Australia's Elite Soldiers in Vietnam: The SAS Regiment and the Training Team

Australia sent two elite forces to Vietnam: an advisory Training Team that won four Victoria Crosses and an SAS Regiment famed for its patrols.

26 August 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 16 articles →

On 3 August 1962, thirty Australian officers and warrant officers stepped off a flight in Saigon, forming the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam — the first Australian unit committed to the war and, a decade later, the last to leave. Over the following ten years the Team grew into the most highly decorated Australian unit of the conflict, its advisers embedded alongside South Vietnamese and American forces at remote border camps. Four years after the Team's arrival, a second elite formation joined it: the Special Air Service Regiment, whose small reconnaissance patrols out of Nui Dat became, by most measures, the most effective Australian fighting force in Vietnam. Together the two units — one built for teaching and advising, the other for stealth and small-unit combat — gave Australia's Vietnam commitment a reputation for elite soldiering that outlasted the war itself and still shapes how the conflict is remembered at home.

A Ten-Year Commitment Begins

The Training Team, universally known within the Army as "the Team," was raised specifically for advisory duty and placed under the command of Colonel Francis Philip "Ted" Serong, a soldier with extensive experience of jungle warfare and counter-insurgency in Malaya and Burma. Its members did not fight as a conventional unit; they were posted singly or in pairs to South Vietnamese Army battalions and to the American-run Civilian Irregular Defense Group camps that dotted the country's remote highlands and border regions, training and leading local forces against Viet Cong infiltration. This dispersed, advisory role meant Team members frequently found themselves the only Australians — sometimes the only non-Vietnamese officers at all — for miles in any direction, a position that demanded unusual initiative and exposed them to combat as often as, or more often than, soldiers in conventional battalions.

The Team's strength grew steadily through the decade, reaching a peak of 227 personnel in November 1970, and almost 1,000 Australians served with it in total. Its isolation from the wider Australian contingent — which arrived only from 1965, when a battalion was committed and later grew into the 1st Australian Task Force — meant the Team operated alone for its first three years, an advisory experiment that predated Australia's larger commitment entirely.

The SAS Comes to Nui Dat

The Special Air Service Regiment's involvement began in 1966, when 1 Squadron deployed to Nui Dat as part of the newly formed 1st Australian Task Force in Phuoc Tuy province. Over the following five years, the Regiment's three sabre squadrons rotated through two tours each, acting, in the words later used by military historians, as the Task Force's "eyes and ears." Rather than fighting as a large formation, SAS patrols worked in small teams — typically five men — inserted by helicopter deep into contested territory to locate Viet Cong base areas, monitor troop movements, and report enemy strength back to Nui Dat, occasionally setting ambushes along known infiltration routes.

This was reconnaissance-led warfare, closer in spirit to the intelligence-gathering that Cold War alliances relied on elsewhere — from the networks described in NATO's intelligence and technology expansion to the older logic of watching an adversary before engaging one. Roughly 580 SAS soldiers served in Vietnam, conducting close to 1,200 patrols. Regiment tradition holds that Viet Cong forces in Phuoc Tuy came to call the patrols "Ma Rung," or phantoms of the jungle, though the phrase survives mainly through unit lore rather than a documented Viet Cong source.

Small Patrols, an Outsized Record

What made the SAS deployment distinctive was the disparity between its own losses and the casualties it reported inflicting. Official unit figures record roughly seven SAS deaths across the five-year deployment — one killed by enemy fire, one who died of wounds, three killed in accidents, one missing and one who died of illness — against 28 wounded. Over the same period, patrol reports credited the Regiment with 492 enemy killed and a further 106 "possibly killed." Historians generally treat the SAS record as genuinely exceptional, the product of superior training and the tactical advantage of choosing when to engage — but body counts from the Vietnam War as a whole are notoriously unreliable evidence, compiled under pressure to show progress, so the SAS figures are best read as the Regiment's own patrol reporting rather than an independently verified tally.

Four Victoria Crosses

If the SAS record rested on avoiding decisive contact, the Training Team's reputation rested on the opposite: advisers thrown into combat alongside the South Vietnamese units they served, with none of a conventional battalion's depth of support around them. All four Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians in the war went to Team members. Warrant Officer Kevin Wheatley was posthumously awarded the VC in 1965 after refusing to abandon a wounded comrade during a Viet Cong ambush. Major Peter Badcoe received his, also posthumously, in 1967 for a string of actions rescuing wounded advisers and rallying South Vietnamese troops under fire. Warrant Officers Ray Simpson and Keith Payne were each decorated within three weeks of one another in 1969: Simpson for leading a company out of an ambush and returning for wounded men, and Payne for spending roughly three hours, wounded himself, gathering some forty scattered and wounded soldiers under mortar fire at the border outpost of Ben Het and leading them to safety. Across its decade of service the Team received more than one hundred decorations in total, a record that, alongside the SAS, made it the most consistently celebrated element of Australia's Vietnam commitment — a status not unlike the outsized reputations small specialised forces earned elsewhere in Cold War alliances such as NATO's nuclear-sharing arrangements.

Chronology

Withdrawal and a Lasting Reputation

Australia's broader military presence wound down through 1971 and 1972 as the Task Force withdrew and Vietnamization shifted fighting back to South Vietnamese forces, a drawdown that unfolded against the backdrop of an American administration consumed by surveillance controversies of its own, as explored in the expansion of NSA surveillance under Nixon. The Training Team, true to its advisory role since 1962, stayed on after the combat units left, finally departing in December 1972 as the last Australian formation in the country — a bookend to the commitment it had opened a decade earlier, in an era when Cold War diplomacy still played out on television as vividly as on battlefields, as it had at the 1961 Vienna summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

In the years since, both units have occupied a particular place in Australian memory of the war: not the conscript battalions whose service defined the domestic controversy over Vietnam, but small, selected forces whose casualties were comparatively light and whose acts of valour were unusually well documented. That reputation formed amid the same Cold War currents that reshaped alliances elsewhere in the period, from Western Europe's long argument over shared nuclear responsibility to the diplomatic thaw that followed, of the kind later visible in projects like Apollo-Soyuz. What set the SAS and the Training Team apart in Australia's Vietnam story was neither scale nor strategic decisiveness — a few hundred advisers and a few hundred SAS soldiers never determined the war's outcome — but how their conduct became, for a divided home front, a rare and largely uncontested source of national pride.

Frequently asked questions

Were the SAS Regiment and the Training Team the same unit? No. The Training Team was raised in 1962 to advise South Vietnamese and allied irregular forces, with members typically posted singly to local units rather than fighting together. The SAS Regiment deployed from 1966 as part of the 1st Australian Task Force and ran reconnaissance and ambush patrols from its own base at Nui Dat. The two overlapped for years but had distinct roles, chains of command and reputations.

Why did the Training Team win all four Australian Victoria Crosses of the war? Team advisers were typically the only Australians present with the South Vietnamese units they served, without the depth of support a conventional battalion could call on, which repeatedly put individual advisers in positions where they had to act alone under fire to rescue wounded comrades or rally collapsing local forces. All four VC actions — involving Kevin Wheatley, Peter Badcoe, Ray Simpson and Keith Payne — arose from exactly this exposed advisory role.

How reliable are the reported SAS "kill ratio" figures from Vietnam? The Regiment's own patrol reports credited it with hundreds of enemy killed for a small number of its own dead, and most historians accept SAS patrols were genuinely effective. But body counts across the Vietnam War are widely considered unreliable, since units on all sides had incentives to report favourable figures, so the ratio is best read as internal patrol reporting rather than an audited statistic.

When did Australia's Vietnam commitment finally end? Australian combat units, including the Task Force and the SAS Regiment, withdrew from Phuoc Tuy province in 1971 as part of the broader Vietnamization of the war. The Training Team, true to its founding role as an advisory rather than combat formation, remained afterward and did not leave until December 1972, making it both the first and the last Australian unit in Vietnam.

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