December 19th, 1968. The long high mountains rose from the Vietnamese jungle like the spine of some ancient beast. Their limestone peaks shrouded in morning mist that refused to burn away even under the tropical sun. Staff Sergeant Michael James Connelly, United States Army Special Forces, Fifth Special Forces Group, crouched at the edge of a clearing that would haunt his dreams for the next 53 years.
He was 31 years old, a veteran of two previous tours, holder of two silver stars and a bronze star with V device for valor. He had conducted crossber operations into Laos that remained classified to this day. He had watched men perish in ways that defied description. He had killed with his hands, with his knife, with weapons that officially did not exist in the arsenals of the United States military.
None of it had prepared him for what he witnessed that morning in the company of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment. The joint patrol had been his idea. Connelly had heard the rumors circulating through the special forces camps at Natrang and the MACV Soggy compound in Saigon. Stories about the Australians operating out of Nui dot.
Tales that seemed too outlandish to be true. They spoke of fiveman patrols that achieved higher body counts than entire American battalions. They whispered about operators who moved through the jungle like ghosts, who could track a single enemy soldier across kilometers of triple canopy forest, who employed methods that made even the hardened veterans of the Phoenix program uncomfortable.
Connelly had dismissed most of it as barroom exaggeration, the kind of tall tales that proliferated whenever elite units operated in proximity. He was wrong. He was catastrophically, fundamentally wrong. But to understand just how wrong he was, we need to examine what the Australian SAS had become by late 1968.
The men of Second Squadron, Australian Special Air Service Regiment, had been operating in Fuai Province for nearly 3 years by the time Connelly requested his attachment. They had arrived in 1966 as a relatively conventional special reconnaissance unit, trained in the British SAS tradition of longrange patrol and surveillance.
What they became over those 36 months of continuous jungle warfare was something else entirely. The Vietnamese terrain, the nature of the enemy, and the influence of their aboriginal trackers had transformed them into a hybrid organism that combined Western military precision with ancient hunting techniques that predated European civilization by 40,000 years.
They did not fight the war the way Americans fought it. They did not call in air strikes at the first contact. They did not measure success in bomb tonnage or artillery rounds expended. They measured success in silence, in patience, in the psychological destruction of an enemy who could never feel safe, not even in their own base camps.
The patrol commander was Sergeant Terren Michael Walsh, known throughout the Australian task force by his call sign, Blackbird. He was 29 years old, a brick layer son from the Melbourne suburb of Footskay, a man who had never traveled more than 200 km from his birthplace before enlisting in the Australian Army at age 19. Now he commanded a five-man reconnaissance team that had accumulated more confirmed eliminations than any other patrol in the regiment’s history.
The Vietkong infrastructure in Fui province had placed a bounty on his head equivalent to 5 years wages for a Vietnamese peasant farmer. They called him, quote, one, the jungle ghost. They told stories about him to frighten new recruits. Stories that had grown so distorted through repetition that they barely resembled reality.
The reality, Connelly would discover, was far more disturbing than any ghost story. Walsh had accepted the Americans presence on the patrol with visible reluctance. The Australians had developed a deep skepticism toward American operational methods. A skepticism born from observing the results of conventional US tactics in their area of operations.
They had watched American units crash through the jungle with all the subtlety of a brass band, announcing their presence to every enemy within 5 km. They had monitored radio traffic filled with chatter that compromised operational security. They had seen the aftermath of search and destroy missions that killed civilians and generated new Vietkong recruits faster than they eliminated existing ones.
The Americans had firepower beyond anything the Australians could dream of commanding. What they lacked in the Australian assessment was craft, and this was merely the beginning of what Connelly would learn. The patrol departed the Australian base at Nui Dat on December 17th, 1968 at 0300 hours. They moved in single file through the rubber plantation that surrounded the base, then plunged into the jungle that marked the boundary of what the Australians called Indian country.
Connelly had participated in hundreds of patrols during his time in Vietnam, butnothing had prepared him for the way these men moved. There was no sound, not a snapped twig, not a rustled leaf, not a single piece of equipment that clinkedked or scraped against another. The five Australians flowed through the vegetation like water through rocks.
Their bodies somehow finding passages through the undergrowth that seemed physically impossible. Connelly, despite his extensive training, felt like an elephant crashing through a china shop by comparison. The first thing Walsh did upon entering the jungle was crouch and remove his boots.
He produced a knife and carefully cut away the heel and toe portions of the rubber soles, leaving only the ball of the foot intact. He then sliced a series of shallow grooves across the remaining sole material in a cross-hatch pattern. The other Australians performed the same ritual without a word being spoken. When Walsh noticed Conny’s confused expression, he offered a brief explanation in a whisper so soft it barely qualified as vocalized sound.
The cuts eliminated the distinctive bootprint that enemy trackers looked for. The remaining sole provided just enough protection while allowing the wearer to feel the ground beneath their feet to sense trip wires and pressure plates through the thin material. The modification also reduced noise by perhaps 15% compared to intact jungle boots.
This level of tactical refinement extended to every aspect of the Australian operation. Their weapons were wrapped in strips of cloth to eliminate reflection and reduce any sound from metal-on-metal contact. Their faces and hands were covered not with standard issue camouflage paint, but with a mixture of ash, charcoal, and pig fat that the Aboriginal tracker traveling with the patrol had prepared according to techniques passed down through countless generations.
Their loadbearing equipment had been modified extensively with all metal buckles replaced by cloth ties and every potential noise source either padded or removed entirely. They carried no food that required cooking, no equipment that served any purpose beyond immediate survival and combat effectiveness. They had stripped themselves down to pure predatory function.
The Aboriginal tracker was a Lance Corporal named William Mundine, a Bunelong man from Northern New South Wales whose grandfather had tracked Japanese infiltrators for the Australian military during World War II. Mundine moved at the front of the patrol. Reading the jungle the way a scholar reads text, he could identify enemy presence from disturbances in vegetation that occurred days earlier.
He could determine the number of soldiers in a unit, their direction of travel, their physical condition, and their state of alertness from signs that remained completely invisible to the Americans trained eyes. The United States military had nothing comparable to this capability. They had technology, sensors, aircraft, electronic surveillance, but they did not have men who could read the land itself as a continuous record of human activity.
But the trackers were only one small piece of a much larger puzzle. By the morning of December 19th, the patrol had covered 17 km through some of the most difficult terrain in Fuoktoy province. They had moved only at night, lying motionless in concealed positions during daylight hours. They had consumed no hot food, made no fires, transmitted no radio signals except for a single coded burst each evening, confirming their position to headquarters.
They had detected and avoided three separate Vietkong patrols during their movement, each time melting into the vegetation so completely that enemy soldiers passed within meters without detecting their presence. Connelly had begun to understand why the Australians achieved the results they did. This was not merely different tactics.
This was an entirely different philosophy of warfare. On the morning of the 19th, Mundine detected signs of a large enemy presence approximately 2 km ahead of their position. The patrol halted while he moved forward to conduct a close reconnaissance, disappearing into the jungle so completely that Connelly lost sight of him within seconds despite watching his departure intently.
He returned 40 minutes later with intelligence that would have required an American unit hours of aerial reconnaissance to obtain. Ahead lay a Vietkong rest station, a semi-permanent camp where enemy units rotating through the area would pause to resupply and recover before continuing their operations. Mundine estimated between 40 and 50 personnel present, including a security element of approximately 12 centuries positioned around the perimeter.
Walsh absorbed this information without visible reaction. He then did something that made Conny’s blood run cold. He smiled. The Australian sergeant gathered his four men and the American observer into a tight circle and began outlining his plan using hand signals and whispered fragments. They would not call forartillery.
They would not request air support. They would not radio for reinforcements. Five Australians plus one increasingly uncomfortable American observer would engage a position defended by 50 enemy soldiers and a dozen centuries. The plan Walsh outlined was not a plan for conventional engagement. It was a plan for psychological annihilation.
The Australians would wait until full darkness. They would then infiltrate the perimeter by eliminating the sentries silently, one by one, over a period of approximately 4 hours. Once the perimeter security had been neutralized, they would not immediately attack the main camp. Instead, they would prepare the eliminated century’s remains in a specific configuration designed to maximize the psychological impact on the survivors when dawn revealed what had occurred during the night.
Only then, in the chaos of that discovery, would they initiate offensive action from positions already established inside the enemy perimeter. This was not warfare, as Connelly understood it. This was something older, something that reached back past the conventions of modern military conflict into a primal realm of hunting and terror.
And yet, this was only the plan. The execution would prove far more disturbing. The patrol moved into position as darkness fell. Connelly was assigned to remain with Mundine at an observation point approximately 300 m from the enemy perimeter. Close enough to monitor the operation, but far enough to provide security warning if enemy reinforcements approached.
Walsh and the three remaining Australians disappeared into the night. Their departure marked by nothing more than a slight rustle of vegetation that could have been the wind. What followed over the next 4 hours challenged everything Connelly believed about the nature of combat. The First Century ceased transmitting his regular signals.
At approximately 2100 hours, the Vietkong used a simple but effective system of communication between perimeter guards. A series of whistled codes passed from position to position every 15 minutes to confirm that each sentry remained alert and alive. When the first signal failed to complete its circuit, the duty officer in the main camp dispatched a runner to investigate.
That runner never returned, nor did the second. By 2200 hours, the enemy commander faced a deteriorating situation he could not understand. His perimeter was going silent, position by position. But there had been no sounds of combat, no gunfire, no explosions, no screams, just silence, spreading like a disease through his defensive network.
The Vietkong commander made the decision that Walsh had predicted he would make. Rather than send more men into the darkness to investigate, he pulled his remaining sentries back toward the main camp and established a tighter defensive perimeter. This was a rational response to an irrational situation, and it played directly into the Australian plan.
By consolidating his forces, the commander had abandoned his outer security positions. Positions that now contained the bodies of his eliminated centuries and the preparations Walsh and his men were making for the morning’s revelation. Connelly did not sleep that night. Neither did Mundine, who monitored the operation with an expression of profound calm that seemed utterly inconsistent with the circumstances.
At one point, approximately 0200 hours, Mundine turned to the American and whispered four words that would stay with Connelly for the rest of his life. Quote three, not quote four, not quote five. hunt. The first light of December 20th revealed the full scope of what the Australians had accomplished during the night.
The Vietkong commander emerged from his command bunker at approximately 0530 hours to assess his defensive situation in daylight. What he saw sent him stumbling backward. His voice raised in a scream that echoed across the camp and brought every soldier running to the perimeter. The eliminated sentries had been arranged in a precise circle around the camp, each body positioned facing inward toward the defenders they had failed to protect.
Their weapons had been removed and laid at their feet. Magazines emptied, actions opened. Their uniforms had been adjusted to expose their torsos, and on each chest had been placed a single playing card. The Ace of Spades, a symbol that American psychological operations units had been attempting to weaponize with minimal success.
The Australians had apparently obtained a supply of these cards specifically for this purpose. But that was not what made the commander scream. That was not what would feature in intelligence reports that MACV would subsequently classify at the highest levels of secrecy. The sentry’s boots had been removed and placed beside each body.
The boots had been cut in a specific pattern, heel and toe removed, cross-hatch grooves sliced across the remaining soles, an exact match of the modifications the Australians made to their own footwear.The message was unmistakable and devastating. We walk among you. We move as you move. We could be anyone. We could be anywhere.
You will never see us coming. And that was when Walsh initiated the second phase of his operation. The first shots came from inside the perimeter from positions the Australians had established during the night within the camp itself. Four rifles firing on semi-automatic. Each round precisely aimed. Each target selected for maximum tactical effect.
The enemy commander fell in the first 3 seconds. His deputy fell 2 seconds later. The radio operator attempting to call for assistance took a round through the hand that destroyed the transmission key before a second round ended his attempts permanently. In the first 15 seconds of engagement, the Australians eliminated the enemy’s command structure, communications capability, and any coherent ability to organize resistance.
The surviving Vietkong soldiers, already in a state of psychological collapse from the morning’s discovery, now found themselves under fire from opponents they could not locate. Some attempted to return fire, shooting blindly into the jungle in all directions. Others fled, abandoning their weapons and equipment in a desperate attempt to escape the nightmare their rest station had become.
A few, the most experienced and disciplined, attempted to organize defensive positions and locate the attackers. These men lived slightly longer than the others, but the outcome was identical. The engagement lasted 11 minutes. When it concluded, 43 enemy personnel lay motionless within the perimeter of what had been a secure rest station.
The Australians had suffered zero casualties. They had expended fewer than 200 rounds of ammunition combined. They had not called for any external support. Connelly emerged from his observation position and moved toward the camp in a state approaching shock. He had participated in engagements where superior American firepower had achieved similar casualty ratios, but always through the application of overwhelming force, artillery barges, air strikes, coordinated assaults by numerically superior infantry.
This was something categorically different. Five men with rifles had destroyed a fortified position defended by 50 through a combination of psychological manipulation, tactical patience, and ruthless precision that seemed to belong to a different era of human conflict entirely. What happened next pushed Connelly beyond shock into territory he had no framework to process.
Walsh emerged from the camp carrying several items he had collected from the enemy commander bunker. documents certainly which would provide valuable intelligence about Vietkong operations in the province. Maps showing infiltration routes and supply caches, but also personal effects, photographs, letters, small items of sentimental value that enemy soldiers carried as reminders of home and family.
Walsh laid these items out carefully and began photographing them with a small camera. He then returned each item to its precise original location, ensuring that whoever eventually discovered this camp would find the commander’s personal effects undisturbed. The message again was psychological. We could have taken everything.
We chose to leave these behind. We do not fight for plunder. We fight to demonstrate that you cannot hide from us, that everything you value is vulnerable, that your private spaces are ours to enter at will. The other Australians were methodically searching the eliminated sentries and main camp casualties, but they were not collecting typical battlefield souvenirs.
They were photographing faces, documenting identification papers, recording names and unit designations in small notebooks they carried for this purpose. Walsh later explained to Connelly that this information would be used to create psychological operations materials, specifically targeting the units and families connected to these casualties.
Letters would be sent. Photographs would be distributed. The relatives and comrades of these eliminated soldiers would know in specific and undeniable detail what had happened in the Long High Mountains. This was not warfare. This was systematic psychological destruction extended beyond the battlefield into the enemy society itself.
But even this was not what broke Connelly. What broke him occurred approximately 40 minutes after the engagement concluded. Walsh approached the American with an expression that combined professional satisfaction with something Connelly could only interpret as anticipation. He gestured toward the circle of eliminated centuries that still ringed the camp, their bodies undisturbed since their arrangement during the night.
The Australian sergeant produced his camera again and indicated that he wanted Connelly to photograph him with the centuries. Not as a trophy shot, Walsh explained, but as documentation for an afteraction report that would be submitted through Australian channelsonly. Connelly refused. His refusal was not eloquent.
It was not a principled statement about the laws of armed conflict or the ethical obligations of military professionals. It was a visceral, instinctive rejection that emerged from somewhere below conscious thought. He simply said no and walked away. Walsh did not pursue the matter. He did not seem offended or even surprised. He simply nodded and conducted his documentation using one of the other Australians as photographer.
The expression on his face as he posed among the arranged bodies was not one of triumph or cruelty. It was business-like, professional, the expression of a craftsman documenting completed work. That expression haunted Connelly for decades. Not because it was monstrous, but because it was so utterly mundane.
The patrol returned to Nuidot on December 21st after an extraction that proved anticlimactic following the intensity of the previous days. Connelly filed his required reports through MACVS channels, reports that were immediately classified and have never been released. He included a single personal request with his official documentation.
He wished to be removed from any future joint operations with Australian SAS units. He provided no detailed explanation for this request. The request was granted without comment. The story might have ended there, buried in classified archives and fading memories, except for what happened over the following months.
Intelligence reports from Fuaktoy province documented a significant change in Vietkong operational patterns following the Longhai Mountains engagement. Enemy units began avoiding the routes that passed through the area where the rest station had been located. Local force commanders reported difficulty recruiting new members from villages in the region.
Desertion rates among units operating in the province increased marketkedly. Capture documents revealed that the legend of quote six had spread throughout the communist infrastructure in the province with increasingly elaborate warnings about the supernatural abilities of the Australian jungle ghosts. The psychological operation had worked exactly as designed.
A single engagement conducted by five men over approximately 16 hours had achieved effects that American operations involving thousands of troops and millions of dollars in material had failed to accomplish. The Australian approach was demonstrabably more effective than conventional American methods. And that perhaps was the most disturbing realization of all.
The United States military establishment in Vietnam had access to resources beyond imagination. They commanded air power that could level cities. They possessed artillery that could saturate square kilm with high explosives. They deployed electronic surveillance systems that could detect enemy radio transmissions from hundreds of kilome away.
They had everything except the one thing that actually mattered in this kind of war. They did not know how to hunt. The Australians knew. They had learned from the Aboriginal trackers who accompanied their patrols. Men whose ancestors had perfected the art of hunting across the most unforgiving terrain on Earth over tens of thousands of years.
They had adapted those ancient skills to modern warfare in ways that Western military doctrine had never anticipated. They had combined stone age hunting techniques with 20th century weapons and communications to create something unprecedented. a special operations capability that operated on principles fundamentally alien to American military thinking.
The American way of war was industrial. It sought to overwhelm the enemy with production capacity to substitute firepower for fieldcraft to achieve victory through material superiority rather than individual skill. This approach had worked against Germany and Japan, enemies who operated according to similar industrial principles.
It was failing catastrophically against an enemy who did not. The Australian way of war was something else entirely. It was personal, intimate, psychological. It sought not merely to eliminate enemy personnel, but to destroy enemy morale, to make the very idea of resistance seem feudal, to create such an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that the enemy would choose to stop fighting rather than face another day in a war they could not understand.
This approach required fewer resources, produced fewer friendly casualties, and achieved more lasting effects than any amount of bombing or shelling. But it came at a cost. The men who practiced this kind of warfare had to become something different from ordinary soldiers. They had to suppress the normal human responses to intimate violence to develop a capacity for patient cruelty that most people could not sustain without psychological damage.
Walsh and his men had crossed a threshold that separated professional warriors from something older and darker. Connelly understood this perhaps better than he wanted to admit. Hisrefusal to photograph Walsh among the centuries was not merely a reaction to a violation of military propriety. It was recognition that he stood at the edge of an abyss he was not willing to enter.
He could observe what the Australians did. He could acknowledge its effectiveness. He could even admire the skill and dedication it required, but he could not become it. The question of whether Walsh and his men had become something inhuman, or whether they had simply reconnected with something human that civilization had suppressed was never resolved in Conny’s mind.
He spent decades after the war attempting to process what he had witnessed, speaking with psychiatrists and fellow veterans, and eventually in the 1990s with historians researching the Australian experience in Vietnam. His accounts were consistent, detailed, and deeply troubled. He never claimed that the Australians had violated the laws of armed conflict in any prosecutable sense.
The centuries had been eliminated in combat operations against a legitimate military target. The arrangement of bodies, while psychologically devastating, did not technically constitute desecration under the Geneva Conventions as they existed at the time. the documentation of personal effects, the psychological operations targeting enemy families, the systematic campaign of terror.
All of these existed in a gray zone that military law had not been designed to address. The Australian SAS had not fought dirty. They had fought in a way that was so clean, so precise, so perfectly calibrated to achieve psychological effects that it somehow seemed dirtier than any amount of conventional brutality.
And the men who did it showed no signs of moral conflict about their methods. That was what truly disturbed Connelly. What kept him awake at night for years after his return to the United States. Walsh and his team had not been sadists or psychopaths. They had been consumate professionals executing a doctrine they believed in.
They had been craftsmen taking pride in their work. They had been hunters doing what hunters do. The absence of visible psychological damage among the Australians suggested either an inhuman capacity for compartmentalization or a worldview so different from Conny’s own that it might as well have been alien. The afteraction reports Connelly filed through Mac Vogg channels reached the Pentagon eventually where they provoked a minor bureaucratic crisis that has never been publicly documented.
Several officers advocated studying and potentially adopting Australian methods for American special operations units. Others argued that such methods were fundamentally incompatible with American military values and traditions. The debate was never resolved, largely because no one at decision-making levels wanted to acknowledge formally that a force from a country with less than 1% of America’s military budget had developed capabilities that American forces could not match.
The reports were classified, filed, and forgotten. The lessons that could have been learned were not learned. American tactics in Vietnam continued largely unchanged until the final withdrawal in 1973. The war was lost. Walsh continued operating in Fuaktui province until the Australian withdrawal in 1971.
His patrol statistics remained the highest in the regiment until the end of Australian involvement in the conflict. He returned to civilian life in Australia where he worked as a building contractor until his passing in 2014. He gave only one interview about his service to an Australian journalist writing a book about SAS operations in Vietnam.
The book was published in 1995 but received minimal attention in the United States. In that interview, Walsh was asked about the American observers who had accompanied his patrols at various times during the war. His response was characteristically tur. The Americans, he said, were good soldiers, but poor hunters. They had forgotten things that human beings used to know.
The jungle had reminded them of what they had forgotten, and most of them did not like what they remembered. Whether this was a criticism of American military culture or a statement about human nature in general, Walsh did not clarify. He did not seem to think clarification was necessary. The rivalry between American and Australian special operations forces continued long after the Vietnam War ended.
It evolved into a more professional and collegial relationship as both countries faced new threats and developed new doctrines for unconventional warfare. Australian SAS operators served alongside American special forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous other conflicts. Their methods and approaches gradually converging as both services learned from each other and from shared enemies.
But the old tensions never entirely disappeared. American operators who trained with Australians still reported a sense that their southern hemisphere counterparts operated according to slightly differentrules, saw warfare through a slightly different lens, were willing to go to places psychologically that American doctrine discouraged.
Whether this represented Australian superiority, Australian darkness, or simply Australian difference remained a matter of debate among the small community of people who thought about such things. Connelly passed away in 2019 at the age of 82. His son, also a military veteran, found among his effects a small collection of documents related to his Vietnam service.
Most were routine personnel records and commendations. One was different. It was a single sheet of paper, handwritten, apparently composed late in Conny’s life when he had begun organizing his memories for posterity. The document described the morning of December 20th, 1968 in the Long High Mountains.
It described the circle of centuries, the arranged bodies, the cut boots, the playing cards. It described Walsh’s expression as he documented his work. It described the 11-minute engagement that followed and the psychological collapse of the enemy force. At the bottom of the page, Connelly had written a single sentence that served as both summary and epitap for his experience with the Australian SAS.
Quote seven. The document was donated to a military history archive where it remains available to researchers. It has been cited in several academic studies of Australian special operations in Vietnam, though never in official American military histories. The Pentagon’s classification of Conniey’s original afteraction reports has never been lifted.
The full story of what happened in the Long High Mountains remains officially unknown. This account represents one attempt to reconstruct events from available sources, survivor testimony, and the fragmentaryary documentary record that has emerged over the past five decades. It is necessarily incomplete. It may contain errors or interpretations that participants would dispute.
What is not in dispute is the fundamental reality that the Australian SS operated in Vietnam according to methods that shocked and disturbed their American allies. That these methods were demonstrabably more effective than conventional approaches. And that the lessons they offered were never adequately absorbed by American military doctrine.
The war in Vietnam was lost. The lessons of the Australian SAS in that war remain largely unlearned. And somewhere in the jungles of Fuaktai province, the ghosts of the Longhai mountains continue their eternal patrol, waiting for enemies who will never come. The Americans, after all, learned to avoid that route, too.
Some questions have no comfortable answers. Some victories leave scars that no metal can cover. And some stories survive not because they inspire, but because they disturb. Because they reveal truths about warfare and humanity that civilization would prefer to forget. This is one of those stories. The men who lived it are mostly gone now.
The jungles where they fought have grown back over the scars of war. The enemies they faced have become trading partners. The cold war that sent them to Vietnam has ended, replaced by new conflicts and new threats that would have been unimaginable to the young soldiers who patrolled the Longhai mountains in December of 1968.
But the questions raised by their experience endure. What is the true nature of elite warfare? How far should soldiers go in pursuit of victory? What separates a warrior from a hunter? And does that distinction matter when the enemy is equally willing to cross any line? These are not questions that military doctrine can answer.
They are questions that each soldier must answer for himself in the darkness of jungle nights and the brightness of confrontations with his own capacity for violence. Connelly answered those questions by walking away. He chose to remain within the boundaries of warfare as he understood it, even if that meant accepting lesser effectiveness against a determined enemy.
His choice was neither heroic nor cowardly. It was simply human. Walsh answered those questions differently. He chose to become something that his civilized background had not prepared him for, to embrace capabilities that most people never discover they possess. His choice was neither monstrous nor admirable. It was simply effective.
Which of them was right? The question assumes that rightness is possible in the context of war. That moral judgment can be applied to situations where survival depends on doing things that peace time morality condemns. Perhaps neither was right. Perhaps both were right. Perhaps the very concept of rightness becomes meaningless when young men are sent into jungles to resolve disputes that old men created in airconditioned offices thousands of kilometers away.
The Australian SAS patrols of the Vietnam War represented something unique in the history of modern special operations. They combined ancient knowledge with modern technology, psychological sophistication withphysical endurance, ruthless effectiveness with professional discipline.
They achieved results that larger and better resourced forces could not match. They did so at a cost that only the men who served can truly calculate. Most of those men never spoke publicly about their experiences. The Australian military culture discouraged the kind of memoir writing and media engagement that characterized American veterans relationship with the Vietnam War.
The stories that have emerged have come mostly from official historians, journalists, and the occasional veteran willing to break decades of silence. What those stories reveal is a capability that the modern world has largely forgotten. the capability of small groups of highly trained men to achieve strategic effects through tactical excellence.
In an era of drone strikes and precisiong guided munitions, of satellite surveillance and electronic warfare, the lessons of men who hunted other men through triple canopy jungle might seem obsolete. They are not. The fundamentals of human conflict have not changed since Walsh led his patrol into the long high mountains.
Fear still motivates. Uncertainty still paralyzes. Psychological effects still outlast physical damage. The enemy who believes he is being hunted by ghosts fights differently than the enemy who believes he faces a conventional military force. These truths were understood by the Australian SAS half a century ago. They remain true today.
Whether modern special operations forces have truly absorbed these lessons is a question that current classification regimes prevent answering definitively. What can be said is that the Australian approach to unconventional warfare, patient, psychological, rooted in hunting rather than combat, continues to influence doctrine in ways that are rarely acknowledged publicly.
The Green Beret, who refused to patrol with Australian SAS ever again understood something that many military thinkers have missed. Effectiveness in warfare is not simply a matter of weapons and tactics. It is a matter of will, of psychology, of the ability to enter mental spaces that most people cannot sustain. The Australians had developed that ability to a degree that their American allies found deeply uncomfortable.
That discomfort was perhaps the most honest response possible. It acknowledged the reality that elite warfare demands capabilities that conflict with civilized values. It recognized that some forms of effectiveness come at costs that not everyone is willing to pay. It accepted that there are limits to how far a person can go while remaining recognizably themselves.
Connelly chose to remain within those limits. Walsh chose to exceed them. Both served their countries honorably according to their own understanding of what honor required. Neither emerged unchanged from the experience. That is the true legacy of the Long High Mountains. Not a tactical lesson or a doctrinal innovation, but a confrontation with the oldest questions warfare poses.
How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice for victory? How far into darkness are you willing to go? And when you emerge, if you emerge, will you recognize the person you have become? These are not questions that afteraction reports can answer. They are not questions that medals can resolve. They are questions that haunt the quiet hours of aging veterans, that surface in nightmares decades after the events that inspired them, that form the unspoken bond between men who have seen things that cannot be unseen.
The Australian SAS of the Vietnam War saw those things. They did those things. They became something that their society had not prepared them for and could not fully acknowledge when they returned. Some of them made peace with what they had become. Some did not. All of them carried the Long High Mountains inside them for the rest of their lives.
And somewhere in the archived files of the Pentagon in documents that may never be declassified, the official record of what happened in December of 1968 waits for historians who may never come. Some stories are too disturbing to tell. Some truths are too uncomfortable to acknowledge, and some victories cost more than defeat.
Connelly understood this. Walsh probably understood it, too, in his own way. The centuries of the Long High Mountains certainly understood it in the final moments before the jungle ghosts came for them. But their understanding came too late. It always does. That is the nature of the hunt. And in the end, we are all either hunters or prey.
The choice of which to become is the only freedom that war allows. It is also perhaps the heaviest burden that war imposes. The men of the Australian SAS made their choice in the jungles of Vietnam. Michael Connelly made his on the morning of December 20th, 1968 when he refused to photograph what he had seen. Both choices were human. Both were understandable.
Both were in their own ways right. And both were inadequate to the enormity of whatthat war demanded from everyone who fought it. This is the truth that no documentary can fully convey. No history book can adequately explain. No memorial can properly honor. War is not a story with heroes and villains. It is a crucible that reveals what human beings are capable of when civilization’s constraints are removed.
What it reveals is not always comfortable. It is not always inspiring. It is not always something we want to remember. But it is always true. And the truth of the long high mountains, whatever else it may be, is a truth that deserves to be remembered, not celebrated, not condemned, simply remembered for the sake of the men who lived it for the sake of those who follow in their footsteps and for the sake of a civilization that sends its young to war without fully understanding what it is asking them to become. The centuries are waiting still,
arranged in their eternal circle, their cut boots beside them, their playing cards on their chests. They will wait forever. And somewhere in the darkness beyond the perimeter, the jungle ghosts are still hunting. They always will be. That is the nature of what the Australian SAS became in Vietnam. That is the legacy they left behind.
And that is why more than 50 years later, a Green Beret’s refusal still echoes through the classified archives of a war that America would prefer to forget. I saw what they did to the centuries. Some sites cannot be unseen. Some knowledge cannot be unlearned. And some stories once heard change everything. This is one of those stories.
