Why American Generals Quietly Trusted Australian SAS With The Hardest Missions

Описание: In the autumn of 1966, General William Westmoreland did something his own staff described as completely out of character. He bypassed three layers of his own command architecture, picked up a secure phone, and called the Australian Task Force headquarters at Nui Dat directly. He had a mission. The kind of mission that American units had proven, repeatedly and expensively, they could not accomplish without triggering contact, generating noise, and alerting the target before the operation reached its objective. So America's most powerful general called Australia instead. And he was not the last.
This is the story that no official American military history has ever fully told. How General Creighton Abrams, General Harold Johnson, General Julian Ewell, and the most senior commanders of the Vietnam War quietly directed their hardest, most sensitive, and most critical missions to a force of fewer than 500 Australians — through back channels, informal arrangements, and secure phone calls that generated no paper trail and appeared in no official record.
David Hackworth, the most decorated soldier in American military history with 90 combat medals, watched it happen from the inside. He called the Australians the finest jungle soldiers in the world. Then he proved he meant it by spending a decade living among them. The generals never said it publicly. Hackworth paid the price for saying it at all. But the back-channel calls kept coming. And the jungle ghosts kept answering.
Drawing on declassified Pentagon records, post-war oral histories, the memoirs of senior commanders from both forces, and the documented operational legacy of SASR methods in modern American special operations, this is the story behind the story — the quiet institutional admission that the world's most powerful military could not do what five Australians with small packs could do in the dark.