Dmanwuzhere wrote:australia was no major threat in vietnam the best battle used most often attributed to australia is long tan but us soldiers had tons of circumstances where they came through shining but just like australia we all came home defeated
you can research the why and there are several reasons most of which were outside the soldiers control
but say what you will about us soldiers but at the end of the day our special forces are utilized in crises everywhere
i have yet to hear australia say they will go get bin laden or any target with their special forces
while i dont take anything from any soldier as they can only fight as well as the mind leading them
you could drop 100 of anyones crack soldiers in the middle of the desert with 5 snipers hidden somewhere and watch the slaughter
battles are determined more often than not by the leaders choices so take your aussie snobbery and go into the bush yourself instead
of trying to determine how your soldiers are better
show me a thousand of any armed forces members who can catch a nuke if you cant they are all ill prepared and even
Dman that is EXACTLY what I said about nukes, nobody can really defend from them. Australia was not a major threat in Vietnam because we could not sustain enough troops and I literally said we couldn't make a big impact because we had too little troops. I know that your Special forces is used everywhere since you have more Special forces and all different kinds Like Australia has the SAS and Commandos and you guys have Seals, whatever your airborn troops are, Green Berets, Delta Force etc (may have gotten some muddled up so don't get angry since I don't follow that stuff). Also isn't Bin Laden dead? You guys went to kill him since you had more resources available. I'm also again aware that Leaders matter also. I'm also aware that there were some great examples of you defeating the Viet Cong and PAVN troops and that's great. But however we were more suited to jungle warfare most Australian soldiers did not wear helmets reducing noise, painted their faces with camo paint (you guys did that too I think), sometimes rarely spoke during patrols using hand signals (think you guys did that too) and we could get closer to enemy positions before they noticed. We also had higher morale since new American soldiers would split up after landing in Vietnam and going into a different unit than their friends sometimes whilst we came in whole units. Of course this is not true all the time. Pretty sure the amount of conscripts in each unit was higher also leading to lower morale. Also I'd say we had more experience fighting in Jungle from WW2 in New Guinea, Borneo and Malaya later. We were also better at ambushing and less prone to getting ambushed ourselves.