How One Australian SAS Patrol Destroyed a 600-Man VC Regiment in 14 Minutes

August 18, 1966—six Australian soldiers were silently watching through the jungle foliage as over 600 Viet Cong fighters gathered below them, completely unaware they were being hunted.

What happened in the next 14 minutes would shatter an entire enemy regiment and rewrite the rules of jungle warfare. But how do just six men destroy a force one hundred times their size without firing a single shot themselves? I served in both 2 Sqn and 3 Sqn SASR. In SVN with 2 Sqn. 

By far the best patrol I was on was one when I didn’t fire a shot. 4th day into the patrol, we hit sign of high volume traffic on trails. By day 7 we found an occupied camp, we pulled back and made contact, organised: An Arclight strike (they flew in from Guam). 

A Phantom strike (they dropped napalm within 2 minutes of the Arclight strike A Cobra strike (gunships working over the camp). In order to pinpoint the camp for the Arclight and Phantoms, we had taken 2 days to crawl into that camp, lay a timed Smoke, that gave us 12 hours to crawl out of the camp and get to a safe location from the strikes.

After the strikes, we were extracted by Huey and overflew the Strike/Camp site, total devastation.