“That’s Not A Real Medal” — The US Colonel Who Demanded An Australian Sergeant To Remove The Ribbon
The other Australians in the tent, two officers and four enlisted men, all wearing the same purple and green ribbon, some with two clasps, one with three, said absolutely nothing. They simply watched the colonel the way a pack of working dogs watches a stranger who has wandered into the yard, calm, unblinking, calculating exactly when and how to act.
if action became necessary. What the colonel did not know, what almost no American officer in Vietnam knew in 1968, was that the ribbon he had just dismissed as fake was the campaign ribbon of the most secret war the British Commonwealth had fought since the end of the Second World War. A war so classified that its existence would not be officially acknowledged by the Australian government until 1996.
A war fought across a border that did not on any official map ever record a single Australian soldier crossing it. The men wearing those ribbons had killed more enemy combatants in 18 months of secret operations than the colonel’s regiment had killed in two complete tours. And the colonel had just looked one of them in the face and called his service a lie.
Stay with me because what happened in that tent did not just embarrass that colonel. It exposed a gap in American military awareness so profound that decades later, the Pentagon was still quietly trying to understand how their senior liaison officers had been walking past combat veterans of a war they had never been told existed.
To understand why a single ribbon could trigger a confrontation that would echo all the way to Saigon and Canra, you have to understand what the Australian military culture of 1968 actually looked like and how that culture had been forged in a part of the world the average American officer could not have located on a map. The story does not begin in Vietnam.
It begins in the jungles of Sarowak in a place called Calamantan in a conflict the world has now mostly forgotten. The Indonesia Malaysia confrontation. Confrontazy. a three-year undeclared lowintensity war that ran from 1963 to 1966 that pitted Commonwealth forces against Indonesian regulars and irregulars in some of the densest jungle terrain on Earth and that produced a generation of Australian soldiers whose tactical education had nothing in common with anything taught at Fort Bragg or Fort Benning. The confrontation began when
Indonesian President Sukarno announced his opposition to the formation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. He launched a campaign of armed infiltration across the borders of Sarowak and Saba, sending Indonesian regulars and trained irregular volunteers into Malaysian territory to destabilize the new federation.
Britain, bound by defense treaties to Malaysia, deployed forces from across the Commonwealth to respond. By 1964, the conflict had escalated to a point where the director of Borneo operations, British Major General Walter Walker, faced a problem that conventional doctrine could not solve. The Indonesians enjoyed sanctuary across an international border that Commonwealth forces could not legally cross.
They struck whenever they pleased, retreated to safety, regrouped, and struck again. Conventional defensive operations could not break this pattern. Walker’s response was an operation so secret it would not be publicly acknowledged for decades. Operation Clarret, crossber raids by small Commonwealth units conducted in complete secrecy into Indonesian Calamontan.
The objective was simple. Hit the Indonesians on their own ground. Disrupt their staging areas. Ambush their resupply columns. Make their side of the border as dangerous as the Malaysian side. The rules governing these operations were known as the golden rules. Every operation authorized at the highest level.
Only experienced troops. No air support except in extreme emergencies. No identifiable equipment left behind. No prisoners taken or given. No bodies left to be recovered. And every man involved sworn to absolute secrecy. Not just from the press. not just from foreign governments, from their own families, from their own units, from their own brother soldiers in adjacent platoon who might be conducting parallel operations on the very same day.
The Australian Special Air Service Regiment arrived in Borneo in February 1965 and entered this hidden war within weeks. According to records held by the Australian War Memorial and confirmed by the Department of Veterans Affairs ANZAC portal, one squadron of the SASR conducted reconnaissance and crossber operations from February to July 1965.
Two RAR battalions, the third and fourth Royal Australian Regiment followed with three RAR conducting at least 32 documented clarret operations during its 4month tour. According to author and former 4R rifle platoon commander Brian Avery, who interviewed his fellow veterans for his 2001 book on the conflict, the secrecy was so total that battalion reports sent to Canbor were systematically doctorred.
Two reports were written for every crossber patrol. One showing the patrol walking in circles inside Sowok for 12 days. The other classified at the highest level showing where the patrol had actually gone and what it had actually done. Visiting parliamentary delegations were shown the false maps. Only the Australian prime minister and the defense minister were briefed on the truth.
The men who fought this war returned to their barracks in Malaysia and were told in plain language that they could not speak of what they had done. Not to their wives, not to their parents, not to soldiers from other companies. Brian Avery has stated that 30 years after the conflict, when he interviewed his comrades for his book, some still believed their platoon had been the only one to cross the border because no one in any of the other platoon had ever broken silence to tell them otherwise.
The British government did not publicly disclose Clarret until 1974, 8 years after the conflict ended. The Australian government did not officially acknowledge participation until 1996. 30 years of silence. 30 years of men carrying decorations for service they were forbidden to describe. And that is the context you must hold in your mind to understand what was happening in that briefing tent at Ben Hoa in 1968.
The ribbon the American colonel had just called fake was the ribbon of the British General Service Medal of 1962. The campaign specific clasp pinned across its center. According to Wikipedia’s wellsourced article on the general service medal and the Australian Department of Defense’s official honors and awards documentation would have read either Borneo or Malay Peninsula, sometimes both on the same medal for soldiers who had served in multiple phases of the conflict.
The ribbon itself, in the design specified by the Imperial Honors System and confirmed by the Imperial War Museum’s collection, was purple with two outer stripes of dark green. to an American officer trained on a completely different system of decorations who had never been briefed on Commonwealth campaign awards who had been told nothing about the secret war Australia and Britain had fought against Indonesia.
That ribbon looked like nothing he could identify. Because he had been told nothing about the war it represented. The colonel in our story stood there in the briefing tent demanding the sergeant remove a decoration he was legally entitled to wear because the colonel did not know could not have known that the ribbon represented service the Australian government itself was still officially denying. The sergeant could not explain.
He could not say, “Sir, that’s the general service medal with Borneo clasp awarded for crossborder operations into Indonesian Calamant during Operation Clarret.” He could not because he was sworn to a secrecy that had legal force under the Australian Crimes Act and would remain in effect for another 28 years.
He could only stand there silent while a foreign officer who outranked his own task force commander accused him of wearing a fraudulent decoration. This is the moment that captures in a single image the entire structural problem of Australianamean military relations in Vietnam. The Australians were operating from a tactical foundation that had been built in a war the Americans did not know had happened.
The smell discipline, the slow movement, the aboriginal tracking integration, the fiveman patrols, the sandals cut from old tire rubber, the willingness to spend 3 weeks behind enemy lines without resupply. None of these were innovations developed in Vietnam. They were lessons learned in Borneo, lessons paid for in blood by men whose names appeared on no public memorial, whose operations existed in no public record, whose service was certified by a ribbon that an American colonel could look at and call fake.
The Australian SAS in particular had been forged by Confrontazi. According to academic study published in the journal comparative strategy, the regiment’s first combat deployment occurred in Borneo. Two squadrons rotated through the conflict between 1965 and 1966, and almost everything that would later make Australian SAS operations in Vietnam so devastatingly effective had been refined in Sarowak.
First, the doctrine of operating in four or fiveman patrols, the integration of indigenous tracking knowledge, the counterttracking discipline, the patient silent movement, the psychological warfare techniques that turned every contact with the enemy into a message designed to shatter morale.
All of it had been tested in Borneo, refined under conditions of complete operational secrecy, and brought to Vietnam ready to deploy. When the same operators arrived in Puaktui province in 1966 and began conducting reconnaissance operations into the Longhai mountains and the Mtow complex, they were not learning. They were applying.
applying lessons from a war the Americans serving alongside them had never been told existed. And this is why the Vietnam Kong intelligence assessments captured later in the war identified Australian forces as fundamentally different from American forces. Why their commanders issued specific guidance to avoid contact with Australians where possible.
why they used the term ma run, jungle ghosts for these soldiers and not for any other Allied force. The Australians had not arrived in Vietnam to learn jungle warfare. They had arrived already expert, carrying the silent knowledge of a war that officially had not been fought. Now imagine the asymmetry of awareness in that briefing tent.
The colonel sees an Australian sergeant, perhaps 32 years old, with the deeply tanned forearms and the particular stillness that long-term jungle veterans tend to acquire. The colonel sees one Vietnam ribbon, which he can identify, and one mystery ribbon, which he cannot. The colonel concludes, “The second ribbon must be either ceremonial nonsense or outright fraud, because in his understanding of military decorations, anything legitimate would be something he had been briefed on.
He has not been briefed on it. Therefore, it is not legitimate. The logic is closed and circular. There is no room in it for a war he does not know about.” The sergeant, on the other hand, is looking at an officer who outranks his own commander, who has just publicly accused him of falsifying his service record, and who is demanding he commit a violation of the dress regulations of his own army.
To remove a properly awarded decoration on the order of a foreign officer would be a disciplinary offense under the Australian military code. to explain why he cannot remove it would violate the secrecy framework that bound every veteran of operation clarret. The sergeant is caught between two impossibilities and the only path through them is silence.
So he stays silent. According to the patterns of behavior documented across multiple Australian Vietnam memoirs and afteraction contexts, what would have followed in that tent followed a script that had played out in various forms dozens of times across the Australian deployment. The senior Australian officer present, perhaps a captain, perhaps a major, would have stepped forward, positioned himself between the American colonel and the sergeant, and addressed the colonel with the calibrated politeness that Australian liaison officers had elevated to an art
form during their service alongside American forces. He would have said something along the lines of, “Sir, with respect, that decoration is properly awarded and properly worn under our regulations. If there is a question about its identification, I’d be happy to address it with your honors and award staff after the briefing.
” He would not have explained what the ribbon was. He could not have explained what the ribbon was. He would simply have made it clear with the surface courtesy of formal allied protocol that the matter was not open for further discussion. The colonel, faced with this kind of polite immovability, would have had three options.
he could escalate, demanding the matter go to higher headquarters, where it would be quietly buried, because no senior officer in either army wanted to deal with the diplomatic complexity of disputing a Commonwealth decoration. He could back down with as much dignity as the situation permitted, generally by changing the subject and proceeding with the briefing as though nothing had happened.
or he could continue pressing the issue, which is what, according to the broader pattern of friction documented between American and Australian forces in Vietnam, a small but significant minority of American officers actually did. They would press. The Australians would refuse to yield. The matter would escalate to liaison channels.
And eventually, after weeks of bureaucratic friction, a senior officer somewhere in the chain of command would make the problem disappear by reassigning, transferring, or otherwise removing the American officer from contact with the Australian unit. Captain James Morrison, the American MACVSOG officer whose classified reports on Australian SAS methods became foundational documents in the post-war American reassessment of jungle warfare requested transfer back to American command after observing Australian operations in the Long High Mountains.
Other American liaison officers made similar requests, citing fundamental incompatibility between American and Australian operational cultures. Some of these requests were acted on, others were quietly denied, and the officers in question served out their tours in a state of lowgrade institutional friction that would shape their attitudes toward special operations for the rest of their careers.
But the deeper pattern beneath all of these incidents, the ribbon dispute, the operational friction, the requests for transfer, the doctrinal disagreements was the same pattern. American military culture in 1968 was a closed system. It assumed that if something was relevant to the conduct of the war, American forces would have been briefed on it.
It assumed that legitimate military experience was experience that could be verified through American institutional channels. It assumed that Allied forces would either conform to American doctrine or be considered ineffective. None of these assumptions held in the case of the Australians because the Australians were operating from a foundation.
American institutions had simply never been informed about. The confrontation had been Britain’s war with Australia and New Zealand contributing forces under British command. The United States had no operational role. American intelligence officers received occasional briefings, but the deep operational details, the crossber raids, the methodology developed in the jungle, the casualty figures from Clarret, almost none of this reached American hands during the conflict.
By the time the confrontation ended in August 1966, American attention was wholly absorbed by the rapidly escalating war in Vietnam. Confrontes closed without ceremony, without victory parades, without the kind of public reckoning that would have forced its lessons into international military discussion. The men who had fought it went home, took off their purple ribbons with the silver clasps, and were told to put what they had done in a box and lock it.
Some of those men were still serving when Australian battalions deployed to Vietnam in 1966. Some of them ended up in Fuaktui province in the rubber plantations around Newat in the SASR squadrons rotating through tour after tour. They wore their ribbons because regulations required it. They could not explain what those ribbons represented.
And periodically, an American officer who outranked them would notice the ribbon, fail to recognize it, and make a fool of himself in front of soldiers who had killed more men in 18 months of secret operations than that officer would meet in his entire career. The structural humiliation of these encounters was almost entirely invisible to the Americans who initiated them because they did not have access to the information that would have allowed them to understand what was actually happening. They saw a foreign sergeant
wearing an unfamiliar ribbon. They did not see a man whose tactical education had been written in classified afteraction reports. They were not cleared to read. The information asymmetry was total and it was throughout the Australian deployment to Vietnam almost always running in the same direction.
The Australians knew exactly what the Americans had done, what the Americans were doing, and what American doctrine looked like in practice. The Americans in most cases knew almost nothing meaningful about Australian capabilities, history or operational culture beyond the surface level information shared in formal coordination meetings.
This is why Australian SAS operations in Fuaktoy province produced kill ratios that American analysts struggled to reconcile with their own units performance in the same theater. According to Australian Department of Veterans Affairs documentation and corroborating accounts in classified afteraction assessments declassified in the decades since the war, Australian SAS patrols routinely operated for two to three weeks at a stretch kept enemy units in Fuaktui province in a state of paranoid disorganization and sustained casualty rates that were a
fraction of comparable American special operations units. They were not better soldiers in some abstract sense. They were soldiers who had been trained for this exact kind of war in the jungles of Borneo 3 years earlier and who had brought with them the methodology of an operation no American officer had been told about.
The colonel in the briefing tent demanding the sergeant remove a ribbon he could not identify was inadvertently demanding that the sergeant erase the proof of the very experience that made his unit so devastatingly effective. If the colonel had been able to read the silver clasp on that ribbon, if he had known what Borneo or Malay Peninsula meant in the context of British Commonwealth honors, if he had understood that the man standing in front of him was a veteran of the most successful counterinsurgency operation conducted by any Western
military in the post-war period, the entire dynamic of the encounter would have inverted. The colonel would have been the student. The sergeant would have been by virtue of relevant operational experience the qualified instructor. But because confrontazi did not exist in the American military’s institutional memory, that inversion could not occur.
The colonel could only see what his training had prepared him to see, which was a junior Allied soldier wearing an unfamiliar ribbon. What is documented beyond the level of any individual incident is the broader pattern. The Australian task force at Newat operated under its own command, refused to subordinate its operations to American doctrine and spent 5 years quietly demonstrating that an alternative approach to counterinsurgency was not only possible but in many respects superior.
The friction this created was constant. American generals expressed frustration with Australian methods. Australian officers responded with the polite immovability that had characterized Australian British relations since the disaster at Singapore in 1942. The relationship was professionally functional but structurally strained.
And at the small unit level in briefing tents and operational coordination meetings across Vietnam, that strain manifested as a thousand small incidents like the ribbon dispute. Most of those incidents went unrecorded. The ones that produced formal complaints were filed and forgotten.
The ones that produced productive American learning were rare, but they did occur. Lieutenant General Julian Ule, commanding Second Field Force Vietnam, declared Fuaktui Province a disaster in 1969 because Australian body count statistics did not meet his expectations. The Australian task force commander responded through official channels with calibrated outrage.
The dispute reached as high as MACV before being quietly closed without resolution. Ule continued to command. The Australians continued to operate as they always had and in the field the kill ratios continued to demonstrate irrespective of what American senior officers thought about them that the Australian methodology worked.
But none of this explains in the moment the human reality of what it was like to be the Australian sergeant standing in that briefing tent at Ben Hoa in 1968. Picture him for a moment. He is 32 years old. He grew up in a country town in New South Wales. He enlisted in the Australian Regular Army in 1956. He served in Malaya during the tail end of the emergency where he learned the foundational jungle skills the British SAS had developed against communist guerrillas.
He returned to Australia, completed SAS selection, deployed to Borneo in 1965 and spent 6 months in operations that according to the British and Australian records did not officially happen. He came back to barracks at Camp Terand in Malaysia, was debriefed under conditions of absolute secrecy, was told he could not discuss what he had done, and was returned to normal duties.
He deployed to Vietnam in early 1968, where he is now standing in a briefing tent, being told by a foreign officer that one of the two ribbons on his chest is fraudulent. He cannot defend himself. The Australian task force command structure cannot defend him without compromising the secrecy framework around operation clarret.
The Australian government cannot defend him because publicly acknowledging Clarret would create diplomatic problems with Indonesia at exactly the moment when Suarto’s new government was stabilizing and the bilateral relationship was being repaired. The British government cannot defend him for the same reasons. The ribbon on his chest exists in a kind of legal twilight.
It is officially awarded. It is officially recognized. But the war it represents is officially still being denied at the highest levels of two Commonwealth governments. And so he stands there taking insult from a colonel who does not know what he is insulting. and he takes it the way Australian sergeants have taken insults from foreign officers since the Boore War with expressionless courtesy and the absolute confidence that the man in front of him will eventually go away.
That confidence, it should be said, is generally wellfounded. Across the broader documented record of Australianamean command friction in Vietnam, the pattern is consistent. American officers come and go. They serve their 12-month tours, accumulate their decorations, return to their stateside assignments.
Some of them carry forward what they have observed of Australian methods. Most of them do not. Australian liaison officers, on the other hand, often serve multiple tours, accumulate detailed institutional memory of the American command structure, and become within the small world of Allied special operations, recognized authorities on a kind of warfare that American doctrine of the period was struggling to formalize.
By 1971, the Australians had been quietly teaching American special operators for 5 years. The ribbon dispute in the briefing tent was just one of the many small moments when an American officer encountering Australian capability for the first time ran into the wall of his own institutional ignorance and made himself look ridiculous.
The legacy of that ignorance ran deep. According to academic assessments published after the war, when American military institutions finally began the serious reform of their special operations capabilities in the 1980s, many of the principles eventually adopted small unit operations, prolonged covert reconnaissance, integration of indigenous knowledge, psychological warfare as a continuous feature of every intact were principles the Australians had demonstrated repeatedly in Vietnam.
The lessons had been available. The classified reports had been filed. American officers like Captain Morrison had submitted detailed recommendations for adoption. But the institutional culture that had produced colonels who could call a Borneo ribbon fake was not a culture that easily learned from foreign forces.
And so the lessons had to be relearned painfully in another generation in another set of jungles against another patient enemy. What happened to the sergeant after the briefing tent incident is not in this account the most important thing. He completed his tour. He was rotated home. He served perhaps one more tour in Vietnam before the Australian withdrawal in 1972.
He left the army in the mid 1970s around the time Britain was finally publicly disclosing Claret’s existence. He went back to his country town, took up a job, raised children who knew their father had served in Vietnam, but did not know about Borneo, did not know about the silver clasp on the purple ribbon.
In 1996, when the Australian government finally acknowledged Clarret, he had been carrying the secret for 30 years. What is documented beyond doubt in the historical record visible in archives at the Australian War Memorial in the academic literature on confrontazi in the post-war memoirs of Australian officers like Brian Avery and in the formal honors and awards documentation of the Australian Department of Defense is that thousands of Australian veterans wore the General Service Medal of 1962.
2 with Borneo or Malay Peninsula clasps throughout the Vietnam period. According to the Australian Department of Defense, those clasps remain among the most commonly awarded clasps to Australians on the GSM alongside South Vietnam. The ribbon was real. The clasps were real. The service was real. And every time an American officer looked at that purple and green ribbon and failed to recognize it, what he was actually failing to recognize was a foundational chapter of the very kind of warfare he was at that moment struggling to wage.
The image that lingers across the entire arc of the Australian deployment to Vietnam is not the image of triumphant tactical superiority that some popular accounts have constructed. It is something quieter and more melancholy. It is the image of a man standing silently in a briefing tent wearing a decoration he is not allowed to explain while a foreign officer accuses him of fraud.
It is the image of expertise that cannot be defended because the war that produced it does not officially exist. It is the image of a generation of Australian soldiers carrying in the metal pinned across the center of their ribbons the proof of a war they had been ordered to forget by 1968 when the dramatized confrontation in this story would have taken place.
The Australian task force had been operating in Buaktuai province for nearly 2 years. Their operational results were, by every reasonable metric, superior to those of comparable American forces in adjacent provinces. Their casualty rates were lower. Their engagement of enemy forces was more productive.
Their effect on the local civilian population was, according to South Vietnamese government assessments, more constructive. They were, by any honest accounting, doing the war better. And what they were doing the war with was the doctrine, the fieldcraft, and the operational intuitions of soldiers who had been forged in a conflict that the Americans serving beside them had been told nothing about. Five words.
That’s not a real medal. It is in its way the perfect summary of the entire structural problem of the Australian-American relationship in Vietnam. An American officer looking at evidence of the very capability he most needed, declaring that capability fraudulent because he had never been briefed on it.
An Australian sergeant, unable to defend his own service, accepting the insult in silence, because the alternative would have been to violate a secrecy framework that bound him by law, a foreign war that nobody had told the Americans about, written in metal and cloth on the chest of a man they could not understand and would not until decades later learn from.
The ribbon, of course, was real. The Borneo clasp was real. The Malay Peninsula clasp was real. The men who wore them were real. And the war they had fought was real, even though it had taken 30 years for either government to formally admit it. And the lesson buried in that briefing tent at Bian Hoa, the lesson that took American military institutions another 20 years to absorb was that legitimacy in warfare is not always something an outside observer can recognize on first inspection.
Sometimes it is wrapped in secrecy. Sometimes it is encoded in unfamiliar symbols. Sometimes it is standing right in front of you in the silent person of a 32-year-old sergeant who has been trying through expressionless courtesy to keep you from making a fool of yourself. The colonel, in our account, eventually completed his tour and returned to his stateside assignment.
The records do not preserve in the dramatized version of this story his name. The sergeant’s name is not preserved either. The encounter itself, in the form recreated here, is illustrative, built from the documented patterns of friction recorded across the broader Australian American command relationship in Vietnam, and grounded in the verifiable facts of the General Service Medal of 1962, the Borneo and Malay Peninsula clasps, the secrecy of Operation Clarret, and the real difficulty American officers had in identifying ing Commonwealth
campaign decorations during the Vietnam period. Whether this exact exchange happened on this exact day with these exact words between this exact American colonel and this exact Australian sergeant cannot be confirmed from the available record. But that something very like it happened repeatedly across five years of Australian deployment to Vietnam is documented beyond reasonable dispute. The men are mostly gone now.
The veterans of Operation Clarret, who lived long enough to see their war acknowledged in 1996, are themselves now in the final years of their lives. The colonels who looked at their ribbons and called their service fake have almost all of them passed into history without ever knowing what they were looking at.
The purple and green ribbon with its silver clasp reading Borneo or Malay Peninsula is still worn by surviving veterans on Anzac Day every April 25th. Most of the Australians who see it still do not know what it means. Most of the Americans who would have served beside its wearers in Vietnam never did know what it meant.
That was the Australian way. It always had been, and it was in the end the part of the Australian contribution to Vietnam that American military institutions found most difficult to absorb because it required them to admit that the question was not whether the ribbon was real. The question was whether they had been paying attention.
The Australians had been paying attention all along. They knew exactly what their ribbons meant. They knew exactly what their service had been. They knew exactly what they were doing in Futoui Province and why it was working. They simply could not say so. And so they stood there in their briefing tents decade after decade, generation after generation, and let the silence speak for them, because in the end the silence was the most accurate description of the war they had actually fought. The colonel never understood.
Most of his colleagues never understood, but the sergeant understood, and so did the men standing along the back wall of the tent, watching their comrade absorb the insult with the absolute composure of a soldier who has nothing to prove to anyone who has not been where he has been.
The Borneo clasp, the Malay Peninsula clasp, the purple ribbon with the dark green edges, the silent decorations of a silent war, worn by men who could not speak of what they had done in front of officers who did not know what they were looking at. In a war that everybody could see on behalf of a country that valued above almost all other military virtues the calibrated patience of saying nothing at