Ghosts of the Long High Mountains

Prologue: The Clearing

December 19, 1968. The Long High Mountains rose from the Vietnamese jungle like the spine of some ancient beast. Mist clung to the limestone peaks, refusing to burn away beneath the tropical sun. At the edge of a clearing, Staff Sergeant Michael James Connelly, United States Army Special Forces, Fifth Group, crouched low. Thirty-one years old, two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star with V for valor, a veteran of two tours and classified operations across Laos. He had killed with his hands, his knife, and weapons that officially did not exist. None of it had prepared him for what he would witness that morning.

Connelly was there by choice. He’d heard rumors circulating through the special forces camps—stories about the Australians operating out of Nui Dat. Tales of five-man patrols with body counts rivaling entire American battalions, of men moving through jungle like ghosts, tracking enemies across kilometers of triple-canopy forest, employing methods that made even Phoenix Program veterans uncomfortable. He’d dismissed it as barroom exaggeration.

He was wrong. Catastrophically wrong.

Chapter 1: The Ghosts

To understand how wrong, we must examine what the Australian SAS had become by late 1968. The men of Second Squadron, Australian Special Air Service Regiment, had operated in Phuoc Tuy Province for nearly three years. They arrived in 1966 as a conventional special reconnaissance unit, trained in the British SAS tradition of long-range patrol and surveillance. Thirty-six months of jungle warfare transformed them. The Vietnamese terrain, the elusive enemy, and the influence of their Aboriginal trackers had created a hybrid organism—Western military precision fused with hunting techniques predating European civilization by 40,000 years.

They did not fight the war as Americans did. No airstrikes at first contact. No success measured in bomb tonnage or artillery rounds. Success was measured in silence, patience, and the psychological destruction of an enemy who could never feel safe.

Their commander was Sergeant Terren Michael Walsh, call sign Blackbird. Twenty-nine, son of a bricklayer from Footscray, Melbourne, who’d never traveled more than 200 kilometers from home before enlisting at nineteen. Now he led a five-man recon team with more confirmed eliminations than any other patrol in the regiment’s history. The Viet Cong in Phuoc Tuy had placed a bounty on his head equivalent to five years’ wages for a peasant farmer. They called him “the jungle ghost.” Stories about Walsh frightened new recruits—stories so distorted by repetition they barely resembled reality.

The reality, Connelly would discover, was far more disturbing.

Chapter 2: The Hunt Begins

Walsh accepted the American observer with visible reluctance. The Australians were skeptical of American operational methods—born from watching US units crash through the jungle, announcing their presence to every enemy within five kilometers. They monitored radio traffic filled with chatter, saw the aftermath of search-and-destroy missions that killed civilians and recruited more Viet Cong than they eliminated.

The Americans had firepower beyond anything the Australians could dream of. What they lacked, in the Australian view, was craft.

The patrol departed Nui Dat at 0300 hours, December 17. They moved single file through the rubber plantations, then plunged into the jungle—what the Australians called “Indian country.” Connelly had participated in hundreds of patrols, but nothing prepared him for how these men moved. No sound, not a snapped twig, not a rustled leaf, not a clink of equipment. The five Australians flowed through the vegetation like water through rocks, bodies finding passages that seemed physically impossible. Connelly, despite his training, felt like an elephant in a china shop.

The first thing Walsh did upon entering the jungle was remove his boots. With a knife, he cut away the heel and toe portions, leaving only the ball of the foot. Shallow grooves crisscrossed the sole. The others performed the same ritual. Walsh explained, barely above a whisper: the cuts eliminated the distinctive bootprint enemy trackers looked for, allowed the wearer to feel the ground and sense tripwires, and reduced noise by 15%.

This refinement extended to everything. Weapons wrapped in cloth to eliminate reflection and sound. Faces and hands covered not with standard camouflage paint, but a mixture of ash, charcoal, and pig fat, prepared by the Aboriginal tracker according to ancient techniques. Load-bearing equipment modified—metal buckles replaced, noise sources padded or removed. No food requiring cooking. No unnecessary gear. They stripped themselves down to pure predatory function.

The tracker, Lance Corporal William Mundine, a Bundjalung man from New South Wales, moved at the patrol’s front. He read the jungle like a scholar reads text, identifying enemy presence from disturbances in vegetation days old, determining unit size, direction, and alertness from signs invisible to American eyes. The US military had nothing comparable. Technology, sensors, aircraft—they couldn’t read the land itself as a continuous record of human activity.

Chapter 3: Into the Mist

By morning of December 19, the patrol had covered seventeen kilometers of brutal terrain, moving only at night, lying motionless during daylight. No fires, no hot food, no radio signals except a single coded burst each evening. Three Viet Cong patrols detected and avoided—each time, the Australians melted into vegetation so completely enemy soldiers passed within meters, unaware.

Connelly began to understand. This was not merely different tactics. It was a different philosophy of warfare.

On the morning of the 19th, Mundine detected signs of a large enemy presence two kilometers ahead. The patrol halted. Mundine disappeared into the jungle, returning forty minutes later with intelligence that would have taken Americans hours of aerial reconnaissance. Ahead lay a Viet Cong rest station—forty to fifty personnel, including a dozen sentries.

Walsh absorbed the information, then did something that made Connelly’s blood run cold: he smiled.

Chapter 4: The Plan

Walsh gathered his men and Connelly into a tight circle, outlining the plan with hand signals and whispered fragments. No artillery. No air support. No reinforcements. Five Australians and one uneasy American would engage a position defended by fifty enemy soldiers and twelve sentries.

It wasn’t a plan for conventional engagement. It was psychological annihilation.

They would wait for full darkness, infiltrate the perimeter, eliminate sentries silently over four hours. Once perimeter security was neutralized, they would not attack immediately. Instead, they would arrange the eliminated sentries’ remains in a configuration designed to maximize psychological impact at dawn. Only then, in the chaos, would they attack from positions inside the enemy perimeter.

This was not warfare as Connelly understood it. It was something older, primal, reaching back past modern conventions into the realm of hunting and terror.

Chapter 5: The Execution

As darkness fell, the patrol moved into position. Connelly was assigned to remain with Mundine at an observation point three hundred meters from the enemy perimeter. Walsh and the others disappeared into the night, marked only by a slight rustle of vegetation.

What followed over the next four hours challenged everything Connelly believed about combat. The first sentry ceased transmitting his regular signals. The Viet Cong used whistled codes between perimeter guards every fifteen minutes. When the first signal failed, a runner was dispatched. He never returned. Nor did the second.

By 2200 hours, the enemy commander faced a situation he could not understand. His perimeter was going silent—position by position. No sounds of combat, no gunfire, no explosions, no screams. Just silence, spreading like a disease.

The commander made the decision Walsh predicted: he pulled his remaining sentries back toward the main camp, establishing a tighter perimeter, abandoning outer positions now containing the bodies of eliminated sentries and the preparations Walsh and his men were making.

Connelly did not sleep. Neither did Mundine, whose calm seemed utterly inconsistent with the circumstances. At one point, Mundine whispered four words that would stay with Connelly forever: “Three, not four, not five. Hunt.”

Chapter 6: Dawn

First light, December 20. The Viet Cong commander emerged from his bunker at 0530 to assess his defenses. What he saw sent him stumbling backward, screaming—a sound that brought every soldier running.

The sentries had been arranged in a precise circle around the camp, each body facing inward toward the defenders they failed to protect. Weapons removed and laid at their feet, magazines emptied, actions opened. Uniforms adjusted to expose their torsos, and on each chest, a single playing card: the Ace of Spades. American psychological operations units had tried to weaponize the symbol with minimal success. The Australians had obtained a supply for this purpose.

But that wasn’t what made the commander scream. The sentries’ boots had been removed and placed beside each body, cut in the pattern of the Australians’ own footwear—heel and toe removed, cross-hatch grooves sliced across the soles. The message was unmistakable: “We walk among you. We move as you move. We could be anyone. We could be anywhere. You will never see us coming.”

Chapter 7: The Attack

Walsh initiated the second phase. The first shots came from inside the perimeter—four rifles on semi-automatic, each round precisely aimed. The commander fell in three seconds. His deputy, two seconds later. The radio operator attempting to call for help took a round through the hand, then another to the chest.

In the first fifteen seconds, the Australians eliminated the command structure, communications, and any coherent resistance. The surviving Viet Cong, already psychologically shattered, found themselves under fire from attackers they could not locate. Some returned fire blindly, others fled, abandoning weapons and equipment. A few tried to organize defense—but the outcome was identical.

The engagement lasted eleven minutes. When it ended, forty-three enemy personnel lay motionless within the perimeter. The Australians suffered zero casualties, expended fewer than two hundred rounds, and called for no external support.

Connelly emerged from his position, moving toward the camp in shock. He’d seen engagements where American firepower achieved similar ratios, but only through overwhelming force—artillery barrages, air strikes, coordinated assaults. This was categorically different. Five men with rifles destroyed a fortified position through psychological manipulation, tactical patience, and ruthless precision.

Chapter 8: The Aftermath

What happened next pushed Connelly beyond shock. Walsh emerged from the camp carrying items collected from the enemy commander’s bunker—documents, maps, personal effects, photographs, letters. He photographed each item, then returned them to their precise original location. The message: “We could have taken everything. We chose to leave these behind. We do not fight for plunder. We fight to show you cannot hide from us. Everything you value is vulnerable.”

The other Australians searched the sentries and casualties, photographing faces, documenting identification, recording names and units. Walsh explained these would be used for psychological operations—letters sent, photographs distributed, families and comrades informed in detail what happened in the Long High Mountains.

This was not warfare. It was systematic psychological destruction, extending beyond the battlefield into enemy society.

But even that was not what broke Connelly.

Chapter 9: The Choice

Forty minutes after the engagement, Walsh approached Connelly, gestured toward the circle of sentries, and asked him to photograph him among the bodies—not as a trophy, but as documentation for an after-action report. Connelly refused. It was not eloquent or principled; it was visceral, instinctive. He simply said no and walked away.

Walsh did not seem offended or surprised. He nodded, used another Australian as photographer, and posed with the expression of a craftsman documenting completed work. That expression haunted Connelly for decades—not because it was monstrous, but because it was so mundane.

Chapter 10: Ripples

The patrol returned to Nui Dat on December 21. Connelly filed his reports, which were immediately classified and never released. He requested removal from future joint operations with Australian SAS units. The request was granted without comment.

The story might have ended there, buried in classified archives, except for what happened next. Intelligence reports from Phuoc Tuy documented significant changes in Viet Cong operational patterns. Enemy units avoided the routes near the rest station. Local commanders struggled to recruit new members; desertion rates increased. Captured documents revealed the legend of the “jungle ghosts” had spread through communist infrastructure, with warnings about supernatural abilities.

The psychological operation had worked. Five men had achieved effects that thousands of troops and millions of dollars in material had failed to accomplish.

Chapter 11: Lessons Unlearned

The United States military establishment in Vietnam had resources beyond imagination—air power, artillery, electronic surveillance. Everything except the one thing that mattered: they did not know how to hunt.

The Australians did. They learned from Aboriginal trackers whose ancestors perfected hunting across unforgiving terrain over tens of thousands of years. They adapted those ancient skills to modern warfare, combining stone age techniques with twentieth-century weapons to create something unprecedented.

The American way of war was industrial, seeking to overwhelm with production capacity and firepower. It worked against Germany and Japan, who operated on similar principles. It failed against an enemy who did not.

The Australian way was personal, intimate, psychological. It sought not just to eliminate enemy personnel, but to destroy morale, to make resistance seem futile, to create fear and uncertainty so profound the enemy would choose to stop fighting.

This approach required fewer resources, produced fewer casualties, and achieved more lasting effects than any amount of bombing. But it came at a cost. The men who practiced it became something different from ordinary soldiers. They suppressed normal human responses to violence, developed a capacity for patient cruelty most could not sustain without psychological damage.

Walsh and his men crossed a threshold separating professional warriors from something older and darker.

Chapter 12: The Abyss

Connelly understood this better than he wanted to admit. His refusal to photograph Walsh among the sentries was not just a reaction to military propriety; it was recognition that he stood at the edge of an abyss he was not willing to enter. He could observe, acknowledge effectiveness, admire skill—but he could not become it.

Whether Walsh and his men had become something inhuman, or simply reconnected with something human that civilization suppressed, was never resolved in Connelly’s mind. He spent decades trying to process what he’d witnessed, speaking with psychiatrists, fellow veterans, and historians. His accounts were consistent, detailed, deeply troubled. He never claimed the Australians violated the laws of armed conflict. The sentries had been eliminated in combat operations against a legitimate target. The arrangement of bodies, while psychologically devastating, did not technically constitute desecration under Geneva Conventions.

The psychological operations, the systematic campaign of terror—these existed in a gray zone military law had not addressed.

The Australians had not fought dirty. They fought so clean, so precise, so perfectly calibrated to achieve psychological effects, it seemed dirtier than conventional brutality. And they showed no signs of moral conflict about their methods.

That was what truly disturbed Connelly.

Chapter 13: Aftermath

Walsh and his team were not sadists or psychopaths. They were consummate professionals executing a doctrine they believed in. Craftsmen taking pride in their work. Hunters doing what hunters do.

The absence of visible psychological damage among the Australians suggested either an inhuman capacity for compartmentalization or a worldview so different from Connelly’s own it might as well have been alien.

Connelly’s after-action reports reached the Pentagon, provoking a minor bureaucratic crisis. Some officers advocated studying and adopting Australian methods. Others argued such methods were incompatible with American values. The debate was never resolved. The reports were classified, filed, and forgotten. The lessons were not learned. American tactics continued unchanged until the final withdrawal in 1973.

The war was lost.

Chapter 14: Legacies

Walsh continued operating until the Australian withdrawal in 1971. His patrol statistics remained the highest in the regiment. He returned to civilian life, working as a building contractor until his passing in 2014. He gave only one interview about his service, published in a little-known Australian book.

Asked about American observers, Walsh replied, “The Americans were good soldiers, but poor hunters. They’d forgotten things human beings used to know. The jungle reminded them of what they’d forgotten, and most didn’t like what they remembered.”

Whether this was a criticism of American military culture or human nature, Walsh did not clarify. The rivalry between American and Australian special forces continued, evolving into a collegial relationship as both faced new threats. Their methods converged, but old tensions never disappeared.

American operators who trained with Australians still reported their southern hemisphere counterparts operated by different rules, saw warfare through a different lens, were willing to go places psychologically that American doctrine discouraged.

Epilogue: The Document

Connelly passed away in 2019 at 82. His son, also a veteran, found among his effects a small collection of documents. One was different—a single sheet, handwritten, describing the morning of December 20, 1968 in the Long High Mountains. The circle of sentries, the cut boots, the playing cards, Walsh’s expression, the eleven-minute engagement, the psychological collapse.

At the bottom, Connelly had written a single sentence, both summary and epitaph for his experience with the Australian SAS.

The document was donated to a military history archive, cited in academic studies but never in official American histories. The Pentagon’s classification of Connelly’s original reports has never been lifted. The full story remains officially unknown.

Coda: The Uncomfortable Truth

Some stories survive not because they inspire, but because they disturb—because they reveal truths about warfare and humanity civilization would prefer to forget.

The jungles where they fought have grown back over the scars of war. The enemies they faced have become trading partners. The Cold War that sent them to Vietnam has ended, replaced by new conflicts unimaginable to those young soldiers.

But the questions endure. What is the true nature of elite warfare? How far should soldiers go in pursuit of victory? What separates a warrior from a hunter? Does that distinction matter when the enemy is equally willing to cross any line?

These are not questions military doctrine can answer. They are questions each soldier must answer for himself, in the darkness of jungle nights and the brightness of confrontations with his own capacity for violence.

Connelly answered by walking away, remaining within the boundaries of warfare as he understood it, even at the cost of lesser effectiveness. Walsh answered differently, embracing capabilities most never discover. Both choices were human. Both were right. Both were inadequate to the enormity of what war demanded.

War is not a story with heroes and villains. It is a crucible revealing what humans are capable of when civilization’s constraints are removed. What it reveals is not always comfortable, inspiring, or something we want to remember. But it is always true.

And the truth of the Long High Mountains, whatever else it may be, is a truth that deserves to be remembered—not celebrated, not condemned, simply remembered.

The sentries are waiting still, arranged in their eternal circle. Somewhere in the darkness, the jungle ghosts are still hunting.

They always will be.