A photograph taken on April 8, 1971, on a low mound of red earth in South Vietnam shows six men who had just returned from nine days in the jungle, squinting toward the camera. Four Australians stand around an American, a U. S. Navy SEAL who had volunteered to accompany them into one of the most dangerous regions on earth.
The image matters not because of who is in it, but because of what it represents. It is close to being the last photograph of its kind ever taken, because these men belonged to a unit that was about to close the curtain on the bloodiest chapter of Australia’s war and leave. For five years, small teams like this one had entered the jungles of Phuoc Tuy Province and returned with a kill ratio that no other Australian unit came close to matching. Most of the time, the enemy never even knew they were there.
Now the war was ending. The task force was heading home, and the burden fell on a handful of men in patrols with simple numerical names like “25” to be the last ones out of the field. This is the story of the final ghosts of the Australian SAS, the men who finished the job. The strangest part, which almost no one knows, is that one of the men who helped them finish it had every reason to be somewhere else entirely.
That American in the photograph tells you everything about the reputation these men had built. Between 1966 and 1971, the Australian SAS Regiment conducted roughly 1,200 patrols inside enemy territory in Vietnam. Across all those years, all those thousands of journeys into jungles the enemy considered their own backyard, the unit lost just one man to enemy fire. One.
A few others died in accidents, one from illness, and one fell and was lost. But killed by the enemy they were hunting over five years? One man. In return, they inflicted nearly 500 casualties on that enemy.
Those numbers are almost grotesque. This is not an ordinary combat record. Soldiers who exchange fire with other soldiers do not produce figures like this. This is a hunting record.
It was, by far, the highest kill ratio of any Australian unit in the entire war. The men did not achieve it by being braver or more aggressive than others. They achieved it by being calmer and more patient than almost any human being can truly endure, by living for a week at a time according to a single rule: see the enemy first and never let him see you. The unit was based at a place called Nui Dat, on a low hill the men simply called “SAS Hill,” and every detail of their method was built on smallness and silence.
A patrol consisted of five or six men, sometimes slightly more. They moved in a strict formation that had become instinct. A scout led the way, reading the ground for the finest unusual details that meant death was near: a broken branch, a footprint still leaking water, spider webs torn at chest height. Behind him came the patrol commander, then the signalman carrying the radio, the only thin thread connecting the patrol to the world and the means to call in artillery or gunships if things went wrong.
Then a medic, a rifleman, and a second-in-command. Each man watched a different part of the jungle. Each man carried the awareness that his stillness was the only thing keeping the others alive. They went out for a week and covered very little ground.
Sometimes just one kilometer a day, because speed makes noise, and noise means death. They watched more than they moved. They listened more than they breathed. That, more than any weapon, is what made them the most feared small unit in the entire region.
Now, about the American. He is the key to the whole matter. By 1971, the United States had every kind of elite unit in Vietnam: the Special Forces, the Rangers, the Navy SEALs, some of the finest soldiers America had ever produced. The SEALs, in particular, were and remain exceptional.
So ask yourself the obvious question: why would a U. S. Navy SEAL, a man from a unit with nothing to prove to anyone, carry his gear and go into the jungle as an attached member of an Australian SAS patrol? The answer is the highest compliment one group of soldiers can pay another.
Because the Australians were, in this specific mission and in these specific jungles, the very best at what they did, and the Americans knew it. Attachments and joint training between allied special forces units were routine, and the American’s choice to base himself with the Australian SAS meant choosing to learn from the men who had quietly mastered the art of survival in that country. That photograph from April 1971, showing John Deakin of the SEALs standing among the Australians of Patrol 25, is a small, quiet monument to a reputation so strong that the world’s most famous commandos came to walk in Australian footsteps and learn how it was done. Now imagine the actual work, the thing that photograph was taken minutes after.
Patrol 25, F Company, 2nd Squadron. The commander was a young officer, Second Lieutenant Brian Russell. His second-in-command was Corporal Ian Rasmussen. The scout was Private Dennis Beard, the man whose eyes reached everything before anyone else’s.
The signalman was Private Don Barnby, whose radio was the patrol’s lifeline, and whose photographs and equipment are the reason we can tell this story with real names at all. He kept them, and they are today in his country’s war memorial. The rifleman was Private Bill Nesbit, and Deakin was the American. That patrol lasted nine days, from late March into April 1971.
Nine days of moving from shadow to shadow through territory where the enemy had every advantage of numbers and knowledge, where these men’s only edge was their self-discipline. They went out, did the job, and all returned, every one of them. And someone raised a camera on SAS Hill and captured them in the few minutes before the jungle swallowed them again. That was what victory looked like for the SAS.
Not a flag on a hill, but six exhausted men still breathing and a notebook full of everything they had seen. But the price must be acknowledged, because the near-perfect numbers can make it look easy. It was never easy, and it was never free. Go back to September 1969, to a different patrol from an earlier squadron, and to a young national serviceman named David Fisher.
His patrol made contact with the Viet Cong in the jungles of Long Khanh Province and had to withdraw in a hurry, in a hot extraction. The men were lifted directly out of the trees on ropes beneath a helicopter because there was nowhere to land. As David Fisher was being raised from among the trees, hanging in open air, he fell. His comrades could not find him.
The war ended. The years passed, and David Fisher remained missing in those jungles until his remains were finally found in 2008, 39 years later. That is the real price hidden beneath that extraordinary statistic. The 500-to-1 ratio is a remarkable number, until you remember that the one had a name and a family, and was hanging beneath a helicopter in his final conscious moments.
The SAS record was not earned by chance. It was earned by a kind of discipline that drained years from men’s lives, and sometimes by the sacrifice of those who did not come home. By 1971, the decision had been made. Australia was leaving Vietnam.
The major base at Nui Dat was to be handed over and evacuated. The task forces were returning home. Five years of Australian war in Phuoc Tuy Province were nearly over. That meant someone had to be last.
Someone had to keep going out into those jungles even as the war around them was clearly ending, even when everyone knew the whole operation was shutting down, even when the obvious human temptation was to ease off, stay safe, and not be the last man to die in a war your country had already decided to leave. The 2nd Squadron, on its second tour, led the SAS’s final patrols of the war through mid-1971, and Don Barnby’s tour lasted from February until October 10 before he returned home. Think about the particular kind of courage that requires. It is one thing to risk everything when the outcome is undecided.
It is another thing entirely to keep performing the army’s most dangerous job with the same silent professionalism when you know the war is already decided and the trucks are already warming up to take you home. There is no glory waiting at the end of such a patrol. There is only the mission, the men beside you, and the quiet determination to finish the job properly to the last day and bring everyone home safely. They did it.
When the SAS finally folded its flag in Vietnam in 1971, its record was remarkable and almost unbelievable, and no Australian unit has matched that achievement since. The men of those final patrols, Russell, Rasmussen, Beard, Barnby, Nesbit, and the American Deakin who chose to walk with them, were not among the most famous soldiers of that war. There is no blockbuster film telling the story of Patrol 25. Most people have never heard the name before, and that in itself, when you think about it, is the truest possible tribute to a unit whose skill lay in not being noticed.
They made no noise. They did not seek headlines. They slipped into the most lethal forests on earth, saw everything, achieved their objectives, and slipped back out again, again and again for five years, then turned off the lights and went home without losing almost anyone to the enemy they hunted. The photograph from SAS Hill, six men squinting into the light, the American standing quietly among the Australians because the world’s best soldiers had come to learn from them, is the entire SAS story in Vietnam compressed into a single frame.
Not a monument, not a battle honor carved in stone, but just a handful of exhausted, exceptionally competent soldiers, all still alive in the final moments of a war that was winding down. They were the ghosts who came back. When the last patrol returned from the jungle, the base was handed over, and the ships sailed home, they left the enemy who had feared them for five years with one lasting lesson, the same lesson every enemy of these men eventually learned: you never hear the sound of the ghost that defeats you. The Australians made sure of that, right up to the last day.
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