The First Time American Troops Knew Who The AUSTRALIAN SAS Were! 

Today we’re covering when and how American forces first became aware of and then began actively working alongside the Australian SAS in Vietnam and how the small unit reconnaissance role the SAS specialized in compared to the different American units doing adjacent but not identical work in the same war.

 Australian ground troops had already been serving alongside Americans for close to a year before the SAS arrived. One RAR deployed to Vietnam in mid 1965 and was attached to the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, fighting alongside it in operations like Hump and Marauder that November and the following January. So by the time the Australian government decided in March 1966 to expand its commitment into a full task force with its own artillery, armor, and an SAS squadron attached, American commanders weren’t meeting Australians for the first time. What they were

meeting for the first time was this larger, more capable, more independently minded formation. And initially, they didn’t get their own patch of ground to do it in. When Australian and New Zealand elements began arriving at NewAtat in the following weeks, they were for a short initial period still working under the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s own command before being detached in June 1966.

 Once the task force’s independent tactical area of responsibility in Fukui province was established. The reason for that detachment is documented plainly enough. Differences in operational method between the Australian and American forces had already become evident. The Australians didn’t patrol the way the 173rd did.

 Didn’t move the way American infantry moved. And it made enough sense to both sides that Fuktui became the Australians own province to run largely by their own doctrine rather than folding them permanently into an American brigade’s way of doing business. From that point on, the relationship was formalized rather than incidental.

 The task force operated under its own Australian National Command in Saigon for administrative matters. But for actual operations, it answered to the American core level headquarters to Field Force Vietnam based at Long Bin. A relationship that lasted for the entire war and gave senior American commanders a direct standing line of visibility into everything the task force, including its SAS squadron, was doing in the field.

This wasn’t a distant or occasional arrangement. The clearest proof of how close it actually got is the Huskys. A battery second battalion 35th Field Artillery, six American M109 155 mm self-propelled howitzers manned by American crews was stationed permanently inside the Australian base at NewAtat from 1966 onward.

 A standing part of the task force’s own fire support alongside the Australians and New Zealanders own artillery. It’s been described as the only American unit in the entire war to serve as a regular integral component of a foreign combat force rather than simply operating nearby or in support on a given operation.

 Those six guns fired in support of D Company 6R at Long Tan on 18 August 1966. Which is why on the official order of battle for one of the most famous purely Australian battles of the war, the United States appears as a listed belligerent. For the SAS patrols operating out of the same base, that battery wasn’t some distant ally.

 It was the artillery sitting a few hundred meters from their own lines. In a war where a patrol calling for fire support needed to trust the guns behind it completely. The relationship between the SAS specifically and American special operations forces built up more gradually patrol by patrol over the following two years.

 By 1967, it had become common enough that American long range reconnaissance patrol personnel from the 101st Airborne Division were going out on operations directly alongside One Squadron SAS. learning the Australian patrol style from the inside rather than reading about it in a briefing. The regiment also ran a formal personnel exchange program with US special forces units in both directions.

Australian troopers spent time with American special forces units and American personnel rotated through service with the Australians. SASR elements also deployed alongside US Navy Seals during this period. None of this was one-sided admiration. According to sources on the development of the American longrange reconnaissance program, special forces concepts and ANZAC SAS concept were both directly folded into the tactical mix that shaped how the US Army’s own LRP units were trained and employed. And the SASR is

separately credited with providing instructors to the American LRP training pipeline that became the army’s recondo school. Whatever doctrine the Australians had spent years refining, first in Borneo and then in Fuic Twe, American reconnaissance units were actively borrowing pieces of it in real time.

 That growing partnership reached its clearest large-scale expression in operation Santa Fe run from 3 November 1967 to 5 January 1968. It was a genuine three-nation operation. The first brigade, 9inth infantry division, the first Australian task force, including one squadron, SAS, and the ARVN 18th division, aimed at destroying the Vietkong fifth division’s base in the MTA secret zone and reopening a 60 km stretch of Highway 1 that VC activity had kept closed since 1962.

Allied forces claimed 126 Vietkong killed against six American dead. And once the secret zone had been cleared and the highway secured, US Army engineers moved in to rebuild 11 bridges and resurface the road itself with regional force bases established along it afterward to hold the ground. For the SAS patrols involved, it was a rare instance of their usual small team reconnaissance work feeding directly and visibly into a large, formally coordinated, multinational conventional operation, rather than the more typical

pattern of quietly reporting back to their own task force headquarters alone. American recognition of what the task force’s intelligence work, the SAS, chief among the units producing it, could achieve, wasn’t limited to a single operation either. Years later, in April 1970, Australian and New Zealand platoon captured a cache during Operation Townsville that included the Vietkong’s own operational signals codes and one-time cipher pads.

 General Kraton Abrams, commanding the entire military assistance command Vietnam at the time, was reported to have called it the biggest intelligence coup of the war. about as direct a piece of praise as a senior American commander could hand a small Allied contingent and a reflection of a reputation for hard, patient ground level intelligence work that the SASR’s own reconnaissance patrols had been building since 1966.

All of this raises a fair question given how closely the SAS and various American reconnaissance and special operations units ended up working together. How similar were they actually doing the same job? The honest answer is less than the shared special forces label suggests, and the differences are worth being specific about rather than waved away.

 The SAS in Vietnam was by its own regiment’s description fundamentally a long range reconnaissance patrol force, the eyes and ears of the entire task force, operating in four or fiveman teams with a guiding principle of seeing without being seen. occasionally running deliberate snatch patrols to capture a prisoner for interrogation and falling back on violent drilled contact drills only when stealth had already failed.

 It was one standing regiment, its three squadrons rotating through two tours each across the entire war, applying essentially the same doctrine the whole time. The closest American equivalent in raw job description was the army’s own long range reconnaissance effort. Initially, individual LRP companies attached to specific divisions and brigades rather than one unified regiment doing genuinely similar work with genuinely similar small teams, but organized and scaled differently.

separate LRP detachments serving separate parent formations only consolidated into a single lineage. The 75th Infantry Regiment Ranger from 1969 onward, years after the SAS had already been running the same kind of patrol as a settled institution since Borneo in the early 1960s. US Army Special Forces, despite sharing the words special and a public image the media tends to blur together with the SAS, was actually built around a substantially different core mission.

Rather than small teams quietly gathering intelligence for someone else’s larger force, special forces central Vietnam era job was unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense, training, arming, and often personally leading South Vietnamese and especially indigenous highland forces through the civilian irregular defense program.

 A commitment that by 1967 had them assisting roughly 80,000 paramilitary troops. That’s a fundamentally different kind of work from a fiveman SAS patrol watching a jungle trail for a week. Longer term, larger in scale, built around embedding with and leading a partner force rather than staying invisible from everyone, including your own side’s larger units.

US Navy Seals sat closer to the SAS’s own direct action and reconnaissance mold, but operated in a different environment entirely, the riverine and coastal terrain of the rungs special zone and the Mikong Delta rather than thuick tweeze inland jungle and generally leaned towards faster, more aggressive direct action raids than the SAS’s default preference for extended patient observation.

 Put simply, the SAS and the American LRP companies were doing close to the same job at different points in their institutional maturity and traded ideas back and forth. As a result, special forces were doing an adjacent but genuinely different job built around partnership and advising rather than solitary reconnaissance. The SEALs shared the SAS’s taste for stealth and small teams, but applied it to a different landscape entirely.

 None of this was a hierarchy of who was better. It was four different tools shaped by four different mission sets that happened to end up working the same war within helicopter range of each other. Occasionally swapping patrol members, instructors and tactics along the way. If you served with any of these units in Vietnam, Australian, New Zealand, or American, and remember what that crossraining or joint patrol experience was actually like on the ground, the comments are yours.

 This is a side of the alliance that gets far less attention than the battles themselves. For everyone else, it’s worth remembering that special forces is a category the public tends to flatten into one image when the actual units serving under that banner in Vietnam were doing meaningfully different jobs for meaningfully different reasons and learning from each other precisely because those differences were real.

Sources are in the description. And if this kind of grounded comparative history interests you, subscribe. And to the men of one, two, and three squadrons SAS, the American units that trained alongside them, fought beside them, and in the case of six gun crews from Colorado, quite literally shared their base at NewAt. Thank you.