“Send Those Aussie AMATUERS Home, NOW” The Order That Haunted The US Military For Years D

In January 2026, the president of the United States sat for an interview with Fox News in Davos, Switzerland, and said something that sent shockwaves through every military alliance America has built since the Second World War. He said that NATO allies sent troops to Afghanistan, sure, but that they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.

Within hours, the backlash was unlike anything the transatlantic alliance had seen in decades. The British Prime Minister called the remarks appalling. NATO Secretary General, who had been sitting just meters away from the president the day before, had already pushed back, telling him directly that for every two Americans who paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan, one soldier from another NATO country also never came home.

And then the Australians weighed in, and their response cut deeper than anyone expected. The Australian Special Air Service Association released a formal statement. They did not mince words. Any suggestion that Australian forces stayed back or avoided the front line, they said, was factually wrong. Their special forces had been among the first coalition troops on the ground after September 11.

They had fought in sustained combat operations for over a decade. 41 Australians were killed, hundreds were wounded, thousands came home carrying scars you cannot see. The Australian Prime Minister said that the 47 families who lost loved ones in Afghanistan deserve our absolute respect.

That 40,000 Australians served there, and that they were certainly on the front lines. But here is what makes this story more than a political spat, what makes it a story about the most elite fighting force most Americans have never heard of. Because the truth is, the soldiers who actually fought beside the Australian Special Air Service did not need a politician to tell them what happened. They already knew.

And what they knew would embarrass anyone who called those soldiers amateurs. To understand why, you need to go back. Not to Afghanistan, not even to the war on terror, you need to go all the way back to the jungles of Vietnam. If you want more breakdowns like this, the real side of elite units most people never hear about.

Like the video and subscribe with post notifications turned on. It really helps the channel. In 1966, a small group of Australian soldiers arrived in Phuoc Tuy province, South Vietnam. They belonged to the Special Air Service Regiment, a unit modeled on the British SAS, and formed in 1957 at Campbell Barracks in Perth, Western Australia.

Their motto, borrowed from their British counterparts, was simple: Who dares wins. The Americans were polite about it. They already had half a million troops in Vietnam. What were 120 Australians going to do that they could not? What happened next became one of the most remarkable special forces stories of the entire war. The Australian SAS did not operate like American infantry, not even close.

They worked in tiny patrols of five or six men. They moved through the jungle so slowly, so silently, that they would sometimes cover less than a kilometer in an entire day. They did not talk, not a word, not a whisper. They communicated entirely through hand signals. They would lie in ambush positions for days, barely breathing, waiting for enemy fighters to walk into a kill zone they never saw coming.

When they did engage, they used a technique that terrified the Viet Cong. They would open fire with everything they had, all at once, simulating the firepower of a much larger force. Six men sounding like 60. The enemy would scatter, convinced they had stumbled into a company-sized ambush. By the time the Viet Cong regrouped and sent reinforcements, the Australians were already gone, vanished back into the trees without a trace.

The Viet Cong started calling them Ma Rung. It translates to phantoms of the jungle. That name was not a compliment. It was a warning passed from unit to unit, commander to commander. If the Australians were operating in your area, you were already in danger, and you did not even know it yet.

Even the most careful Viet Cong infiltrators, men who had been evading American patrols for years, could walk straight into a devastating Australian ambush without the slightest warning. In several captured communist military documents, even Australian regular infantry were referred to as commandos because of how they moved and fought.

The NVA could not distinguish between Australian special forces and Australian line infantry. To them, they all fought [music] like elite soldiers. Over the course of the war, the Australian SAS conducted roughly 1,200 combat patrols. They killed over 500 enemy fighters, and in those same operations, only one SAS soldier was killed in action.

Their losses overall across all causes in Vietnam were extraordinarily low. 28 men were wounded. The entire regiment that served in Vietnam totaled 580 personnel. The Pentagon took notice. American commanders began sending observers to study the Australian methods. Some American special forces units tried to replicate the slow, silent, small patrol approach.

They found it nearly impossible. The discipline required, the patience, the ability to operate for weeks in enemy territory without support, was not something you could teach in a training manual. It was baked into the culture of a regiment that had been building this capability since its founding, and that culture was about to be tested on a scale nobody anticipated.

On September 11, 2001, the world changed. Within days, the Australian government invoked the ANZUS treaty, the mutual defense pact between Australia and the United States that had been in place since 1951. Australia committed to standing beside America, not behind, not a little back, beside. By October 2001, Australian SAS soldiers were among the very first coalition troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

This was weeks after the attacks. Most of the world was still in shock. The Australians were already in hostile territory conducting long-range reconnaissance patrols against Al-Qaeda and Taliban positions in some of the most dangerous terrain on Earth. And then came Operation Anaconda. In March 2002, American forces launched the biggest ground battle of the entire war against terrorism up to that point.

The plan was to trap Al-Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley near the Pakistan border using a hammer and anvil strategy with United States conventional forces and Afghan militia. The plan fell apart almost immediately. Intelligence estimates were wildly wrong. Instead of a few hundred fighters, the valley was defended by up to 1,000 Al-Qaeda and Taliban combatants dug into prepared mountain positions with heavy weapons, mortars, and machine guns.

The hammer hit the anvil, and the anvil hit back harder than anyone expected. American troops from the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne Division were pinned down under withering fire at over 7,500 feet of elevation. The thin air made every movement exhausting. The cold was brutal.

Helicopters were taking fire as they tried to insert troops. Two Chinooks went down. American soldiers were trapped near the crash sites with Al-Qaeda fighters closing in on their position. The situation was deteriorating by the hour. The original plan, which the commanding general had estimated would take about 72 hours to complete, was collapsing on the first day.

In the middle of that chaos, a small team of Australian SAS soldiers with a United States Air Force combat controller had already infiltrated the area. They had inserted before the operation began, undetected as part of a long-range reconnaissance mission. When the American helicopters crashed and the situation turned desperate, the Australians remained hidden in their observation post.

From that position, they began coordinating multiple coalition air strikes that prevented Al-Qaeda fighters from overrunning the downed aircraft. Those air strikes, guided by the Australians on the ground, were credited with saving the lives of the American soldiers trapped at the crash sites.

Two additional SAS officers worked directly with the 10th Mountain Division’s command element throughout the battle. Their combined efforts were so significant that the commander of the entire Australian SAS force in Afghanistan was awarded the Bronze Star for outstanding contribution to the war on terrorism.

After the battle, the reaction from American soldiers who had been there was striking. One Australian trooper later described it as almost embarrassing. American soldiers at the base would step aside in the meal line when they saw Australians. Some would applaud and push them to the front of the queue. These were not gestures from politicians.

They came from the men who had been under fire and knew exactly who had helped get them out alive. But the Australians were not done in Afghanistan, not by a long way. In fact, the most intense fighting was still years away. When the SAS returned to Afghanistan in 2005 for what would become a continuous deployment, the war had changed.

The Taliban had regrouped. Southern Afghanistan, particularly Uruzgan province, where the Australians were based, had become one of the most dangerous areas in the country. The Australian Special Operations Task Group operated out of Tarin Kowt, and from there they launched missions that would test every skill they had built over half a century.

They were hunting Taliban leadership. Small teams, often fewer than a dozen operators, would be given a list of high-value targets. They would go out into the valleys and mountains, find those targets, and either capture them or engage them in combat. Night after night, week after week, for rotation after rotation, spanning years.

The tempo was relentless, and the cost was real. Improvised explosive devices, ambushes, close-quarters firefights in compounds and village alleyways. Australian Special Forces soldiers were being killed and wounded at a rate that placed enormous strain on the small, tight-knit community of operators. Then came September 2nd, 2008.

A date that would produce one of the most extraordinary acts of individual bravery in modern military history. It happened during the same battle that would later produce an entirely different kind of story, one involving a military working dog named Sarbi, who vanished during the fight and would not be found alive for over a year.

A combined Australian, American, and Afghan patrol was moving through a valley in Uruzgan province when they drove straight into a perfectly coordinated Taliban ambush. The enemy force was estimated at up to 200 fighters positioned on elevated ground along a 4-km stretch of road, firing down with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in a rolling ambush designed to keep the convoy under constant fire, no matter how far they moved.

The patrol was immediately overwhelmed. Casualties mounted within minutes. Vehicles filled with wounded soldiers. The uninjured had no room to ride. They had no choice but to run beside the Humvees on foot in the open while being shot at from multiple directions for over 2 hours. In the middle of that nightmare, an Australian SAS trooper named Mark Donaldson did something that nobody ordered him to do.

He deliberately stood up and exposed himself to enemy fire over and over, drawing Taliban attention away from the wounded soldiers who were being dragged to cover. His movement kept the enemy focused on him while his teammates saved lives. Then he noticed something that made his blood run cold.

A coalition interpreter, severely wounded, had been left behind in the chaos of the withdrawal. The man was lying on open ground, roughly 80 m away, with machine gun fire raking the area around him. Donaldson ran. No cover, no suppressive fire arranged, just a soldier sprinting across open ground through accurate enemy fire to reach a wounded man.

He reached the interpreter, picked him up, and carried him back to the vehicles. Then he went back to fighting. For that action, Mark Donaldson received the Victoria Cross for Australia. It was the first time the medal had been awarded to an Australian in nearly 40 years. The citation described his behavior as displaying exceptional courage in circumstances of great peril.

He was 29 years old. Two years later, in June 2010, the Australians would fight what the army itself considers the greatest victory of Australia’s longest war. >> [music] >> It happened in a place so dangerous that even America’s Delta Force hesitated to go there. Shah Wali Kot is a district in northern Kandahar province.

>> [music] >> In 2010, it was a Taliban sanctuary, a stronghold so deeply held that coalition forces had largely avoided direct confrontation there. The area was considered extremely high risk for helicopter insertion, and the Taliban presence was significant enough that even the US Army’s most elite units approached it with extreme caution.

The operation began on June 10th, 2010, when roughly 120 Australian commandos from the 2nd Commando Regiment flew into the Shinazef Valley at night. Their plan was simple and audacious. Land in a Taliban safe zone, sweep through compounds, provoke the enemy into fighting, and destroy them. [music] The commandos found themselves in a fierce battle as the Taliban responded exactly as planned, except in far greater numbers than expected.

The next morning, intelligence located a Taliban gathering in a neighboring village called Tazak. The SAS decided to fly in. Around 35 members of the SAS 2nd Squadron boarded four American Black Hawks for what they assumed would be a quick capture mission. Nobody expected a major fight.

They did not bother with camouflage paint. They figured they would be on the ground less than an hour. Some of the operators later compared the pre-mission atmosphere to a routine training exercise. 2 minutes before landing, the lead American pilot received the code word “ice”, meaning the landing zone was clear of enemy fighters.

It was not clear, not even close. The moment the helicopters touched down, all four came under immediate and accurate fire. Three Black Hawks were hit. One took a bullet straight through the cockpit. Another had its rotor blade damaged by enemy rounds. The situation unfolded so fast that one SAS sergeant would later describe it as walking into the Taliban AGM, a gallows humor reference to the sheer number of enemy fighters assembled in the tiny village.

The SAS soldiers piled out of the helicopters into a firefight they had not planned for. They were outnumbered roughly three to one. They were armed with little more than assault rifles and grenades. They had no artillery support, no armored vehicles, no reinforcements available. The enemy held the high ground and had been waiting for them.

Delta Force had previously discussed a joint mission to Tazak with the Australians. They had ultimately decided against it. The risk of losing a helicopter in a daylight insertion was too high. The Australians were now living that exact scenario. What happened next defied every tactical principle in the book.

Rather than calling for extraction, rather than pulling back and requesting an airstrike that would have flattened the village, the SAS conducted a daylight frontal assault through a fig orchard against entrenched machine gun positions they could barely see. They cleared the village compound by compound. They killed a force three times their size.

Not a single Australian died, not one. The two engagements, the commando fight in Shinazef and the SAS assault on Tazak, became known collectively as the Battle of Eastern Shah Wali Kot. The Australian Army awarded both regiments battle honors, the first since the Vietnam War.

22 soldiers were nominated for bravery medals. The army considers it the most significant victory of the entire 20-year war. And the Americans who were there, the pilots who flew those Black Hawks into a hail storm of Taliban fire, the intelligence officers who watched the fight unfold on drone feeds, they knew what they had witnessed.

A unit that did not stay back, a unit that went forward when the odds said they should not have. Over the course of the war, Australian Special Forces completed 23 rotations into Afghanistan. Some 40,000 Australian Defense Force personnel served in the conflict from 2001 to 2021. 41 Australian soldiers were killed, with roughly half of those casualties coming from the SAS and the 2nd Commando Regiment, the two units that bore a disproportionate share of the fighting.

Hundreds more were wounded. Thousands returned home with post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries, and psychological damage that continues to shape their lives and their families today. Sergeant Andrew Russell of the Australian SAS was killed by a land mine in Afghanistan in February 2002.

He left behind his wife Kylie and their daughter Lisa, who was just 11 days old. President George W. Bush himself mentioned Sergeant Russell by name in a memorial address for the victims of September 11th, saying, “Friends said of Sergeant Russell, you could rely on him never to let you down.

This young man and many like him have not let us down.” Russell’s loss became part of a national moment of grief. That was a very different tone from a very different president. When the SAS Association responded to the January 2026 remarks, they made a point that cut through the politics and went straight to the men who had been there.

They said, “Those who served do not require validation from political leaders. Their service is already known and respected by the people who matter most, the fellow soldiers who fought beside them.” They pointed out pointed out that the remarks did not represent the views of the broader United States military, nor of the countless American soldiers who served shoulder to shoulder with Australians across Afghanistan.

“The bonds forged in combat,” they said, “are built on shared danger, mutual trust, and proven competence. Those bonds endure beyond administrations, elections, or individual leaders.” And they were right. Because the men who were actually in those valleys and mountains already knew the truth. The Australian SAS operators who coordinated airstrikes during Operation Anaconda, saving trapped American soldiers, they knew.

The American soldiers who stepped aside in the meal line at Bagram to let the Australians go first, they knew. The US pilots who flew Blackhawks into Taliban fire at Tizack while Australian SAS operators charged machine gun nests, they knew. They all knew. The real irony in all of this is that the Australian SAS has a longer combat relationship with the United States military than almost any foreign special forces unit in the world.

They cross-train with Navy SEALs and Delta Force. They served alongside American Green Berets in Vietnam. They were in the first wave in Afghanistan and among the last to leave. Their regiment has been awarded American military decorations, including the Bronze Star for service rendered to American forces. When the Viet Cong called them phantoms of the jungle, it was because they had earned the name in blood.

[music] When American soldiers at Bagram applauded them after Anaconda, it was because they had watched those Australians coordinate the strikes that saved their lives. When Delta Force declined a daylight mission into Tizack and the SAS went anyway, it was because that is what the motto means, who dares wins. You can call them amateurs.

You can say they stayed back, but the men who were there, the Americans, the British, the Canadians, and every other soldier who fought alongside the Australian SAS, they will tell you a different story. And their story is the one that matters because the truth doesn’t stay back. The truth is always on the front line.

If this story changed how you think about Australia’s military, subscribe. I cover stories like this every week, the ones that don’t make the headlines but shape the wars that defined our era. And if you want to see the full story of how a handful of Australian soldiers changed the course of the Vietnam War, that video is on screen now.