"You're Not Grading Us": The Green Beret Australian SAS Turned Into A Student

Join this channel to get access to perks: @australiashiddenwar In 1968, a US Green Beret master sergeant called Australia's jungle school "boy scouts with rifles." The Australians didn't argue. They enrolled him as a student. He was sent from the MACV Recondo School at Nha Trang to grade the Australian Jungle Training Centre at Canungra and recommend whether American students should keep training there. He found bamboo frames, hessian screens and an ammunition allocation that wouldn't cover one afternoon on an American range. He said so out loud, in front of the instructors. Forty minutes later he was no longer an observer. He was on the student roll, bound for the Tully rainforest in north Queensland, carrying a handful of blank rounds, a compass and the same ration scale as a nineteen-year-old private. What followed was six days inside the only course in the region that did not care how well a man could shoot. It cared about one thing: how much of himself a man leaves behind every hour he moves. A Green Beret who had taught long-range reconnaissance to American students in Vietnam was about to learn what the Australian SAS, the Malayan veterans and the Iban trackers of Borneo already knew. A staff sergeant drew something on a card before he had walked a single metre. A warrant officer found his team in five hours and forty minutes without anyone hearing a thing. A leaf from the gympie-gympie stinging tree tested his nerve on the first night. And on the last day, four Australians lay sixty metres away and watched him search for six hours. This documentary reconstructs how the Australian jungle method was built, why American officers dismissed it, and why the report that finally went back to Nha Trang asked for Australian instructors by name. In this documentary: Why a Green Beret called Australian jungle training "boy scouts with rifles" The Jungle Training Centre at Canungra and the Tully training area The track-and-evade test that replaced marksmanship as the only graded serial How Australian trackers read a trail from cut vine, moss and silence The gympie-gympie stinging tree and the rule of noise discipline Malaya, Borneo and the Iban trackers behind Australian SAS patrol methods Australian SAS patrols in Phuoc Tuy province, Vietnam How the course shaped allied combat tracker teams from 1968 onwards Sources / References: David Horner, SAS: Phantoms of War – A History of the Australian Special Air Service (Allen & Unwin) Australian War Memorial (AWM) – Jungle Training Centre records and oral history collection Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975 (AWM / Allen & Unwin) Peter Cosgrove, My Story (HarperCollins) U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH) – US Army Special Forces in Vietnam US National Archives (NARA) – Records of U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia This video is a narrative reconstruction for educational purposes. Some characters, scenes and dialogue are dramatized or composited to explain training methods and historical context. Core facts about the Jungle Training Centre, Australian tracking doctrine and Australian SAS operations in Vietnam are drawn from the sources above. If you enjoy untold stories of the Australian SAS and the Americans who served beside them, subscribe to Australia's Hidden War. #AustralianSAS #VietnamWar #GreenBerets