Jungle Adventures

Probably not, either for US or Australia or anyone else in Vietnam, including the poor bloody Vietnamese who actually had to live there and fight most of the war and live with the consequences when they lost it after their great and resolute allies (in order of commitment US, South Korea and Australia) pissed off once they’d stuffed it up beyond belief and realised they were propping up crooks and thugs. (I’ll refrain from drawing parallels with Iraq, where Britain substituted for South Korea with the other two perennial idiots playing their usual sorry roles.)

The scale of country and operations was different while the enemy was comprised of regular and irregular forces widely dispersed within the country the Yanks and us were operating in, rather than being a border containment exercise like Konfrontasi. Also there weren’t any issues about pretending we weren’t there (Except for Yank incursions into Laos and Cambodia but they’re a different issue.)

Australian SAS performance in Vietnam is a bit of a mixed bag, depending upon whom you read.

Some lousy reports from Brigadier Pearson, Oz task force commander in 1969, but they might reflect the common mainstream military contempt for what they see as cowboys.

Problems also arose from shifting opinions about what SAS were supposed to do. Originally watch and report but shifted to including ambush etc to kill and stop the enemy. Bit hard with five man teams.

Other issues affected SAS performance in other commanders’ reports, such as those outlined in Major General Vincent’s1967 report to the Chief of General Staff which pointed out that the lack of helicopters (Australia relied largely on the US for uplift) limited insertion and retrieval capability. Brig Pearson saw the use of choppers for SAS as an unwarranted drain on resources better used elsewhere.

Some Aussies participated, very, very marginally, in Operation Phoenix. If you read florid novels and ‘factual’ reports you’d think it was just about CIA throwing VC out of helicopters, but it grew into a well designed counter-insurgency program which was destroyed by, among other things, the corruption which pervaded the SVN government and armed forces leadership. Those bastards deserved to lose the war. Phoenix was more like the British response to the Emergency in Malaya than Konfrontasi.

Google 'Operation Phoenix Vietnam" for the various opinions about it.