thing. Then you can see the guy here, you know, I’m sorry, yeah, being dragged aboard. Okay? And eventually, the last photograph is of that same fellow with with obviously coming out of the hover now because the crewman has swung the winch swung the winch in. And this fellow here is happy.

 He’s no longer manning the gun, so obviously we’ve left the site. We’re her away. And there’s the other SAS guy who you can who we saw earlier being dragged on board. And you can see the look of joy on his face and the relief and he’s got out of it. He’s still alive and helicopters have picked him up. For Faceless 26 on the 14th of January, 1970, the gunships came in low and fast.

Smoke from Sutherland’s grenade marked their position. The pilot threading the extraction was an Australian named Peter Bradford. Years later, Bradford would say the same thing every surviving member of the patrol would say, “Tarei deserved recognition.” Tarei kept the patrol moving, firing controlled bursts, calling adjustments, holding the rear while McCallion stumbled forward with 60 extra kilos of his patrol commander across his back.

The bush rangers raked the tree line behind them. The slicks came in. The winch line came down. Two men at a time, the wounded first, the dead with them, then the rest. They got out, all six. Sergeant Graham Campbell would be the first and only New Zealand SAS soldier killed in action during the entire Vietnam War.

 He was 28 years old. His body was flown home. On the 3rd of February, 1970, he was buried with full military honors in the Returned Servicemen section of Wairoa Cemetery on the East Coast of the North Island. Five other men were alive because of one man, and Captain Gray Shatky knew it.

 The moment Shatky debriefed the patrol, he sat down and started writing. What Shatky wrote was a citation for a gallantry medal. The exact award was a question for someone higher up the chain. But the recommendation, the official formal nomination was unambiguous. Bill Tarrey’s actions had saved the patrol. Shackley himself put it on record years later.

 He said it was very clear to him at the time and he had no hesitation saying so even decades on. Bill Tarrey had spared that patrol from a much worse situation. He had done everything possible to save Graham. There was no question in Shackley’s mind that his actions were outstanding. Shackley was not a man you ignored. He had led NZSAS troopers through the Tet Offensive.

 After Vietnam, he became a major figure in the regiment. Eventually retiring as a major, he was famously careful about gallantry recommendations. He didn’t write them lightly. He sent the citation up and then nothing happened. Here’s why. And here’s the part of this story that still makes some of the older NZSAS men angry 55 years later.

When the New Zealand SAS deployed to Vietnam, it deployed as a troop attached to the Australian SAS regiment. That’s the part everyone knows. What most people don’t know is that this attachment had a brutal administrative consequence. New Zealand had no independent medal quota for the war. Every medal awarded to any Australian or New Zealand SAS soldier in Vietnam came out of one combined pot.

 The Australians filled it. 11 gallantry medals, 16 mentions in dispatches. The Kiwis received zero. Bill Tarrey’s citation went into the Australian medal queue. It was never approved. Whether it was buried by politics, lost in administrative friction between the two armies, or simply outranked by Australian citations, no one has ever been able to track down what happened.

 Shatky himself, decades later, still didn’t know. He said he had followed the process. He had given the citation to be passed up the line, both Australian and New Zealand. He was not sure where the breakdown occurred and had not been able to track it. Mac McKallion was blunter. He said Tar should have received some sort of medal for the way he took charge and brought them all home.

Bill Tar carried on as he always had. He served out his time. He went home and in the years that followed, he never made a fuss about the citation. He didn’t, in fact, know about it for a long time. He died eventually without the recognition his patrol commander and every man he saved said he deserved.

 That is the story of the New Zealand SAS in Vietnam in one patrol. Six men go in, five come out, one is killed, one man’s actions save the rest. The medal never comes. 4 Troop NZSAS ran 155 patrols across 26 months in Vietnam. They came home in February 1971. One man never came home with them.

 If you want to know what kind of soldiers the New Zealand SAS produced, you don’t read about big battles. You read about the quiet patrols. The men who walked into jungles where they were always outnumbered and walked out again because of what each man did for the man behind him. Bill Tar didn’t get his medal, but his patrol mates have spent 55 years making sure he got something else.

Their voices.