88% 6.7% in a widely cited American study of Vietnam combat, the enemy fired first in 88% of the engagements that involved United States forces. The enemy chose the moment. The enemy opened the shooting. The American soldiers spent those first seconds working out where the fire was coming from. During eighth Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment’s year in Vietnam, the enemy fired first in 6.

7% of the Battalion’s contacts, more than 130 contacts across that tour, and in something close to 19 out of every 20 of them, it was the Australians who decided when the fighting began. That is not a small difference. It is the difference between walking into most of your firefights on the other man’s timing and walking into most of them on your own.

Now, the Australian figure belongs to one Battalion during one tour in one corner of the war. It is not a national average, and it does not crown every Australian who ever carried a rifle, but more than 130 contacts is a large enough sample to demand an answer. How did a single Battalion turn the opening shot around that completely? That is the question this video is going to chase, and the answer is not luck, and it is not magic, and it is not a slogan painted onto the past. This channel is small and new, and

it is trying to put Australia’s documented Vietnam record back on the table. The reports, the contact logs, the numbers soldiers actually generated. If that is the kind of history you want kept, subscribing is the one thing that helps most. Start with what the numbers are because most of the noise about this comparison comes from people who never bothered to read the definitions.

 The American figure comes from a study of United States engagements, and the wording matters. It says the enemy initiated the action. It does not say the Americans were stupid or asleep or beaten. It says that in the overwhelming majority of recorded engagements, the communist forces chose to open fire and the Americans answered.

The broader record backs this up. Analysts looking at the war found the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese starting somewhere near nine in 10 of the larger firefights, retaining the ability to decide when many engagements would begin, deciding their own losses by deciding whether to fight at all. An Australian Department of Veterans Affairs account attributes the figure to 8 RARs 1969 to 1970 tour.

 The published account does not turn the two percentages into a matched scientific comparison, but it records a striking difference in who usually opened the shooting. The battalion served its year, had more than 130 contacts, and in 6.7% of those, the enemy got the first shot away. In roughly two-thirds of the contacts, the Australians opened from a prepared ambush.

 They were already in position, already waiting when the fighting started. That last detail is the heart of it and we will come back to it properly. The terminology matters. Open fire first is not the same as achieve total surprise. A patrol can be fired on first without being caught completely unaware. An ambush can be sprung first by the side that planned it, which is rather the point of an ambush.

 Enemy initiated contact means the enemy started the shooting. It does not always mean the Australians had no idea anyone was there. The distinction prevents two different ideas from being treated as the same event. Here is why the first shot was worth so much beyond bragging rights. The side that opens a contact usually gets to choose the ground.

 It picks the range. It picks which target to hit first and where to throw the heaviest weight of fire in the opening burst. It has often already decided where it will pull back to, whether there are claymores wired into the killing ground, whether the artillery has been pre-planned onto the spot, and whether this is going to be a 30-second affair or a longer fight.

 The side reacting to the contact has to do all of that work under fire and in a hurry. Find the direction, get into cover, get organized fire going back. Keep men from bunching, work out whether the burst that just hit them is the whole enemy force or one machine gun left behind to fix them in place while the rest moves around a flank.

 Get a contact report out, decide whether the gun line can fire without dropping rounds on their own people. None of that means the side firing first always won. Prepared positions failed. Ambushes were spotted before they sprang. A well-trained unit hit hard could turn and fight straight through the ambush and break it. But across hundreds of contacts, the unit that more often controlled that first handful of seconds was the unit suffering less and learning more.

 The first shot was an advantage, it was not a guarantee. So, who were 8 RAR and why them? 8th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, arrived in Phuoc Tuy Province in late 1969 and served through to late 1970, working out of the Task Force base at Nui Dat as part of the 1st Australian Task Force. It was a mix, like every Australian battalion of that period, regular soldiers alongside national servicemen, the conscripts, who by 1969 were doing the same patrols and carrying the same risks as everyone else. It worked the

same province other Australian battalions had been working for years with the same supporting cast, the gunners, the armored personnel carriers, the engineers, the helicopters, the intelligence staff at Task force headquarters who collated what the patrols brought in. It matters that 8 RAR turned up late in the Australian commitment rather than early. Because the 6.

7% was not invented by 8 RAR, the battalion inherited it. By the time it arrived, several years of Australian patrolling in that province had built up a body of knowledge, maps marked by earlier units, contact logs, known tracks, known crossing points, a feel for which base areas the enemy used and which routes fed them. 8 RAR refined a method.

 It did not dream one up. The number was the product of training, of lessons paid for by earlier battalions, of map continuity and battalion discipline, and of a province the Australians had been studying for years. That is the unglamorous truth behind a striking statistic, and it is more impressive than a miracle. Not less.

 Practically, that inheritance showed up in small ways. A platoon commander arriving in 1969 did not have to learn from scratch which crossing points the enemy favored or which villages sat astride a supply route. A good deal of it was already penciled onto the maps he was handed. The national servicemen carried their share of this.

 By that stage of the war, a conscript had been through the same jungle training as the regular beside him. And on a track in Phuoc Tuy, there was no visible difference between the two. The method belonged to the battalion, not to any one type of soldier in it. And that is part of why it held across more than 130 contacts rather than resting on a handful of veterans.

 Picture a section moving through the scrub and rubber of Phuoc Tuy. Because the statistic lives or dies in the small mechanics of how these men walked. Equipment is taped and tied so nothing rattles. The men are spaced out, not bunched, far enough apart that one burst of fire cannot catch the lot of them. Close enough to support each other.

 A scout is forward reading the ground. Behind the section, a man watches the rear because the most natural mistake in the world is to assume the danger is only ahead. Movement is slow. There are halts, and during the halts, nobody moves and nobody talks. They just listen for voices, for the clink of equipment, for the particular silence that falls on birds and insects when other men are nearby.

Every one of those choices cost something. More radio batteries meant surer contact with Nui Dat and a heavier load on the man carrying them. More ammunition improved the odds of surviving the first minutes of a fight, but slowed the patrol and tired the legs that had to carry it. Water was weight, and in that heat, a patrol could not skimp on it.

A section commander balanced all of this before he stepped off because the same load that kept his men alive in a long contact also made them slower and louder on the approach. And slow and loud was how patrols got found. There was no setting that solved every problem at once.

 There was only the judgment of which risk to carry that day. They stay off the obvious tracks because the obvious track is where the enemy expects them and where the enemy lays his mines. They read footprints and work out how old they are, how many men, which way, carrying what. They look at bent grass and broken branches and the color of disturbed earth.

 At a stream, they cross on hard ground where they can to leave less sign. They eat cold because a cooking fire announces a patrol to anyone downwind for hours. The radio is used sparingly and quietly. And before they push into anything that looks like a natural choke point, a narrow crossing, a gap between two thick patches is a sensible enemy would sight an ambush, they stop and they look and they think instead of walking in to find out the hard way.

 Every one of those habits is uh aimed at one outcome. See the other man before he sees you. That is where the 6.7% actually comes from, not from a clever trick. From a hundred small disciplines stacked on top of each other until the odds of being surprised got very thin. And this is the part people miss.

 The shooting was usually the last stage of something that had started days earlier. A patrol crossing a piece of country does not just look for the enemy to shoot. It looks for the enemy’s habits. Fresh tracks on a particular path, sign that the path is used again and again, some clue as to when, footprints over the morning dew or under it. A rough count of how many men, which direction they favor, whether they are carrying loads heavy enough to suggest resupply, whether the route seems to serve a camp or a village or a bunker system, whether civilians use the same

path, which changes everything about how you are allowed to fight there. That information does not stay with the patrol. It goes back through the debrief, onto the marked map, into the intelligence summary, where it sits next to what other patrols saw and what earlier battalions logged and whatever came from villagers, captured documents, aerial observation or signals work where it was available.

 And then often another patrol or the same one days later goes back to that track with a plan. They do not stumble into the enemy. They have worked out where the enemy is likely to be and at roughly what time. And they go and wait for him there. The Australian ambush was usually the sharp end of an intelligence cycle, not a group of bored men sitting by a random path hoping someone would wander past.

And the cycle had memory, which is the part that is easy to undervalue. A contact this week was logged against contacts from last month and from the battalion before. A track that went quiet was noticed. A track that suddenly carried heavier sign was noticed faster. Over a tour, the men at headquarters built a picture of the province’s rhythms, when certain routes ran hot, which villages fed which approaches, where the enemy tended to pull back to when a sweep pushed him.

None of it was perfect, and a good deal of it was guesswork dressed up as assessment, but it meant a patrol going out in October was carrying the accumulated reading of the months before it, not setting out blind. The 6.7% was partly a number about paperwork, about debriefs taken seriously, maps kept current, and the unglamorous discipline of writing down what you saw so the next patrol could use it.

 So, how does a prepared ambush turn into a statistic? The route is chosen because the evidence pointed at it. The patrol moves in before the time the enemy is expected to use it and settles into concealment off the track. Arcs of fire are assigned so every man knows his slice, and the slices overlap, and nobody is left covering nothing.

 A killing ground is identified, the stretch where the fire will be concentrated. Claymore mines may be set facing into it, where the ground and the rules of engagement allow. One man, usually the commander, controls the signal to open fire because an ambush that goes off when one nervous soldier decides is an ambush thrown away.

Security is put out to the flanks and the rear so the ambushers are not themselves ambushed. Artillery is pre-planned onto likely spots. A withdrawal route is agreed before anything happens, and there are rules. Civilians are not the target. A lone scout might be allowed to walk straight through untouched so that the main body behind him walks into the trap instead.

 Not every group that walked into the killing ground was the right group to hit. A commander watching a track had to weigh what he was seeing against what the intelligence had promised him. A handful of unarmed figures might be civilians, and firing on them was both a crime and a way to turn a village against the battalion for months.

 A small armed party might be a scouting element with a larger body close behind, and springing early meant trading a big result for a small one, and handing the rest their warning. So, the discipline ran the other way as often as not. Holding fire was a decision in its own right, made in seconds by a corporal or a young lieutenant lying still in the green, and getting it wrong in either direction had a cost.

 Then they wait, and often nothing comes. The enemy used a different track that night. He came at a time nobody predicted. Civilians passed, and the ambush stayed silent. An animal moved in the dark and set everyone’s nerves on edge for nothing. The patrol’s own sign was spotted by an enemy scout, and the column quietly turned away a kilometer back.

 The weather shifted, and movement stopped. A night spent lying still in the wet in silence with nothing to show for it was not a failure of nerve. It was the ordinary cost of a method that only paid off some of the time. Many ambushes ended without contact. The ones that did were what bent the numbers. The 2/3 figure explains the result.

 Roughly 2/3 of eight RAR’s contacts began from an Australian ambush position. Put that next to the 6.7% and the picture stops looking like fortune and starts looking like a system. If two of every three fights opened with Australians already lying in wait, then the low rate of enemy initiated contact was not the battalion getting lucky a 130 times.

 It was the predictable output of a way of operating that kept producing the same ingredients. Advance warning, ground of their own choosing, fire they controlled, support they had arranged, exposure they had kept low, and a way out planned before the first round went off. It does not mean every ambush worked or that the enemy obligingly walked into all of them or that there is some glorious body count to wave around here.

 There is not and this video is not interested in one. What the 2/3 figure measures is control over the beginning over and over eight RAR contacts started on terms the Australians had set. That is the mechanism. That is what 88 versus 6.7 is actually describing. The American figure came from a very different operational problem. Start with scale.

 The United States was fighting a continent-sized war across every kind of terrain, moving enormous forces over ground they often did not know intimately, repeatedly deploying into unfamiliar areas and then leaving them. A big formation cannot move quietly. Helicopters announce an air assault to everyone within earshot and the enemy learned to watch likely landing zones precisely because the noise told him where to look.

 Road movement, large sweeps, big operations driving through known enemy base areas, all of it generated sound and sign that a watching enemy could read and much of it was supposed to. American units were frequently sent to find the enemy and force a fight. Sometimes a unit was deliberately operating as bait or sweeping a base area or pushing into ground the enemy held, knowing full well the enemy would get the first shot.

 In that situation, accepting enemy initiation was the price of bringing him to battle at all. Tempo worked against the Americans too. A force under pressure to produce contact, sent to sweep a fresh area, and then move on to the next, did not get the months in one place that turned a track into a known quantity.

 It arrived, it searched, it left, and the enemy who lived there watched it do all three. Local fighters knew the ground in a way a unit passing through could not match in a few weeks, and they could wait for the sweep to pass and the helicopters to leave. None of that made the American soldier worse at his trade.

 It meant he was usually being asked to do the harder thing, find an enemy at home on ground the American was seeing for the first time. That operational context helps explain the figure. It does not prove the American soldier could not patrol. There were American units, Marines, special forces, the long-range reconnaissance patrols, recon platoons, hard-bitten infantry battalions who had been in country long enough to learn the ground, who ran patrols and ambushes every bit as careful as anyone’s.

 The figure is a measure of a different kind of war fought at a different scale with different missions more than it is a verdict on the men. The rest is explained by the kind of war the Americans were fighting. Many units were sent deliberately into ground the enemy controlled where being engaged was the expected outcome rather than a failure.

Large operations moved big formations the enemy could hear and see coming, and the enemy could usually choose whether to stand and fight or slip away and engage another day on his own terms. When fire did come, American artillery and air power frequently arrived after the contact had already opened, answering a fight the enemy had started.

That is much of why enemy initiation stayed so high against American forces. But the central problem still stands, and it is a real one. With all that mobility, all those sensors, all that firepower waiting on call, the communist forces still kept the power to decide when a great many of these fights started.

 And if the enemy decides when it starts, then for those opening seconds the firepower is reactive. The artillery and the air are answering a fight already underway on ground the enemy picked against an enemy who has often already started to pull back. That is the thing the 88% exposes, not American weakness. American firepower arriving a step behind the decision, the comparison has clear limits.

The American figure covered an enormous spread, many units, many regions, many kinds of mission across years at a scale no single battalion can match. The Australian figure covered one battalion on one tour inside one task force working a relatively defined patch of country. Nobody ran a controlled experiment in Vietnam, and the raw percentages do not prove that every Australian was 13 times the soldier every American was.

 13 to one is a number you can type. It is not a finding. What the comparison can honestly carry is this, even granting those caveats, different forces, different missions, different scale, 6.7% across more than 130 contacts is too sharp a result to wave away. It describes two operational systems that handled the opening of a fight very differently.

 And it points hard at a real difference in who usually controlled the first shot. The roots of the Australian method run back before Vietnam, and they explain why this was institutional rather than personal. Australia had come out of the Malayan Emergency and the Confrontation in Borneo with a hard-won set of habits. Patient patrolling, junior leaders trusted to make decisions on the spot, tracking, ambush, navigation, and a general conviction that fieldcraft and avoiding unnecessary contact were not signs of timidity, but the whole job.

The jungle training center at Canungra back in Queensland drilled men in this before they shipped out. Moving in close country, living in it, fighting in it. The doctrine the Australian Army carried into Phuoc Tuy was shaped by a decade of small war experience in Southeast Asian jungle, and it showed in how the battalions moved.

 Malaya did not provide a complete answer for Vietnam. Vietnam was a different and far larger war. The communist forces there had outside backing on a scale the Malayan insurgents never had. Sanctuaries across borders the allies could not cross, larger formations, vastly more firepower, and the mines that would become the signature horror of Phuoc Tuy.

 Malaya did not prepare anyone for a barrier minefield turned against its makers. What Malaya and Canungra did supply was the institutional instinct, the reflex to patrol carefully, to push decisions down to corporals, to value the ambush and the avoided fight. That 8 RAR then applied to a harder problem, Nui Dat, and the geography of the commitment mattered, too, because they gave 8 RAR something many American units simply did not have.

 The Australians held a defined patch. Phuoc Tuy was broadly theirs to work year after year, battalion after battalion. When 8 RAR rotated in, it inherited the marked maps of the units before it, the known tracks, the bunker zones, the village approaches, the base areas, the watercourses, the recurring mine patterns, the routes the enemy used to resupply.

 Operations kept going over the same ground, so the knowledge compounded instead of resetting. A small force concentrated on a fairly consistent area over a long stretch of time accumulates a local fluency that a large force ranging across vast regions cannot. That is a genuine structural advantage and it is worth naming without overstating it.

Plenty of American units had their own areas and their own deep local knowledge. The Marines in their tactical zone built exactly that kind of fluency. And the Australians did not own Phuoc Tuy. The enemy lived in it, moved through it, drew support from villages in it, and was never cleared from it. But the task force model, a smaller force, a steadier area, continuity of records, is part of why one battalion could produce a number that surprises people.

 It was not patrolling a province blind. It was patrolling a province its own army had been reading for years. Then there is the matter of who got to make decisions because the Australian system pushed judgment a long way down. A section commander, a corporal, was trusted and expected to act. He could slow the pace, halt the patrol, change the route, decline a contact that looked wrong, set an ambush, call for support, or break off a fight that was going bad, all inside the broad intent his superiors had given him.

 He was expected to act within the commander’s intent without waiting for detailed direction. Platoon commanders, often very young men, ran their patrols with the same latitude. The scout, the signaler, the gun group, the forward observer who could bring the artillery in, the man on rear security, each had a defined job and was expected to do it without being told twice.

 This is not a claim that American junior leaders lacked initiative. That would be cheap and untrue. It is a claim about emphasis. The Australian way of fighting, small forces, long patrols, decentralized by necessity, leaned unusually hard on the judgment of the man on the ground. And that judgment fed straight into the statistic.

 The freedom to stop, to wait, to walk away from a bad ambush site, to refuse a contact that was not on your terms, that freedom is exactly what drives the rate of enemy initiated fights down. A corporal who can abandon a useless position rather than force a fight to satisfy somebody’s timetable is a corporal who is not getting surprised on a track he should never have been on.

A representative contact might unfold like this, so you can feel what tactical initiative actually meant on the ground. The Australians are in. They went in before the expected movement, settled off the track, set their arcs, and now they wait in the green dark. A scout appears on the path.

 The temptation for an untrained man is to fire. They do not. The scout walks on. He is bait the enemy sent ahead, and the discipline of letting him pass is what separates a real ambush from a nervous one. Then the main body starts to enter the killing ground, and the commander is suddenly holding a fistful of decisions in a few seconds.

 Is this the target the intelligence pointed to or a different group? Are there civilians mixed in? Is there a second enemy element easing along a flank about to come in behind them? Is the body bigger than expected? Can the guns reach this spot if it goes long? Is a reaction force or a helicopter available if it goes wrong? Has the patrol already been spotted, and is this whole thing about to be turned around on them? He decides he springs it.

 The opening is concentrated and immediate. The claymores, if they were set, the machine gun laying down the weight of it, the rifles, grenades into the killing ground, cut off groups in position to catch men trying to break out the ends. The signaler is already passing the contact. The artillery comes in if it is needed and safe. The Australians pursue only if pursuit makes sense, and they break contact and move before the enemy can bring up anything heavier. No invented dialogue, no gore.

Just a sequence in which almost every advantage sits with the side that chose the time and place. Not every 8 RAR contact looked like this. But this is the shape the statistics are describing. And then the enemy adapted because he always did. And the result was achieved against an enemy that studied Australian habits and adjusted.

The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were not target standing still to be counted. They were intelligent, experienced, and patient. And once Australian ambush patterns became readable, they responded. They pushed their scouts further out front. They changed routes and changed timings. They used parallel tracks so the obvious one stayed empty.

 They sent small advance parties to draw fire and reveal positions. They watched landing zones. They leaned on the villagers and the local network for warning that the Australians were about. They laid mines on the approaches and the withdrawal routes. On exactly the ground a patrol would use. They set counter ambushes for the ambushes.

 And sometimes suspecting Australian activity, they simply did not move at all and let a patrol lie out on empty ground through a long cold night for nothing. The communist soldier in Phuoc Tuy fighting his own intelligent war. The records of the period show the same picture across the war as a whole. The enemy reverting to small unit tactics, choosing his fights, controlling his losses by controlling when he engaged.

Initiative was never handed to the Australians and kept. It was contested every week by men who learned. The 6.7% was not a fixed law of nature. And there is no honest way to claim it held steady across every battalion and every year. It held for 8 RAR on that tour against an enemy who was constantly trying to push it back up.

 And the contest also moved over the course of a tour. An ambush position that worked in the battalion’s first months might be quietly avoided by its last because the enemy had marked where contacts kept happening and steered his routes around them. The Australians answered by shifting their own patterns, ambushing the approaches to the old sites rather than the sites themselves, or sitting on a track far longer than any sensible enemy expected.

The 6.7% was the state of that running argument at the end of one battalion’s year, not a verdict that held for everyone before or after it. And the enemy had one answer to the whole Australian method that no amount of patrol skill could fully solve. The mine statistics about who fired first only count fights with a shooter on the other end. A mine has no shooter.

 The enemy could bury a mine or a booby trap and be far away when it went off, inflicting casualties without revealing a position, without staying to be engaged, and without ever giving the Australians the chance to open fire first. Those casualties did not enter the first shot count the way a firefight did.

 The enemy could bleed the battalion without ever entering a conventional contact. In Phu Oc much of that threat was self-inflicted in origin. Back in 1967, before 8 RAR’s time, the task force had laid a long barrier minefield near the coast. The enemy lifted those mines by the thousand and re-laid them against the men who came after.

By early 1970 in the Long Hai Hills, some of the metal maiming Australians was Australian. Control of the The shot meant nothing against it. So, the 6.7% did not mean invulnerability. And anyone who reads it that way is reading it wrong. It meant the Australians rarely lost the opening of a conventional contact. It did not mean they were safe.

The mine saw to that. The Australian method depended on a wider Allied support system. 8 RAR did not fight a quiet, low firepower war out of principle. It fought inside a system soaked in firepower and it depended on it. The ambushes leaned on the gun line. Artillery was pre-planned. Safety lines were known.

 Forward observers moved with the infantry to bring fire down fast and accurately when a contact opened. Mortars backed the close fights. Armored personnel carriers could come forward as a reaction force. Helicopters lifted men in and out and pulled casualties to surgery. And the whole Allied effort sat on top of an American theater, American aviation, American logistics, the medical evacuation chain, the supply that kept everyone in the field.

New Zealand was woven through it, too. New Zealand gunners served in the task force’s artillery, and New Zealand infantry fought inside the Anzac battalions of the period, sharing the same fire support and the same intelligence and the same hard ground. 8 RAR itself was an Australian battalion, not an Anzac one on that tour, and it is worth being accurate about that.

 But the system it fought inside was an Allied system, and the support it drew on was not Australian alone. The difference was never that the Australians refused firepower. The difference was sequence. They tried to find the enemy and shape the contact before they exposed themselves. And then, once it started, the fire could come down hard and fast.

Quiet patrolling up front. Heavy violence at the moment of the Australians choosing. The restraint was in the approach, not in the firefight. What the low number measured is worth setting out concretely, what each part of it actually bought. Local knowledge meant a patrol knew which track was live on a Thursday night, not merely which tracks existed on the map.

 Patience meant letting a scout walk on so the main body would follow him into the killing ground. Junior leadership meant a corporal could walk away from a bad position rather than force a contact to meet the schedule. Preparation meant the artillery was already plotted before anyone needed it.

 Concealment meant the enemy entered the fight not knowing the fight was there. Stacked together over a tour, those habits produced a battalion that was usually the one deciding when to start. So, the word in the title, crushed. The title uses the word crushed in a specific sense. What 8 RAR crushed was not the United States Army.

It was not American firepower or American mobility or the American contribution to the war, which was vast and which carried the rest of the Allied effort on its back. What one battalion crushed in one province for one year was a set of assumptions that faster movement automatically produced initiative, that larger sweeps necessarily found the enemy first, and that mobility and firepower automatically controlled the opening moment.

 In that narrow but real sense, the Australian method took those assumptions apart. It produced repeatedly the thing the firepower could not buy on its own, control of the first shot. The comparison also needs its proper frame. The United States carried the overwhelming weight of the war at a scale Australia never approached. American units had different missions and many were sent deliberately into ground where the enemy would fire first.

American helicopters, guns, surgeons, and supply held up the whole structure the Australians operated inside and American patrol and reconnaissance units developed ambush craft as good as anyone’s. None of that dissolves the result. The tactical result had strategic limits. The method could reduce surprise, improve the terms of a fight, protect the battalions own men and feed the intelligence machine.

 It could not break the communist political network, close the supply routes across the borders, stop North Vietnamese reinforcement or settle South Vietnam’s politics and the public support behind the war in Canberra and Washington. A battalion that owns the first shot still loses a war being lost above its head. Where are you watching from? Did you or someone in your family patrol with Australian, New Zealand, American or Vietnamese forces? I’d particularly like to know whether the official contact statistics match what soldiers remembered on the ground.

Back to the two numbers because that is where this ends. 88% showed how often communist forces retained the first move against American units in the study. 6.7% showed how rarely they did so against 8 RAR during its tour. The fact that roughly two-thirds of the battalion’s contacts began from Australian ambush positions explains the gap.

 The figures did not settle every argument about Australian and American methods. They settled one. Against 8 RAR, the enemy usually did not control the opening of the fight. That was the part of the American way the Australian system defeated. The assumption that mobility and firepower automatically delivered tactical initiative. The United States carried most of the war for 1 year in Phuoc Tuy, 8 RAR controlled the first shot.