The First Time NVA Saw AUSTRALIAN SAS In Action in Vietnam! 

There’s an Australian War Memorial photograph cataloged as P01979.010 dated to January 1968. It shows a soldier and four members of number one squadron Special Air Service preparing for patrol out of the battalion headquarters of 7RAR dressed in tiger stripe camouflage carrying M16s and SLRs with taped foregrips.

The location isn’t Phuoc Tuy, the province the SAS had called home since 1966. It’s Bien Hoa, more than 50 kilometers away, and the operation they’re about to patrol into isn’t a hunt for Viet Cong guerrillas in familiar ground. It’s Operation Coburg, the first time the Australian Task Force had ever deployed outside its own province thrown in to stop a North Vietnamese offensive nobody in Phuoc Tuy had trained to fight.

Today, we’re covering the year and the operation where the documented record shows the SAS’s war changing character for the first time. Not a mythical single encounter, but a real datable shift from fighting local Viet Cong forces to operating in direct support of a battle against regular North Vietnamese formations.

 For the SAS’s first year and a half in Vietnam, the enemy was almost entirely local. Viet Cong guerrillas, the D445 battalion, forces that knew Phuoc Tuy’s jungle the way a farmer knows his own fields, built up an intelligence picture the hard way, patrol by patrol. That changed in January 1968. American commanders had picked up intelligence pointing to a major communist offensive timed for the Tet Lunar New Year aimed squarely at the Long Binh Bien Hoa complex northeast of Saigon.

 At the time, the largest American and South Vietnamese military base complex in the country. General Frederick Weyand asked the Australian task force to help defend the eastern approaches. On 24 January, 1 ATF moved out of Phuoc Tuy for the first time in its history, deploying 2 RAR and 7 RAR into an area of operations near the village of Trang Bom, deliberately astride the lines of communication the Australians expected North Vietnamese forces to use.

What they were about to run into wasn’t the enemy the SAS had spent nearly 2 years learning to read. Operation Coburg put 1 ATF directly in the path of the 273rd and 274th regiments, regular formations of the North Vietnamese People’s Army moving south in far greater numbers and with a different kind of discipline than the local guerrilla forces of Phuoc Tuy.

Patrol clashes started almost immediately once the Australians and New Zealanders were on the ground, and by 27 January, 4 days before Tet officially broke, the fighting had already cost 14 Australians wounded. On 31 January, the North Vietnamese launched the offensive itself, striking population centers and allied bases across the length of South Vietnam simultaneously.

Coburg had been mounted too late to stop the opening attacks on Saigon outright, but it did exactly what it was designed to do in the days that followed. It disrupted the North Vietnamese approach routes into Long Binh and Bien Hoa, and when PAVN units tried to withdraw back through the same ground afterward, the Australians were sitting on their way out.

 The SAS patrol in that photograph was operating in exactly this environment, not the intimate single-province jungle war the regiment had built its reputation on, but a conventional North Vietnamese formations fought on someone else’s ground in support of a fight that had nothing to do with hunting Viet Cong tunnel networks. It’s worth sitting with how different that mission actually was.

 Everything the SAS had trained and refined since 1966, the small teams, the reliance on stealth over firepower, the assumption that the patrol itself was the primary source of intelligence, had been built against an enemy that operated in squad and platoon strength, close to home, with everything to lose by being caught in the open.

Bien Hoa, in January 1968, put that same doctrine to work against regiments that moved in far larger formations, with a specific offensive timetable to keep, and considerably less patience for being quietly watched. The patrol tempo itself had to change to match. Reconnaissance in Phuoc Tuy had been built around patience measured in days.

 A five-man team watching a single trail junction for a week, if that’s what the mission called for, because the local VC units they were reading weren’t going anywhere fast. A North Vietnamese regiment moving on an offensive timetable didn’t give a patrol that luxury. Contact reports out of Bien Hoa needed to reach the task force fast enough to matter to a battle that might be over in hours, not the kind of long, deliberate intelligence picture SAS patrols had spent two years learning to build against the Viet Cong.

 The fighting built through February. On the 5th, C Company of 7 RAR engaged a well-fortified North Vietnamese position in a battle serious enough that, in a normal news cycle, it likely would have drawn real attention. It was almost entirely overshadowed by the sheer scale of the Tet Offensive unfolding everywhere else in the country at the same time.

From the 17th through the 28th of February, an Australian-manned position called Fire Support Base Anderson, dug in astride the enemy’s lines of communication near Trang Bom, came under repeated ground assault. The first major attack alone cost seven Australian and one American life. Each assault after that was repelled, though the exact North Vietnamese losses were never cleanly established, a familiar problem with body counts on every side of that war.

 By the time Operation Coburg wound down on 1 March and the task force returned to Nui Dat, the toll stood at 17 Australians and two New Zealanders killed, with Australia crediting the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong with roughly 145 killed and five captured. Phuoc Tuy hadn’t been quiet while this played out either, and it’s worth remembering the SAS’s original war didn’t pause just because part of the task force had moved north.

 With 2 RAR and 7 RAR committed to Coburg, 3 RAR was left to defend the home province, and Viet Cong forces used the opportunity to strike the towns of Baria and Long Dien as part of the same nationwide Tet Offensive. 3 RAR held both in fighting that cost five Australians killed and 24 wounded against roughly 50 Viet Cong.

For a few weeks in early 1968, the task force was effectively fighting two different wars in two different provinces at once. The old familiar counter-guerrilla fight in Phuoc Tuy, and an entirely new kind of conventional defensive battle a province away. Coburg turned out to be the opening note of something bigger, not an isolated flare-up.

Only a few months later, in May and June 1968, Australian forces fought the Battle of Coral Balmoral. And it’s worth spending real time on why this became, by most measures, the costliest sustained battle of Australia’s entire war in Vietnam. Fire Support Base Coral was established north of Bien Hoa as part of the broader Allied response to a second, smaller wave of Tet-related offensives.

And the insertion itself went badly before the enemy had even made contact. Inexperience with large-scale airmobile operations, thin reconnaissance, and rushed planning meant the position wasn’t properly consolidated on the first night, leaving the Australians exposed. The North Vietnamese hit them that same night and hit them again repeatedly over the following weeks at both Coral and the neighboring fire support base Balmoral in contact that Australian accounts describe as heavier in volume, larger in scale, and more

sustained than anything the task force had previously experienced in Vietnam. This wasn’t the same style of fight as Long Tan 2 years earlier, where a single company held out for hours against a mass assault. Coral-Balmoral ran for weeks, involved artillery jewels, armored counterattacks, and repeated night assaults against dug-in positions.

And it confirmed something Coburg had only hinted at a few months before. The North Vietnamese Army was now committing serious, sustained, conventional force into the same general area where the SAS had spent 2 years perfecting a completely different kind of war. Whatever the SAS and the wider task force learned about the North Vietnamese Army during those 6 weeks around Bien Hoa in January and February, they needed it again almost immediately and in a considerably larger and bloodier form.

A photograph of five men adjusting their kit outside someone else’s battalion headquarters in a province they’d never patrolled before, about to spend 6 weeks discovering that the enemy they’d need to help contain wasn’t always going to be the one they’d spent 2 years learning to outwait in the jungle back home.

There’s a second question worth asking here, and it’s one that almost never gets attached to this story, either. While all of this was happening, what did anyone back in Australia actually know about it? The honest answer is almost nothing, and not by accident. The regiment’s own regimental history, written decades later, describes its Vietnam era operations in exactly those terms: secretive, conducted deep behind enemy lines, built around the assumption that the less anyone outside the unit knew about a given patrol, the better that

patrol’s odds of coming home. This wasn’t unique to the Australians. It’s the standard operating posture of any special forces type unit doing reconnaissance work in hostile territory, but it meant that for the entire period covered by everything in this account, the early patrols against D455, the shift into Bien Hoa for Coober Pedy, the grinding weeks at Coral Balmoral, the Australian public had essentially no detailed picture of what the SAS specifically had been doing in Vietnam.

Official war correspondents covered the infantry battalions, the artillery, the Medevac helicopters. The regiment’s >> own patrols weren’t the kind of story the army was eager to hand a journalist, and the men themselves weren’t in the habit of talking about it afterward, either. The army wasn’t entirely silent on camera, to be fair.

 Its own defense public relations unit did film SAS patrols in the field. Footage exists in the Australian War Memorial’s collection today showing a patrol commander briefing his men before a mission, troopers applying camouflage paint before loading onto trucks, insertion by helicopter onto a jungle landing zone, a patrol working its way through the bush, and eventually returning to base to clean weapons before the next team went out.

 It’s genuinely valuable historical material now. At the time, though, this was official military record keeping and public relations material, not the kind of thing that put the SAS’s Vietnam service in front of the ordinary Australian reading a newspaper or watching the evening news. For that, the country had to wait for a cook. William Nagel was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria in 1947, enlisted in the Australian Army in 1964, and qualified as an Army cook the following year.

 In March 1966, he was reassigned to the SAS Regiment in that same trade, and in June 1966, the same initial deployment that put three Squadron into Vietnam for the very first time, Nagel went with them, flying out to Saigon as part of the SAS’s opening chapter in the war. His own time in country didn’t last as long as most. He was sent home for insubordination in March 1967, and was later discharged from the Army altogether.

 It would have been a footnote in the Regiment’s history if he hadn’t spent the next several years turning what he’d seen into a book. Published in 1975, The Odd Angry Shot was a slim, blackly funny, semi-autobiographical novel about a fictional SAS patrol, Patrol 22, enduring the long stretches of boredom on SAS Hill at Nui Dat between the short, violent jungle patrols that gave the book its title.

 It won the National Book Council Award that year and became almost immediately the closest thing Australia had to a definitive literary account of its own Vietnam War, full decade after the SAS’s first patrols against D445 and seven years after Operation Coburg. For most Australians who read it, this was the first time anyone had described what the Regiment’s actual day-to-day experience in Phuoc Tuy had been like, stripped of both the total public silence of the war years and the thank you for your service framing that came later.

The film adaptation followed in 1979, and by any reasonable account, it was Australia’s first Vietnam War movie, the first time a mainstream feature film had put the country’s own soldiers, rather than Americans, on screen fighting that war. Producer Sue Milliken later described just how nervous the army still was about the whole project barely a decade after Nagl’s own service.

The production needed months of negotiation before it secured defense cooperation. Filming largely at the army’s own land warfare center at Canungra in Queensland with the army and RAAF providing advice and equipment. Even as in Milliken’s own words, the army hierarchy was very nervous about anything to do with Vietnam.

The finished film starring Graham Kennedy, Bryan Brown, John Hargreaves, and John Jarrett, made on a budget of $600,000, took nearly 900,000 at the Australian box office and gave the country its first widely seen dramatization of what SAS Hill, the jungle patrols, and the long empty stretches between them had actually looked like.

It would be another decade after that before the SAS’s Vietnam service got a serious historical treatment rather than a novelist’s or a filmmaker’s version of it. David Horner’s regimental history did that work, built on patrol reports and interviews with the men who’d actually served, and it’s the source that gave the wider Australian public the phantoms of the jungle framing that since become the standard shorthand for the regiment’s reputation in Vietnam.

 The same Ma Rung nickname the Viet Cong themselves had used, now finally attached to a properly documented account rather than passed around as service folklore. Put the two timelines side by side and something genuinely striking falls out. The Viet Cong and later the North Vietnamese army had a name and a reputation for this unit within roughly two years of first patrol contact.

 Ma Rung was in use by the historical record’s own account well before the war even ended. The Australian public that these men actually served didn’t get any comparable picture of what the regiment had done until Nagel’s novel in 1975. Didn’t see it dramatized until 1979, and didn’t get a properly sourced history of it until 1989, 23 years after three squadron first flew out of Perth.

For the better part of a generation, the enemy the SAS fought knew more and had said more publicly about what this regiment was capable of than the country that sent them ever did. If you served with the task force during Operation Coburg or Coral Balmoral in the SAS or any of the units that fought alongside them that year, the comments are yours.

 This is a stretch of the war that gets far less attention than it should, precisely because it happened in the shadow of Tet’s bigger headlines, and because for years afterward, almost nobody outside the regiment was in a position to tell the story at all. For everyone else, this is a reminder that the neat first time X happened story usually doesn’t survive contact with the actual archive.

 What survives instead is often better. A dated photograph, an operational record, six weeks in early 1968 when the nature of the war itself changed under everyone’s feet at once, and a decade of near total public silence afterward that a discharged army cook finally broke with a book he apparently wrote the first draft of in six straight days.

Sources are in the description, and if this kind of grounded, documented history is what you come here for, subscribe. And to the men of 1 Squadron SAS, 2 RAR, 7 RAR, and 3 RAR who fought two different wars in two different provinces during the same few weeks of 1968, and to the ones who eventually made sure the rest of the country found out about it, thank you.