‘The Odd Angry Shot’ starred (comedian) Grahame Kennedy, not Brian Brown, and, although not a bad film, was pretty unrepresentative of the way the Oz SAS did their business in SVN. (The ‘required’ big battle towards the end, with lots of unit casualties for a bit of pathos, wasn’t what the SAS did. In all their years in country, where they did so many really, really amazing things, they suffered only on KIA, the unfortunate Gunner Fisher, who, wounded, fell from the rope during a helicopter extraction. His body was located only a few years ago.)
If anyone is interested in reading a far more accurate recounting of the Oz SASR in SE Asia, try ‘Sleeping with Your Ears Open: On Patrol with the Australian SAS’, by Gary Mackay – a very good read, mostly first hand, first person accounts. In North Borneo during Confrontation, the SASR suffered one dead on ops who was gored to death by a rogue elephant.
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Re ChrisJ800’s post # 18: Lofty Lance was indeed killed while serving with the RAAF’s 9 Sqn in SVN. Lofty was one of the ex-RAF pilots who were taken on by the RAAF in the mid to late 60s to put a few experienced heads among the boggies on squadrons with the major expansion required by the Vietnam commitment. Some had been long out of the RAF and were already living in Australia, having emigrated there.
Re the original question: did anyone from the RAF serve in Vietnam? (Remember, this is a RUMOUR network, and this next bit as about as much a 'way out there' rumour as rumours get.) In the late sixties, as the Brits began to withdraw everything that was East of Suez to West of Suez (and therefore, quite a few people saw the [what was] very good life they’d enjoyed for a very long time coming to an end), bar talk at Tengah had it that ‘someone’ was looking for experienced fast jet drivers to fly high performance, delta winged aircraft in Asia for 5,000 USD a month.
Now $5,000 a month was very big money back then, and (other than the USAF – who definitely weren’t paying foreigners $5000 a month to fly any of their aeroplanes), there was only one outfit flying ‘high performance, delta wing aircraft’ in Asia at the time.
That same bar talk said that a small number of RAF fast jet types had taken up the offer and made a lot of money flying those high performance, delta wing jets – but of course, it was bar talk, and no one could ever name a name. So, in answer to the original question, maybe so, (if unlikely), but not in quite the way the questioner might have imagined.