On December 7th, 2004, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California. 2,000 Marines stand at attention on a runway hot enough to warp the rubber of their boots. The President of the United States walks to the podium. He is here to award the Presidential Unit Citation. The highest decoration the American military can give to a unit, not a man.
It has been awarded only 36 times since 1942. It is the unit level equivalent of a Distinguished Service Cross. And one of the men receiving it that day is a Lieutenant Colonel from a country with fewer soldiers than Los Angeles County has bus drivers. His name is Peter Kelly. He is the commanding officer of the 1st New Zealand Special Air Service Group.
He wears no insignia that would identify him as anything special. No squadron patch, no campaign ribbons displayed, no name tape that means anything to anyone in the crowd. He steps forward. He accepts the citation on behalf of a unit whose missions are still classified. The citation reads, and this is the verbatim language released by the United States Navy.
For extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance of duty in action against the enemy in Afghanistan from October 17th, 2001 to March 30th, 2002. It continues. Benchmark standards of professionalism, tenacity, courage, tactical brilliance, and operational excellence. That’s the public version.
That’s all the Pentagon will ever say. What the citation does not say, what cannot be said because the operational details remain classified by both governments to this day, is what 40 New Zealanders actually did inside Afghanistan during those 164 days. This is the story of how a small detachment of soldiers from a country most Americans cannot locate on a map climbed into the highest mountain range in Central Asia, vanished into snow at 11,000 ft, and came back with intelligence that rewrote how the United States would fight the war on terror for the next 20 years. It is also the story of how 3 years later the president of the United States stood on a runway in California and pinned a ribbon onto a uniform that bore no rank. Because the men who actually did the
work could not be there to receive it. They could not be photographed. They could not be named. They could not say what they did. The quiet tigers of Phuoc Tuy province in Vietnam, the unit’s grandfathers, had earned that nickname from the Viet Cong who hunted them for 26 months in the jungle and never once broke a New Zealand patrol.
What you are about to hear is what their grandsons did in the snow of the Hindu Kush. And why the most powerful military on Earth had to invent a way to honor soldiers who, by every working definition of the trade, do not officially exist. The Americans had a phrase they used for them in the first 3 weeks at Kandahar airfield.
The phrase was, “Get those Kiwis off my base.” 6 weeks later, the same Americans were on the radio begging them not to leave. To understand why, we have to go to a place where everything the New Zealanders thought they knew about war stopped working. A place that killed Marines. A place where the rules of jungle warfare meant nothing. The Hindu Kush.
The Hindu Kush is not the jungle. That is the first sentence in every after action report from the 2001 to 2002 New Zealand deployment that has ever been declassified, and it is the only sentence that says everything. The jungle of Phuoc Tuy province, where the NZSAS earned its reputation, was wet and dense and dark. It absorbed sound.
It hid silhouettes. It rewarded the smell doctrine, the soap-free, deodorant-free, scent-controlled discipline that allowed four-man patrols to lie inside a Viet Cong base perimeter for 72 hours and watch a battalion eat lunch. The Hindu Kush rewards none of those things. At 11,000 ft, scent does not travel. It freezes.
At 11,000 ft, sound carries for 2 km on a cold morning because the air is thin and the snow is hard. At 11,000 ft, the color green does not exist. Everything is gray rock, white snow, and the brown of frozen mud. A man in jungle camouflage is not invisible. He is a target. The first detachment of New Zealand SAS to arrive in Afghanistan landed at Kandahar airfield on the 9th of December 2001.
Approximately 40 operators, 20 support staff, one officer, the rest enlisted and non-commissioned. The squadron had been handpicked, but they had been trained for jungle, desert, and urban warfare. They had not been trained for war at altitude in winter. They were attached to a unit called Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force South, operational name Task Force K-Bar, commanded by US Navy Captain Robert Harward, a SEAL.
K-Bar’s mission was simple in description and brutal in execution. Special reconnaissance and direct action across Southern Afghanistan. Find the enemy, watch the enemy, where appropriate, kill the enemy. Above all, do not be seen. The first two NZSAS foot patrols inserted into the high mountains were spotted within hours of insertion.
Their helicopters dropped them at altitude in winter. The men moved in standard cold weather gear. Gore-Tex, polypropylene, military-grade insulation. To Vietnamese eyes in jungle, a man in faded greens disappears into a wall of leaves. To Taliban scouts on a snow-line ridge at first light, a man in Gore-Tex burns like a flare.
His exhaled breath fogs visibly for 15 m on a cold morning. His footprints in snow last for hours. His body heat, even through layers of synthetic insulation, registers on second-generation Russian thermal optics that the Taliban had inherited from 20 years of Soviet occupation. The patrols requested emergency extraction.
Helicopters had to be scrambled. Fighter-bombers had to be vectored in from US Navy aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea to fly top cover for the extraction. The cost in flight hours was extraordinary. The political cost for a 40-man unit trying to prove its worth to a hosting American command structure was worse.
This is the moment the American advisers at Kandahar began saying it, half under their breath in the operations tent, half loud enough to be heard. Get those Kiwis off my base. The same sentiment from a different war in a different decade. In Vietnam, it had been “Look at those Australian amateurs.
” In Afghanistan, in the first 3 weeks of December 2001, it was “Look at those Kiwi amateurs.” The pattern was identical. The recovery would be identical, too. Within 72 hours of the second compromised patrol, the NZSAS troop commander, whose name remains classified in New Zealand Defence Force documents to this day, pulled his entire detachment off external operations. He grounded them.
For a unit whose currency is operational tempo, this was a humiliation. He told them they were going to relearn everything they thought they knew about fieldcraft. In a borrowed corner of Kandahar airfield, surrounded by Marines who had already started joking about the Kiwis being shelved, they did what their grandfathers had done in Phuoc Tuy in 1968.
They started over. The first thing that changed was the gear. Standard-issue NZ Defence Force cold-weather kit was replaced piece by piece. Gore-Tex outer shells came off. Wool watch caps and locally bartered gray-brown shemaghs went on. The wildcard detail, and this is documented in Ron Crosby’s authorized history of the unit, is that several patrols traded American-issue cold-weather gear to Pashtun villages in exchange for woolen sheep blankets and brown homespun cloth.
The trade was uneven by Western standards. The Americans were horrified. The blankets had two properties that mattered. First, they did not shine on thermal imaging. The loose-weave wool diffused body heat in a way synthetic insulation does not. Second, they made the man wearing them look at 300 m through a cheap Soviet-era optic exactly like a local goat herder.
The second thing that changed was the weapon. In Vietnam, the SAS doctrine had centered on what the Australians called the the sawed-off L1A1 self-loading rifle. Modified for jungle close-quarters work. In the Hindu Kush, close quarters was not the problem. Engagement ranges in mountain terrain frequently exceeded 600 m.
The NZSAS standardized on the Diemaco C8 carbine, a Canadian-made variant of the M-16 family, for compact work and on the 7.62 mm L7 general-purpose machine gun for sustained fire. Designated marksmen in each patrol carried bolt-action sniper rifles capable of reaching out past 900 m. The principle was the same as it had been in Phuoc Tuy.
Match the weapon to the actual ground you will fight on, not the ground in the training manual. The third thing that changed was the movement profile itself. Foot patrols in deep snow at altitude leave tracks that last for days. The doctrinal solution, refined over the next 8 weeks, was to abandon long-range foot insertion entirely.
The unit went mobile. By May of 2002, the NZSAS in Afghanistan had begged, borrowed, and modified American Humvees, what they called dumvees, into long-range patrol vehicles fitted with heavy weapons mounts, extra fuel cans, and the kind of antenna arrays that turn a vehicle into a rolling intelligence gathering platform.
Some patrols added Kawasaki dirt bikes for scouting ahead of the main column. The vehicle-mounted patrols would operate for 20 to 30 days at a time. They would cover between 1,000 and 2,000 km on a single mission. They would not see resupply except by airdrop. They would not communicate with base except by short, encrypted, scheduled burst transmissions.
They were, in every operational respect, exactly what four troop had been in Phuoc Tuy 33 years earlier. Smaller, quieter, patient, and they were about to do something nobody, not the Americans, not the Australians, not the British, had been able to do. They were about to slip three patrols into the Shah-i-Kot Valley before Operation Anaconda.
And they were going to come back out, every single one of them, in late January 2002. American signals intelligence and CIA paramilitary reporting began converging on a single piece of terrain, the Shah-i-Kot Valley, Paktia Province, roughly 80 miles southeast of Kabul, 18 miles south of Gardez. Altitude on the valley floor, 7,500 ft.
Altitude on the surrounding ridgelines, 9 to 11,000 ft. The valley itself was 5 miles long and 2 and 1/2 miles wide. Four small villages on the valley floor, Marzak, Babulkhel, Sarkan Khel, and Zerki Khel. Western ridgeline known as the whale, 4 miles long, 1 mile wide, 9,000 ft of solid limestone. Eastern ridgeline higher still, broken by ravines that funneled directly toward the Pakistani border.
US intelligence assessed there were approximately 200 Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters dug into the valley. The real number, confirmed later by enemy documents, prisoner interrogations, and recovered radio traffic, was between 800 and 1,000. US planners began drawing up what would become Operation Anaconda.
2,000 troops, 10th Mountain Division, 101st Airborne. Conventional forces in conventional formations supported by overwhelming firepower. The plan needed eyes on the ground before the assault. Aerial reconnaissance was almost useless. Satellite passes captured rock and snow. Predator drone footage showed empty trails.
What the planners needed, and what no amount of technology could produce, was a human being lying still on a ridgeline for 10 days, counting fighters, mapping cave entrances, watching mortar pits, and calling in air strikes onto retreating columns once the main assault began. In the second week of February 2002, three NZSAS patrols slipped into the high country overlooking the Shahikot.
This is documented in Ron Crosby’s official history of the unit, and confirmed by independent journalism for the New Zealand Herald. The exact insertion routes remain classified. What is known is that they did not arrive by helicopter. A helicopter at altitude in winter cannot be hidden. Its rotor wash kicks snow visible for miles.
Its engine signature is heard across an entire valley. The patrols inserted on foot from extraction points several days march away. Moving at night, lying up by day under those gray-brown wool blankets they had traded for in December. For 10 days, three patrols of four to five men each lay in observation posts hacked out of the limestone.
They moved only at night. They did not cook. They did not heat water. They urinated into bottles and they buried their waste in plastic. They did not use their radios except for scheduled burst transmissions, never longer than 15 seconds, encrypted on rotating frequencies, transmitted only when ambient atmospheric conditions made detection harder.
They identified mortar positions. They identified machine gun nests on the high ridges that American planners had not known existed. They counted fighters moving in and out of cave complexes and confirmed that the real enemy strength in the valley was roughly four times the official US estimate. This intelligence was relayed back to Bagram. It was not all believed.
The accepted American estimate at the time of the Anaconda jump-off was still in the low hundreds of enemy fighters. The planners assumed the Kiwis were overcounting. They were not. On the 2nd of March, 2002, Operation Anaconda began. The 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne air-assaulted into the valley expecting a defeated enemy in retreat.
They walked into a prepared defense by close to a thousand dug-in fighters using the ridgelines the NZSAS had been mapping for 10 days. Two MH-47 Chinook helicopters were shot down. Eight American servicemen were killed in action. More than 80 were wounded. It would become known as the bloodiest single battle American forces had fought in Afghanistan to that point.
It would also have been catastrophically worse by an order of magnitude had the New Zealand patrols on the ridgelines not been precisely where they were doing precisely what they were doing. As US helicopters were pulling out wounded from contested landing zones, the NZSAS observation posts on the high ground were doing something that almost no public reporting has ever fully credited.
They were calling in the air strikes. Specifically, as Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters broke from the valley floor and tried to retreat through the high passes toward the Pakistani border, the NZSAS patrols had eyes on every escape route. The radio relays from those ridgelines vectored US Navy F-14s and F/A-18s, Air Force B-52s and AC-130 gunships onto retreating columns.
The fighters did not know they were being watched from above. They never had. Visual night vision footage of high altitude air strike from declassified footage. The wildcard detail, verified in declassified after-action material, is that the NZSAS patrols on the high ground remained in place during the entire 17-day battle.
They were not extracted. They held their observation posts while a thousand enemy fighters tried to fight their way through the very passes the Kiwis were lying on. They watched columns of armed men move within 50 m of their positions, and they did not engage with their personal weapons because the moment a Kiwi rifle opens up, the position is compromised, the radio relay dies, and the air strikes stop.
Instead, they let the columns walk. They radioed coordinates. They watched 2,000-lb bombs hit the men they had just watched walk past. This is what a Delta Force operator at Bagram is reported to have said about the NZSAS take after the third day of Anaconda. And the quote, while attributed only to a US special operations source in independent journalism, has never been denied.
Their reports are better than ours. Six words. Better than ours. This was no longer the unit the Americans had called amateurs at Kandahar in December. This was something else. The Americans were going to need a name for it. They didn’t have one yet. But on the other side of the front line, the Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who survived Operation Anaconda and made it back to Pakistan, and who would later be captured and interrogated, had a phrase of their own.
They called the men on the ridgelines the silent ones. They believed there were hundreds of them. There were 12. Reconnaissance is one face of the work. Direct action is the other. And the second story is one the New Zealand Defence Force has never confirmed in public, but which is laid out in unusual detail in Ron Crosby’s authorized history, NZSAS, the first 50 years, and which has been independently confirmed by New Zealand Herald reporting based on that book.
In the spring of 2002, two United States Navy SEAL teams were tasked with a direct action mission against two compounds in eastern Afghanistan believed to be holding senior Taliban commanders. The plan was straightforward by special operation standards. Two simultaneous compound assaults, helicopter insertion, breach, clear, extract.
The NZSAS detachment at the joint base was held back as the quick reaction force. This is the most thankless role in special operations. The QRF does not get the glory of the assault. The QRF sits in their gear at the airfield, weapons loaded, fast ropes coiled, helicopters spinning on hot pads, waiting for one of two messages.
Stand down. The operation is complete and we don’t need you. Or come now. It has gone wrong and we will all die if you don’t. For the New Zealanders that night, the second message almost came. According to Crosby’s account, both SEAL assaults made contact with significantly more enemy than the intelligence had predicted.
The compounds were not lightly defended. They were heavily defended. The SEAL teams found themselves in extended close quarters, firefights inside compounds that had been prepared for exactly this kind of assault. Defenders positioned to channel attackers into kill zones, internal sightlines pre-ranged for grenade tosses, escape tunnels prepared for retreat under fire.
The NZSAS troop on the airfield was minutes from boarding helicopters when the situation stabilized on the SEAL end. The QRF was stood down. The Kiwis went back to their cots. What that account does not say and what no after-action report has ever publicly stated is what would have happened if the QRF had launched.
The compounds they would have flown into were not what intelligence had assessed. They were were kill zones for exactly the kind of helicopter-borne reinforcement that a QRF mission produces. If the New Zealanders had been pushed into those compounds, the casualty rate would have been catastrophic. 12 to 15 New Zealand operators flying into compounds whose defenders had been waiting all night for a reaction force.
The NZSAS troop commander, who had to make the decision to keep his men spinning on the pad rather than launching them prematurely, has never been publicly named. His call was correct. His call was also the kind of call that ends careers when it goes the other way. This is the part of special operations work that does not appear in citations.
The restraint, the judgment, the willingness to be useless on the cot tonight in order to be useful on the ridgeline tomorrow. In February of 2004, the NZSAS returned to Afghanistan on Operation Concord II. A deployment ahead of the country’s first presidential elections. The mission profile had shifted from pure reconnaissance to a mix of long-range vehicle-mounted patrols, direct action, and what the defense force fact sheet describes only as specialist search.
In mid-June of that deployment, a New Zealand troop conducting operations in central Afghanistan, the exact province is still classified, though the Operation Burnham inquiry later identified the broader area as Uruzgan, had laid up for the night in a defensive formation in rocky, broken terrain. It was approximately 03:15 hours.
A group of roughly 20 enemy fighters, using the cover of undulating ground in pitch darkness, had crawled to within rocket-propelled grenade range of the patrol position. The first rocket-propelled grenade struck one of the patrol’s vehicles directly. A second RPG struck a different vehicle. One was destroyed outright.
The second was immobilized. The explosion blew Lance Corporal Bill Henry Willie Apiata off the bonnet of the vehicle where he had been sleeping. He was dazed. He was not physically injured, but two other soldiers had been wounded in or near the same vehicle. One of them, referred to in the official New Zealand gallantry citation only as Corporal D for operational security reasons, had life-threatening arterial bleeding.
He was deteriorating rapidly. The patrol’s main position was 70 m to the rear, 70 m of broken, rocky, fire-swept ground. Apiata assumed command of the small detached group. He realized, as the official citation describes, that the casualty could not be safely moved by stretcher under that volume of fire, and that staying where they were meant the wounded man would bleed out within minutes.
In total disregard of his own safety, that is the verbatim language of the citation, Apiata stood up, lifted his wounded comrade bodily across his shoulders, and carried him. 70 m across open ground, fully exposed, fully illuminated by the muzzle flashes and explosions of the firefight. Heavy enemy fire from in front, returning friendly fire from his own troops’ main position behind him.
That neither he nor his colleague were hit, to quote the citation again, is scarcely possible. He delivered the wounded man to the troops’ main position. He rearmed himself. He turned around and went back into the fight. Three other SAS soldiers received bravery awards for their actions during the same engagement.
Two received the New Zealand Gallantry Decoration. One received the New Zealand Gallantry Medal. Apiata received the Victoria Cross for New Zealand. He is, as of this recording, the only living recipient. This is the part of the story that became public. This is the visible tip. The reason the world learned anything at all about the New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan is because one soldier, on one night in 2004, did something that could not be hidden behind security classifications.
Underneath that visible tip, under the surface, are dozens of other engagements. Patrols whose participants are still named only by single letters in court documents. Operations whose dates remain redacted. Missions whose objectives remain classified by both the New Zealand and United States governments.
The men who did them cannot speak about them. They cannot be photographed. They cannot be identified. And it was for those missions, not for the visible ones, not for Apiata’s 70-m carry, but for the silent 10 days on a Shah-i-Kot ridgeline in February 2002, that the President of the United States stood on a runway in California on the 7th of December 2004, and pinned a ribbon onto a uniform that bore no rank. Return to that runway.
President George W. Bush has finished speaking. Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, has read the citation aloud. The words in the formal document, released by the Department of the Navy and reproduced verbatim in the Defense Media Network archives, describe what was accomplished. Operating first from Oman and then from forward locations throughout the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan, successfully executed its primary mission to conduct special operations in support of the United States efforts to destroy, degrade, and neutralize the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leadership and military. During its 6-month existence, this task force was the driving force behind extremely high-risk missions and unconventional warfare operations in Afghanistan. Established benchmark standards of professionalism, tenacity, courage,
tactical brilliance, and operational excellence. That language, benchmark standards, is not casual. The Presidential Unit Citation is not awarded for participation. It is not awarded for service. It is awarded for the kind of performance that, in the formal language of the United States Department of Defense, would justify the Distinguished Service Cross if it had been performed by an individual.
It is the unit-level equivalent of the second highest decoration the American military can bestow. It has been awarded to coalition units exactly six times in its history. The Combined Task Force K-Bar award, covering American SEALs, special forces, combat controllers, and the special operations forces of Canada, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Turkey, and New Zealand, is one of those six.
The New Zealand contribution to that award was a unit that, at its peak deployment strength, numbered approximately 65 men. For context, the SEALs alone in K-Bar fielded three full teams. The Army Special Forces contribution was three operational detachments. The Canadian JTF2 contribution was 40 operators.
The NZSAS with 65 men spread across a 12-month rotation contributed proportionally less manpower than any other partner in the task force. And yet the operations they conducted, the long-range vehicle patrols of 20 to 30 days covering 1,000 to 2,000 km without resupply, the reconnaissance patrols on the Pakistani border in the run-up to Anaconda, the QRF standby missions, the helicopter inserted foot patrols in the Hindu Kush at the worst of winter, were assessed by the American command as having strategic effect disproportionate to the unit’s physical size. That language, again, is not casual. It is the same language American intelligence officers had used about the Australian SAS in Vietnam in 1969.
A small unit producing strategic effect. A small unit accomplishing what battalions could not. A small unit whose currency is patience and information rather than firepower and presence. The lineage is direct. The quiet tigers of Phuoc Tuy operated in patrols of four to five men. The NZSAS in the Hindu Kush operated in patrols of four to five men.
The quiet tigers in Phuoc Tuy ate cold rations on patrol. The NZSAS in the Hindu Kush ate cold rations on patrol. The quiet tigers in Phuoc Tuy did not communicate except by scheduled burst transmissions. The NZSAS in the Hindu Kush did not communicate except by scheduled burst transmissions. The quiet tigers in Phuoc Tuy let enemy units walk past their observation positions rather than engage because engagement compromised the position and the position was worth more than the kill.
The NZSAS in the Hindu Kush let enemy units walk past their observation positions rather than engage because engagement compromised the position and the position was worth more than the kill. There is a paragraph in the speech given by then Governor-General Anand Satyanand at the formal presentation of the citation to the unit on home soil which is publicly available on the New Zealand Beehive Government Archive.
He said this addressing the men of the unit directly, most of whom were in uniform, faces visible only to other members of the unit, no names recorded in the public version of the proceedings. First NZSAS prides itself on its discreet and unassuming nature. I know it does not seek or even welcome accolades.
He continued You have conducted numerous different missions and activities and as a small unit you have provided a capability out of all proportion to your physical size. That you maintained a low level of casualties throughout these deployments, especially considering the circumstances in which you have operated, is a tribute to the training and skill you have applied to these tasks.
The casualty count for the three Afghanistan deployments between December 2001 and November 2005 across three rotations of 40 to 65 men operating for periods of 6 to 12 months in some of the most contested terrain on the planet was zero NZSAS killed in action. Wounded, yes. Two soldiers wounded in the June 2004 ambush where Apiata earned his Victoria Cross.
Others were wounded in vehicle accidents and mine strikes across the campaign. But killed in action, zero. This is the same number four troop returned from its first 12-month rotation in Phuoc Tuy in 1969. With the number that the second rotation returned with was one. Sergeant GJ Campbell killed on the 14th of January 1970.
The number across the entire NZSAS Vietnam deployment was one. Across 155 patrols, across 26 months in the Hindu Kush, across thousands of patrol days, and a campaign that included Operation Anaconda, the bloodiest single battle for American forces in Afghanistan to that point, the number was zero. Zero is not luck.
Zero is doctrine, not change. The terrain changed, the enemy changed, the decade changed, the doctrine did not change. The ribbon is worn on the right breast of the uniform. In the New Zealand Defence Force, this is the side reserved for unit decorations, not individual ones. Members of the NZSAS who served with CJTF-S period, 17 October 2001 to 30 March 2002, are entitled to wear it permanently for the rest of their service careers and beyond.
Members of the unit who joined after the citation period are entitled to wear it for the duration of their service with the NZSAS. When they leave the unit, they take the ribbon off. The award belongs to the unit, not to the man. This is perhaps the most New Zealand thing about the entire affair. The award is permanent.
The wearer is not. The man passes through. The unit endures. And the doctrine. The doctrine that takes 26 men into the jungle of Phuoc Toi in 1968 and brings them out with one fatality after 155 patrols. And that takes 65 men into the Hindu Kush in 2001 and brings them out with zero fatalities after thousands of patrol days.
That is what the citation actually decorates. Not the men. The doctrine the men carry. The American captain at Kandahar airfield who said in December 2001, “Get those Kiwis off my base.” That captain is unnamed in the public record. He is unnamed because by the spring of 2002, he was no longer saying it.
The phrase died in the Hindu Kush, just as its older brother, “Look at those Australian amateurs.” had died in Phuoc Toi 33 years earlier. In both cases, it died for the same reason. The men they were calling amateurs walked into the worst terrain on offer. They walked back out. They came back with intelligence that no satellite, no drone, no battalion sweep could have produced.
They did it without being seen. And when, 3 years later, the president of the United States needed to put a name to what they had done, needed to find some language for the work that the operational details could not describe, the only language available to him was the highest unit decoration in the American military.
Because there is no medal for being invisible. There is no ribbon for the patrol that walks 20 km into enemy territory, lies still for 10 days, and walks out again without firing a shot. There is no decoration in any military’s inventory that means this unit produced strategic effect out of all proportion to its size by doing things that can’t be made public.
The closest available approximation is the presidential unit citation. It was the right ribbon. It went to the right men. The men, of course, cannot tell you what they did. 4 Troop NZSAS, Vietnam. 155 patrols, one killed in action. The Viet Cong called them the Quiet Tigers. 1 NZSAS Group, Afghanistan.
December 2001 to March 2002. Classified number of patrols. Zero killed in action. The Pentagon awarded them the presidential unit citation. The motto of the New Zealand Special Air Service is inherited from the British SAS who came before them. Who dares wins.
