Why Viet Cong Fighters Were Baffled By Australian SAS Fighting Better In Rain Than Clear Weather

September 1967, Phuoc Tuy province. While every other allied unit retreated to their bases to escape the torrential monsoon rains, the Australian SAS were just getting started. The Viet Cong had spent years using the storms as a shield for secret movement only to realize too late that the downpours were actually making the Aussies invisible, silent, and far more lethal.

How did a handful of elite bushmen turn the guerrillas’ greatest environmental advantage into a psychological nightmare that left the Viet Cong questioning if they were fighting soldiers or ghosts? The Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat sat like a small island in a sea of green jungle surrounded on every side by triple canopy so thick that the sky disappeared somewhere above the treetops.

It was September 1967. Monsoon season had arrived with a vengeance. Rain fell in sheets so thick that a man could barely see 15 m ahead. The water came down hard enough to sting exposed skin. It turned every trail into a river of mud. It made the jungle canopy roar like a waterfall that never stopped. This is the story of why Viet Cong fighters were baffled by Australian SAS soldiers fighting better in rain than in clear weather.

What you are about to hear changed everything the guerrillas thought they knew about their own jungle. Deep in an underground bunker somewhere in the province, a Viet Cong commander studied reports that made no sense to him. His men were dying during rainstorms, not in firefights with large American units, not in bombing raids.

They were simply vanishing from trails they had used safely for years. The commander belonged to the D445 Provincial Mobile Battalion. His men knew this jungle like they knew their own villages. They had fought here for years. They had beaten the French. They had blooded the Americans. But something new was happening.

 Something that defied everything they understood about jungle warfare. The reports told a strange story. Australian patrols seemed to grow more aggressive during the worst weather. When the rain hammered down so hard that helicopters could not fly and artillery could not aim properly, the Australians did not retreat to their base.

They pushed deeper into the jungle. The Viet Cong commander stared at the reports and had no explanation. In the months ahead, his men would find one, though it brought them no comfort. For years, the monsoon had been the guerrillas’ best friend. Every Viet Cong fighter knew the simple truth of jungle warfare.

When the rain came, the enemy went indoors. The Americans were predictable. Their patrols shortened or stopped entirely during heavy storms. Their helicopters stayed grounded. Their firebases buttoned up tight. The rain meant safety for the guerrillas. They could move supplies on trails they normally avoided.

 They could walk upright instead of crawling. They could talk and even smoke cigarettes. The monsoon was their shield and their sanctuary. The Viet Cong had built their entire way of fighting [snorts] around this truth. Monsoon season was resupply season. It was the time to move rice and ammunition down the trails from storage areas near the Cambodian border.

It was the time to shift troops between base camps. It was the time to recruit new fighters from villages and train them in secret. The rain made all of this possible because the enemy was blind and deaf and stuck behind their firebase walls waiting for clear skies. But the Australians did not follow the rules.

At Nui Dat, the Australian SAS squadrons operated on a completely different rhythm. First squadron, second squadron, third squadron. They rotated through Vietnam bringing skills learned in jungles far from here. These men had fought communist guerrillas in Malaya during the 1950s. They had conducted secret cross-border patrol operations in Borneo during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation of the early 1960s.

They had spent more than a decade learning how to beat insurgents at their own game in their own terrain, and they had won. The SAS patrols that slipped out of Nui Dat looked nothing like American units. Where an American patrol might number 30 or 40 soldiers, the Australians sent out five or six men.

 Where Americans moved 4 to 6 km per day cutting through vegetation with machetes, the Australians moved as little as 500 m. They never cut anything. They stepped on roots and rocks to avoid leaving footprints. They carried minimal food to keep their packs light and eliminate cooking smells. They stayed in the jungle for 14 to 21 days at a time without returning to base.

The jungle they moved through was a living nightmare for most soldiers. The heat never broke even during rain. It simply became a wet, suffocating weight that pressed down on everything. Humidity sat near 100% around the clock. Equipment rusted overnight. Skin softened and cracked. Fungal infections appeared within hours.

Leeches emerged by the hundreds during rain, finding every gap in clothing and attaching themselves without a sound. But the SAS men did not fight the jungle. They became part of it. A patrol commander from second squadron noticed the pattern first. Every time the rain hammered down, the Viet Cong moved freely on trails his men were watching.

The guerrillas walked upright. They talked at normal volume. They laughed and smoked. They assumed the wall of rain made them invisible and untouchable. They had no idea that five Australian soldiers lay motionless in the undergrowth just 10 m away. Watching, counting, waiting. The rain that grounded helicopters and silenced artillery also blinded the guerrilla to a threat he had never imagined.

A threat that did not retreat when the storms came. A threat that moved slower and quieter than anything the Viet Cong thought a foreign army capable of producing. A threat that saw the monsoon not as an obstacle, but as the perfect hunting ground. The patrol commander understood something in that moment that no military manual had ever written down and no commanding officer had ever formally taught.

 Something that would take the Viet Cong months to figure out and years to fully accept. The rain did not degrade the Australian SAS. It did the exact opposite. The guerrilla’s greatest weapon was about to become his worst nightmare. What that looked like in practice, what it actually meant for five men to become ghosts in a monsoon, happened on trails across Phuoc Tuy province again and again.

And it worked because the Australian SAS did not simply tolerate the rain. They turned it into a weapon. Every advantage the monsoon gave the guerrilla was quietly and methodically taken from him. The process was not fast. It was not dramatic. It was built on years of hard-won jungle warfare experience and a kind of patience that most soldiers could not even imagine.

The first advantage was sound. Rain falling on triple canopy jungle creates a roar so constant and so complete that it swallows everything beneath it. A man could snap a branch and no one 10 m away would hear it. The SAS already moved in near total silence even in dry weather. They taped down every piece of metal on their equipment so nothing clinked or rattled.

 They communicated only with hand signals. They placed each foot with deliberate care, testing the ground before shifting their weight. In the rain, even these already tiny sounds disappeared completely. The SAS became perfectly silent. Meanwhile, the Viet Cong did the opposite. Believing themselves alone in the storm, they splash through puddles.

They called out to each other on the trail. They let their weapons and equipment swing freely. The rain made the SAS quieter and the enemy louder at the same time. The gap between the two became enormous. The second advantage was scent. Jungle fighters on both sides understood that smell could betray a position.

The Viet Cong could sometimes detect foreign soldiers by the scent of their soap, their insect repellent, or the different smell of Western food in their sweat. Tracking could follow a scent trail for hours through dense vegetation, but heavy rain washed everything clean. Within minutes of a downpour, a scent trail simply ceased to exist.

The SAS already took extreme precautions before every patrol. They stopped using soap days in advance. They avoided strongly scented food, but rain added a final layer of invisibility that no amount of personal discipline alone could fully replicate. The third advantage was visibility. In a heavy monsoon downpour, the jungle world shrank to a tiny green bubble.

A man could see perhaps 5 to 8 m in any direction. Beyond that, there was only a wall of gray water and dark tangled vegetation. A five-man patrol lying motionless in the undergrowth wearing jungle-faded uniforms was completely invisible at any distance beyond a few paces. They did not need elaborate camouflage or carefully constructed hide positions.

They simply stopped moving and the rain erased them from the world entirely. The fourth advantage came after the rain stopped and was perhaps the most tactically cunning of all. When a heavy downpour ended, the jungle floor became a perfect recording surface. Every footprint pressed into the soft mud was preserved in precise detail.

An SAS tracker could read those prints the way a scholar reads a page. He could count the exact number of people who had passed. He could determine their direction of travel. He could estimate the weight each person carried by measuring how deeply the heel impression sank into the earth. Deeper prints meant heavier loads, which meant ammunition or rice.

He could even estimate how long ago the prints were made by studying how much water had seeped back into the impression. After a rainstorm, the SAS could pick up a trail that was hours old and follow it with confidence straight to a Viet Cong base camp hidden deep in the jungle. The fifth advantage was the most important of all, and it lived entirely inside the enemy’s mind.

 For years, the Viet Cong had moved freely during monsoon rains because every opposing force they had ever faced retreated when the storms hit. This was not an assumption. It was proven fact built from years of direct experience. American patrols pulled back to firebases. Helicopter gunships stayed on the ground.

 Artillery forward observers could not see their targets through the rain and low cloud. The entire weight of American military technology ground to a halt when the storms arrived. The Viet Cong had absorbed this lesson so completely and so deeply that they no longer questioned it. Rain meant safety. It was as reliable and certain as the sun rising each morning.

The SAS exploited this certainty with cold and precise calculation. They set ambushes specifically timed to monsoon downpours because they knew the enemy would come. They knew the Viet Cong would be relaxed and moving at an easy pace. They knew weapons would be slung over shoulders and not held at the ready.

 They knew that the attention of every man in the column would be half occupied with the discomfort of the rain rather than fully focused on the trail ahead. The guerrillas’ absolute confidence in the rain became the trap that killed him. The SAS approach had roots that went far deeper than Vietnam. In the jungles of Malaya during the 1950s, Australian and British SAS units had fought a 12-year counterinsurgency against communist guerrillas and had won it.

Not by matching the guerrilla in numbers, but by exceeding him in patience and fieldcraft. The Borneo operations of the early 1960s had refined these skills further with patrols operating in complete secrecy deep in difficult terrain for weeks at a time. What these men brought to Vietnam was an institutional memory of how to beat an insurgent in his own environment.

They had done it before. They knew exactly what it required. It required the willingness to move 50 m in an hour and consider that progress. It required the ability to lie in flooded mud for 36 hours without moving, without speaking, without eating, urinating in place rather than risk the noise or movement of standing.

It required a psychological tolerance for isolation and stillness that could not be created quickly through standard military training. It had to be built over years. Even within the Australian military, this approach created friction. Conventional infantry officers looked at five-man patrols moving half a kilometer per day in the rain and struggled to see the value.

The metrics of conventional warfare, ground covered, enemy contact initiated, firepower delivered, none of them captured what the SAS was actually producing. What the SAS was producing was something far more valuable than any of those numbers. They were producing fear. They were producing confusion. They were systematically dismantling the one assumption that held the entire Viet Cong opera- -tional plan together.

 The assumption that the storm was safe. The results came quickly and they were difficult to argue with. SAS patrols began generating kill ratios and intelligence yields that seemed almost impossible for units of their size. Captured documents revealed trail networks and base camp locations that no other force had found.

Supply columns that the Viet Cong had moved through the rain for years without incident began disappearing. And still the enemy could not identify the cause because the cause defied everything they understood about how foreign armies operated. It took months before Viet Cong commanders in Phuoc Tuy province began to connect the pattern.

Their losses were spiking during the precise conditions they had always relied on for safety. And slowly, reluctantly, a terrible new understanding began forming in their minds. The rain was no longer their friend. Something was out there in the storm. Something that hunted better in the dark and the wet than it did in sunshine.

 And they had absolutely no idea how to stop it. The full weight of what that meant played out on a trail northeast of Nui Dat in 1969. And it looked like this. The five men had not moved in 36 hours. They lay in the undergrowth 10 m off a well-used trail in the jungle approaching the Hat Dich base area. A known Viet Cong stronghold in Phuoc Tuy province.

Second SAS Squadron had been running patrols deep into enemy territory for weeks. This particular patrol had inserted by helicopter 4 days earlier, landing at a false position 2 km from the actual target area to avoid alerting anyone who might be watching landing zones. They had spent two full days covering just 3 km, moving with a deliberate slowness that would have driven most soldiers to the edge of madness.

On the third day, they found what they had come for. A trail network showing heavy and recent use. The patrol’s tracker knelt and studied the prints pressed into the earth. At least 15 to 20 individuals had passed here recently. Some of the prints sank deeper at the heel than at the toe. That specific pattern meant heavy loads carried on the shoulders.

 The weight pressing down through the body with each step. Ammunition, rice. Supplies moving toward a base camp somewhere deeper in the jungle. The trail showed signs of regular use over many days. On the fourth day, the patrol leader chose his ambush position. A natural choke point where the trail narrowed between a dense wall of undergrowth on one side and a massive fallen tree on the other.

The killing zone measured perhaps 15 to 20 m in length. Fields of fire were deliberately short, no more than 20 m in any direction, which suited the SAS perfectly. Long fields of fire meant open ground, and open ground meant the enemy could see you before you could spring the trap. In close jungle, an ambush could be set with total concealment right up to the moment it fired.

 The patrol positioned four M18A1 Claymore mines along the kill zone, each one carefully angled to maximize coverage of the trail. Each Claymore contained 700 steel ball bearings packed behind a curved plate of C4 explosive. When the mine detonated, those ball bearings would blast outward in a 60° arc at approximately 1,200 m/s. Anything standing within that arc at close range would be struck by dozens of them simultaneously.

The patrol leader held the electrical firing device, called a clacker, in his right hand inside a waterproof bag to protect the connection from moisture. Each man settled into his designated position with a specific firing arc already assigned. Each man knew exactly where his Claymore coverage ended and where his rifle responsibility began.

Then, the rain came. It began around 1400 hours on the fourth day. Not a light shower, but a full monsoon downpour of the kind that makes the jungle feel like the inside of a waterfall. The canopy above the patrol shuddered under the weight of water cascading through it in streams and curtains. Within minutes, the jungle floor was flooding.

Brown water pooled around the bodies of the five men, soaking through uniforms that were already permanently damp, and filling every hollow in the ground around them. The roar of rain striking the canopy above was so loud and so constant that a man could not have heard a normal speaking voice at 15 m. Leeches emerged from the saturated earth and began moving across skin and clothing seeking warmth.

No one moved to brush them off. No one shifted position. No one ate or reached for water. They breathed slowly, and they watched the trail, and they waited. Night came without the rain stopping. The patrol lay in complete darkness in the flooded undergrowth, invisible and motionless.

 Dawn arrived gray and heavy and thoroughly soaked. The rain continued without any sign of easing. The five men had now been lying in the same positions for more than 30 hours. Muscles had moved past aching into a deep persistent numbness. Skin had turned white and soft from constant immersion. Fungal infections were already developing in the warm, wet spaces between fingers and toes.

None of it changed anything. The trail was there. The rain was falling. The enemy would come. At approximately 8:30 on the morning of the fifth day, the patrol leader heard voices. He heard them even through the hammering rain because the Viet Cong were speaking at completely normal conversational volume. Then came the sound of laughter.

 The careless metallic clink of equipment swinging freely. Then movement in the gray-green wall of rain ahead. Figures taking shape. 12 to 15 Viet Cong soldiers walking in a loose and relaxed single file along the trail. Their weapons were slung over their shoulders, not held at the ready. Several men carried supplies balanced on bamboo shoulder poles across their backs.

 Their body language was entirely unguarded. They had walked this trail in rain like this many times before. No enemy had ever been waiting for them. There was no reason to expect today would be any different. The patrol leader watched them enter the killing zone. He counted bodies through the rain with slow and absolute patience. He waited for the center of the column to reach the center of the kill zone.

He squeezed the clacker. The four claymores detonated together in a single massive crack that tore straight through the roar of the monsoon rain. 2,800 steel ball bearings screamed outward across the trail in overlapping arcs at a velocity faster than any standard rifle round. The effect across the 15-m killing zone was immediate and total.

 Before the last echo of the detonation had finished rolling through the trees, the five SAS soldiers were already firing. The heavy authoritative crack of L1A1 self-loading rifles chambered in 7.62 mm mixed with the sharper and faster report of M-16s. Each man fired short and controlled bursts into his designated arc. There was no shouting, no panic, no wasted ammunition.

 Every round was deliberate. The entire engagement lasted approximately 8 seconds. Then the patrol leader signaled and the five men moved. They gathered their claymore firing wires quickly and efficiently. One soldier swept forward past the nearest casualties and snatched a canvas satchel from the ground that might contain documents, maps, or unit orders.

They did not stop to examine what they had done. They did not count bodies or confirm kills or secure the position. Standard SAS operating procedure was absolute on this point. Spring the ambush, inflict maximum damage in minimum time, and disappear before the enemy could organize any kind of response. To linger was to die.

They turned and moved back into the jungle using the same deliberate silent steps they had practiced for days getting into position. The rain closed around them immediately. Within minutes, their footprints in the soft mud were filling with brown water and dissolving back into the earth. Within an hour, there would be no physical evidence that any of them had ever been there.

The surviving Viet Cong were left standing in the downpour with their dead and their shock and a set of questions they could not answer. How many attackers? From which direction? Where did they go? The jungle had reached out from the rain and killed without warning. And then the rain had simply swallowed every trace of what had happened.

 That experience, repeated across dozens of patrols and dozens of separate engagements over several years, produced a shift in Viet Cong behavior in Phuoc Tuy province that intelligence analysts found deeply significant. The word moved through Viet Cong units the way bad news always travels. First, as rumor whispered between men on rest.

Then, as a pattern confirmed by too many separate incidents to dismiss. Then, as undeniable operational fact that commanders had to address directly. The D445 provincial mobile battalion and elements of the 274th and 275th Viet Cong regiments began changing their behavior in ways that their own leadership found troubling and difficult to explain.

 Men who had walked freely through monsoon rains for years were now hesitating at trail heads when storms began. Unit commanders who had routinely used heavy rain as a guaranteed window of safe movement for resupply operations were now posting additional sentries specifically during downpours, reversing a practice that had served them well for a decade.

Some units stopped moving during heavy rain altogether, choosing to wait out the storm before attempting any logistics movement. The conditions that had once been the guerrillas’ greatest freedom now felt like exposure. The psychological damage reached further than any change in patrol schedules or sentry rotations.

 The Viet Cong fighter’s deepest source of confidence was his certainty that he knew this environment better than any foreign soldier could ever learn it. The jungle was where he had grown up, where he had trained, where he had survived years of war. The rain was his shield, as natural and reliable as breathing.

 The Australian SAS had quietly and methodically destroyed that certainty without the guerrilla ever fully understanding the mechanism by which it had been done. Captured documents from this period show commanders writing to their superiors struggling to account for why rain movement had become so costly. Some attributed the losses to improved American surveillance technology.

Some suggested the presence of informants in nearby villages. The actual explanation, that small teams of foreign soldiers were lying motionless in flooded jungle undergrowth for days at a time waiting specifically for rain to bring the enemy out onto the trails, was so far removed from anything they understood about how Western armies operated that it did not present itself as a serious possibility.

Instead, the phrase that eventually spread through the ranks was simpler and far more frightening than any tactical explanation. Ma rong. Phantoms of the forest, men who did not move like soldiers. Men who did not fight like soldiers. Men who arrived from the rain and returned to it without leaving a single footprint or a single cartridge case or any trace at all that they had ever existed in that place.

Within the Australian military, the SAS methods spread in the way that genuinely unconventional ideas usually spread inside conventional institutions partially and unevenly. The infantry battalions rotating through Nui Dat, including first RAR and third RAR, adopted certain elements. Patrols grew somewhat smaller.

 Noise discipline improved. Some officers began paying closer attention to weather patterns when planning operations. Tracking skills received more emphasis in preparation training. But the complete SAS methodology could not be transferred through a briefing or a training attachment of several weeks. It required a total reconstruction of how a soldier understood his role and his purpose when operating in jungle terrain.

 It required the genuine internalization of patience as a primary tactical tool rather than a temporary and uncomfortable necessity. It required a man to lie in flooded mud for 36 hours and understand in his bones, rather than just his head, that this was the most productive thing he could possibly be doing. That understanding took years to build and could not be rushed.

American forces received formal briefings on Australian patrol methods. Long-range reconnaissance patrol units operating in other parts of Vietnam adopted certain compatible elements. Some special forces teams developed broadly similar approaches through their own independent experience in comparable terrain.

But the institutional framework of the American military effort in Vietnam made wholesale adoption of the SAS model essentially impossible. American strategy in Vietnam was built on attrition, on generating a rate of enemy casualties that would eventually break the will and capacity of the opposing force.

 That strategy demanded constant aggressive action and required a measurable product in the form of enemy killed and ground controlled. A five-man patrol lying completely still in the rain for two days produced no body count figures and held no terrain. Even if the intelligence it gathered or the ambush it executed saved many lives and disrupted enemy logistics for weeks.

The system had no accurate way to value what the SAS was doing and systems tend not to change in favor of things they cannot properly measure. The numbers that eventually accumulated told their own story with considerable force. Kill ratios achieved by Australian SAS patrols during the Vietnam commitment are regarded by military historians as among the most favorable recorded by any special operations unit in modern warfare.

Estimates of the ratio of enemy killed to SAS soldiers killed in action reach figures that are difficult to comprehend in conventional military terms. Phuoc Tuy province, despite being one of the most heavily Viet Cong influenced provinces in the country before the Australian task force arrived, became measurably more secure than comparable neighboring provinces during the years of Australian presence.

 The D445 battalion was never completely destroyed, but it was persistently disrupted. Its freedom of movement was severely constrained. Its ability to use monsoon season as a protected window for large-scale resupply was effectively broken during the period of most intensive SAS activity. The bafflement that had started in that underground bunker in 1967 never fully resolved itself, even after the war ended and the guns went quiet.

Vietnamese veterans interviewed in later decades still found it difficult to articulate precisely what had made the Australians different from every other enemy they had faced. Other opponents were dangerous in good weather when aircraft could fly low and artillery observers could see their targets clearly.

 The Australians were most dangerous when the sky closed completely and the trails flooded and every instinct and every year of experience said the enemy had gone indoors to wait. That specific inversion, that understanding that a monsoon downpour now meant increased danger rather than guaranteed safety, was something the Viet Cong tactical mind had no existing framework to accommodate.

They had fought the French for years. They had fought the Americans. Neither had ever made the rain feel like a weapon pointed at them. And then the Australians left. The withdrawal of Australian combat forces began in 1971. The last troops departed in 1972. The SAS patrols that had haunted the jungle trails of Phu province for years were gone.

The Viet Cong moved carefully back into areas they had learned to avoid. They tested the trails during rainstorms and found them empty. The rain was theirs again. By April 1975, Saigon had fallen and the war was over and the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam absorbed everything. The territory, the trails, the base camps, the graveyards, and the hard lessons that so many men on both sides had paid such a severe price to learn.

The legacy of what the Australian SAS built in that jungle did not disappear with the withdrawal. It traveled. The experience became foundational material for how special operations forces around the world thought about small unit warfare in difficult environments. The core principle that a disciplined and patient small force can identify and exploit the environmental conditions in which the enemy feels safest and turn those exact conditions into a killing ground appeared again in different forms in different places. In Afghanistan,

coalition special operations teams conducted operations during blizzards and in mountain conditions that grounded conventional air support understanding that the enemy’s sense of security in bad weather was itself a vulnerability. In Iraq, the hours before dawn, the period when the enemy felt most certain of his safety, became a primary operating window for special operations raids.

The rain became a sandstorm became a moonless night. The jungle became a mountain became a city street. The principle beneath all of it remained unchanged. Find the moment when the enemy is certain he is safe. Be there waiting. Today, the jungle has taken back most of what the war touched in Phuoc Tuy province.

The trails that carried supply columns and ambush patrols and frightened men through the monsoon dark have disappeared under decades of new growth. The earth that absorbed so much has been turned over season after season by roots and rain and small creatures until almost nothing remains on the surface to mark what happened there.

Farmers working the fields near the old operational areas still turn up shell casings sometimes. They pull them from the soil and set them aside without ceremony and keep working. Because the land does not stop requiring attention simply because men once died on it. The rain still falls in the same heavy sheets every monsoon season.

 It still roars across the canopy the same way it did in 1967 and in 1969 and in every year of that long and costly war. It still shrinks the visible world down to a small gray-green bubble of 15 m in every direction. It still turns the trails to rivers and fills every depression with brown water and brings the leeches up out of the saturated earth.

But there is no one lying in the undergrowth anymore. No patrol leader with a firing device wrapped carefully in a waterproof bag. No tracker reading the story written in softened mud. No five men breathing slowly and watching a trail and knowing with complete certainty that the rain falling on them is not their enemy but their most reliable and faithful ally.

What the Australian SAS proved in that jungle was straightforward and profound and in the end deeply sad. They proved that a small number of extraordinarily skilled and patient men could take the guerrilla’s greatest environmental advantage and turn it completely against him. They proved that fieldcraft and discipline and the willingness to become genuinely indistinguishable from the environment could overcome technology and numbers on the most demanding battlefield imaginable.

They proved that the phantom could be real, that the rain could kill, and that the jungle night did not automatically belong to the man who had been born in its shadow. What the war itself proved was something else entirely. That being correct about how to fight does not matter if the purpose behind the fighting cannot be sustained.

That tactical brilliance operating inside a flawed strategy is like a perfect sentence written inside a story that should never have been told. The men who mastered that rain and lay in that mud and built something remarkable out of patience and silence deserved a purpose equal to that extraordinary skill. That is the one thing the jungle cannot grow back.

The one debt the rain cannot wash away. The one silence that all the years since have never quite managed to fill.