The Day Six Australian SAS Men Refused to Fire

AM, October 16, 1999.

A dry riverbed near Aidabasalala, East Timor.

A British Special Boat Service sergeant lies hidden in the brush, second-in-command of a six-man Australian SAS patrol.

Outside the tall grass, militia close in.

Intelligence would later estimate the pursuing force at 60 armed men.

For 90 minutes, the six would be attacked again and again.

They would fire 267 rounds between them.

One man would not fire a single shot.

None of the six would be injured.

This is how it happened.

Let’s start with the man who didn’t belong.

The Special Boat Service is Britain’s naval special forces unit, sister regiment to the SAS, based on England’s south coast at Poole.

In 1999, one of its sergeants was on a two-year exchange with the Australian SAS in Perth.

That placed him in the hills of East Timor as second-in-command of an Australian patrol.

Most accounts of this patrol, citing Fennell’s book and Horner’s regimental history, place him there.

They don’t give his name.

No other public record we found does either.

So he remains, as the records describe him, the British sergeant.

His patrol would enter a firefight at 7 AM on the 16th, but the moment things began to go wrong was three days earlier, and it had nothing to do with anything the six did.

The man in charge was Sergeant Steven Oddy.

He hadn’t grown up aspiring to be a soldier.

His father was a lobster fisherman working out of Geraldton on Australia’s west coast, and Steve thought he’d follow him onto the boats.

He didn’t find himself at sea.

Almost spontaneously, he tried the army.

By 1999, he’d spent 14 years in uniform.

He’d already been to Timor once that year during Operation Spitfire, the evacuation of Australian and UN staff after the independence vote turned violent.

His patrol consisted of six men, each with a role.

Oddy was in command.

He carried a short M4 with an M203 grenade launcher under the barrel, a single-shot tube firing a 40mm grenade a few hundred meters.

The British sergeant was second-in-command, the man who takes over if the leader falls.

Two scouts led the way.

Behind them was a young corporal named Keith Fennell, who’d joined the regiment in 1995 at twenty-one.

The patrol medic carried the heaviest firepower in the group, a Para Minimi.

It’s a version of the light machine gun fed by ammunition belt, with a short barrel and folding stock.

It uses the same 5.56 caliber as the rifles but feeds from a belt, allowing it to keep firing longer after a rifle has to reload.

And the signaller carried the radio, the only thing capable of calling in helicopters.

The Brit wasn’t the only foreigner in the country.

When international forces entered East Timor on September 20, their special forces were a joint body called the Response Force.

It consisted of a squadron from Australian SAS, a detachment from New Zealand SAS, and a detachment from British SBS, totaling about 20 men.

Australia’s contribution was Operation Warden.

The Response Force was under Lieutenant Colonel Tim McOwan, commander of Australian special forces.

The exchange sergeant wasn’t part of that detachment.

He wasn’t a visitor attached to a military campaign.

He was seconded to work inside the Australian regiment itself.

And in Timor, he wasn’t watching the Australians from outside.

He was second-in-command of their patrol, with a different accent and a different military background.

That position matters for this reason.

He had trained in one special forces tradition and was now fighting within another.

Whatever the Australians did by habit, he was in a position to witness it.

Now, the country he was fighting in, and the reason any of them were there, goes back to one day.

On August 30, 1999, East Timor voted on its future.

Nearly 99% of registered voters turned out, and 78.5% rejected Indonesia’s offer of autonomy.

It was a vote for independence.

The militia responded with fire.

Towns were burned, and nearly a quarter of a million people fled or were forced across the border into West Timor, many into camps controlled by the militia.

By mid-October, the fighting had moved west.

On October 1, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment arrived by air to secure Balibo and Batugade, right on the border.

In armored personnel carriers, they advanced to Maliana and cleared the rest of Bobonaro district.

On the 6th, Gurkhas and the Response Force entered Suai on the south coast.

Outside town, a group of Australian special forces was ambushed.

Two Australians were wounded.

In the counterattack, two militia were killed, and two more who fled were later found dead from their wounds.

On the 13th, a major amphibious landing at Suai brought the headquarters of the 3rd Brigade, renamed West Force, with one mission: secure the border.

The militia were fleeing toward that same border.

On the other side lies Atambua in West Timor, where they could rest, rearm, and return.

Those still inside East Timor moved through old trails and dry riverbeds, the infiltration routes they’d used for years.

Those routes had to be watched.

That was the job of the SAS.

Oddy’s mission was simple in the telling: go to the border area near Aidabasalala and find out if the militia were there, how many, and where they were moving.

If the reports were true, a full SAS squadron would follow.

The reports didn’t agree.

One published in the Sydney Morning Herald the following March said the patrol went in to confirm reports that up to 20 armed men were operating from the area.

The patrol’s published report records intelligence of more than 100 armed militia.

Either way, six men were being sent to face a much larger force, not to fight it.

A reconnaissance patrol isn’t designed to win a firefight.

It’s designed to avoid one entirely.

Its weapons exist to buy the seconds needed to escape.

If this patrol ended up firing, the mission had already gone wrong.

On October 13, an Australian Army Black Hawk inserted the patrol about 8 km from the village.

The helicopters came from the 5th Aviation Regiment based in Townsville.

They had moved twelve S-70 Black Hawks to Dili in the first days of the operation to transport troops and provide limited fire support. 8 km is a deliberate distance.

Close enough to walk, far enough to ensure that anyone who heard the helicopter couldn’t confirm its destination.

A Black Hawk is not quiet.

In the hills near the border, the noise of its rotors carries for miles, and every man in the valley knows what it means.

So the aircraft lands well away from the target, then lifts off, and the patrol continues on foot.

This time, the trick didn’t work.

The six didn’t know it then.

They learned it later from intelligence reports.

Indonesian special forces (Kopassus), allegedly coordinating militia activity, heard the Black Hawk landing.

They reached the correct conclusion.

A reconnaissance patrol had just been inserted.

So, as the six men moved toward the militia, the militia was organizing to hunt them.

The numbers in those reports carry the label.

At least 60 armed militia and 40 others unarmed combing the forest for them.

They were organized into three groups of 20.

Each group was divided into teams of six.

Teams of six hunting a patrol of six.

So imagine the scene.

The patrol thinks it’s the hunter.

They are being hunted by a force at least ten times their number, operating in teams matching their exact size on ground the militia know and the team does not.

The six moved southwest for three days.

Moving at night.

Hiding by day.

Pushing through dry creek beds; because in October, before the wet season, the border streams are just strips of stone and sand between steep banks.

Moving through fog-wrapped jungle.

Every step calculated.

Communicating in sign language.

When you stop, you stop in a position that gives you visibility without being seen, and you stay there through the heat of the day without speaking, barely moving.

Oddy later described the area the way the patrol understood it.

There were many militia pockets in the west near the border, and rumors of large groups moving through the area.

No one knew for certain.

That was why they were there.

One evening on a track, they nearly met the answer face to face.

A militia patrol was coming the other way on the same trail.

The Australians saw them first.

They were wearing night vision goggles.

The militia, according to accounts, were not.

That advantage decided their night.

Night vision takes the faint light from stars and sky, amplifies it thousands of times, and paints the world in green.

To the wearer, the trail at night is like a lit corridor.

To someone without it, it’s pitch black.

The six stepped off the trail into the brush, stood still, and let the militia pass beside them.

Oddy later described it: “As they passed by us, they were only centimeters from our chests.

It was truly terrifying to be that close to the enemy and not know if we were about to be discovered.” Centimeters, not meters.

From inside the patrol, the British sergeant saw it.

Six men carrying heavy packs, standing in the brush close enough to touch the enemy, and none of them moved.

No weapon was raised.

No one fired first for safety.

The militia moved on.

The patrol moved on.

No record suggests the militia ever knew.

Many soldiers would have fired.

It’s the easier choice in that moment, when a man is close enough to smell.

But firing a shot there would have ended the mission and started a chase in the dark, deep in militia country, with a helicopter far away.

Not firing was the harder skill.

It was also the skill that kept the patrol covert for another day.

A certain kind of stillness is selected for before it is trained.

Fennell later described the Australian SAS selection course that brought him into the regiment.

Three weeks, 20 days.

He started at about 80 kg and finished at 67.

The first week or so, he says, is about exhausting the soldier completely.

The next phase tests his ability to work alone, then his ability to work in a team.

And there are four and a half days of hard physical work without food.

The men who pass this phase are the ones who can think clearly while exhausted, starving, and afraid.

Standing motionless with the enemy close enough to touch is that test in real life.

The patrol moved further.

The published account records they spent a full day in a village without being spotted.

Then they reached the place they’d come for.

On the morning of the 16th, they crossed a dry bed of a stream called Moto Mokulai.

The patrol believed this ground was part of a major militia infiltration route from West Timor.

Here they would set up their observation post to watch and count.

The stream bed was about 10 meters wide.

Its banks rose nearly 3 meters, and the ground above was thick with tall grass and lantana.

Lantana is an invasive shrub that grows into dense, thorny tangles head-high.

You can’t see through it.

You can’t move through it quietly.

It was a good place to hide an observation post.

It was also a very bad place if they were found.

Oddy was preparing to send a situation report to headquarters.

The scouts were settling into their positions.

Fennell, the rear scout, looked over his shoulder.

Then he saw them. AM.

The British sergeant on the bank, six men moving in the stream bed.

They wore camouflage and military gear, moving cautiously.

Not a mob, but a patrol.

Fennell looked at how they stood and estimated at least three had military training.

Here the sources diverge for the first time.

Horner’s history says Fennell first saw them at 20 meters, let the lead man close to 10 meters, and fired half a magazine from his M4.

On national television, after his book came out, Fennell told the story a little differently.

He said he looked over his shoulder, saw six armed men at 20 meters, and fired from the hip before their eyes met directly, hitting the lead man in the shoulder.

Either way, the distance was about a cricket pitch or half of one, and the first shot came from the Australians.

The incident report published in the Sydney Morning Herald says Oddy ordered his men to open fire when the militia clearly threatened his position.

The militia had stumbled onto them by accident.

Yet the first shot belonged to the patrol.

The situation at the stream erupted suddenly.

The militia scattered, firing as they withdrew.

Fennell kept firing.

The lead militia scout fell.

Behind Fennell, the rest of the patrol, about 15 meters back and still carrying their packs, joined the fight.

Oddy moved forward to Fennell and fired 40mm grenades from his M203 at the militia as they withdrew.

Then, movement at 50 meters.

Fennell, Oddy, and the signaller, who had moved forward, all fired their rifles and additional grenades.

What the patrol did next decided their fate.

The easy choice was to run.

The stream bed was open ground, and the militia knew where the shots came from.

Instead, Oddy deployed the patrol.

He sent the two forward men, Fennell and the medic with the machine gun, across the stream bed to the opposite bank.

The idea was to widen the patrol’s field of view.

The rest stayed on the near bank to cover them.

It turned one position into two, watching the stream from both sides.

The scouts crossed the stream.

On the way, they passed the militia scout Fennell had shot.

He was dead.

They climbed the opposite bank and began moving along it.

Within minutes, the militia returned.

The medic saw two men moving in the stream bed 80 meters away from the same direction as the first group.

He opened fire and killed one.

Fennell threw grenades, and then fire started coming from everywhere.

The noise did what noise always does in the jungle.

It drew more militia.

Here the number 60 from the intelligence report turned into real men in the brush.

Oddy pulled the scouts back.

He gave them covering fire.

Fennell crossed the stream first.

The medic followed, firing as he crossed.

The patrol took up a defensive circle.

Six men facing outward, each covering a sector.

The signaller tried to reach headquarters to report the contact and request the quick reaction force waiting in Dili.

He had trouble making the call.

The militia were moving in the thick brush around them.

The patrol could hear them before they saw them.

Oddy later described the sound.

Lots of movement everywhere, and it seemed completely disorganized.

And their fire wasn’t hitting its targets.

It was passing well over the patrol’s heads.

That tells you something about the enemy.

A trained soldier firing at men he can’t see keeps his fire low.

A bullet that goes high hits nothing.

The militia were firing randomly and high.

Not all of them.

This is the part of the fight that belongs to the British sergeant.

Two militia appeared out of the brush 7 meters away.

The width of a small room.

The SBS sergeant opened fire on them.

Both were probably hit.

Then the militia began to surround the patrol.

Accounts describe seven to nine men sweeping the vegetation and firing wildly while others behind them directed the attack.

Fennell, on television years later, put it the same way.

They were eventually pinned down.

There were about nine men coming from the other side.

The medic fired into the moving vegetation.

So did Oddy.

Bullets struck the ground a foot from the British sergeant’s position.

He threw two hand grenades.

Look at it now from where he lay.

The only man in the patrol trained somewhere else.

Six men in a circle, each covering an arc.

The medic firing into the brush wherever it moved.

And Oddy doing the same.

And somewhere in that circle, one man who didn’t fire a shot because nothing entered his arc.

The record doesn’t say what the sergeant was thinking about that.

It records what was in front of him.

Men firing at what moved in their arc, then stopping.

The numbers that prove it come later.

Oddy decided it was time to leave.

To break contact, the patrol had to become lighter and faster than the men hunting them.

Oddy gave the order to drop the heavy packs.

For a patrol that had walked for three days with what they carried, this is not a simple decision.

The packs held food, water, extra ammunition, and equipment for more days in the field.

Leaving them meant the patrol was now committed to getting out today.

But not everything could be left.

Fennell took up a covering position in the stream.

The second scout and the signaller searched the packs and pulled out the essentials.

While they did, they carried the radios.

Nothing would be left in the brush that could tell the militia or whoever stood behind them how the patrol worked.

Then they crossed the stream.

The scouts first, then the rest, man by man.

Each man covered by the others as he crossed that open strip of stone 10 meters wide.

From the vegetation on the opposite bank, sporadic fire came.

No one was hit.

They moved 300 meters through the brush.

Oddy stopped them and set up a defensive perimeter again, so the signaller could reach Dili once more.

This time he got through.

In Dili, the quick reaction force was on full standby for exactly this call.

Twelve men launched in two Black Hawks toward the contact site.

For 20 minutes, the patrol waited in the brush, listening.

No one could be sure if the militia were approaching, withdrawing, or reorganizing.

Then they heard the rotors.

The helicopters arrived and circled over the battlefield.

From the air, the crews could see what the patrol could only hear.

The militia attack was collapsing.

Men were retreating across open ground.

The door gunners had them in their sights.

John Farrell, in his history of the campaign, describes them as tempting and forbidden targets at the same time.

The gunners didn’t fire.

The same restraint appeared in the air.

With the enemy in sight, the gunners held their fire.

The patrol threw a smoke grenade to mark its position.

The Black Hawks moved in fast.

One landed.

Six men from the quick reaction force jumped out and spread into a covering arc.

The patrol ran to the aircraft and climbed aboard.

The QRF men secured the site until the patrol’s helicopter lifted off, then boarded the second.

And here’s the part almost no one remembers.

The helicopters didn’t return to base.

They circled and came back.

From the air, it had been confirmed that the contact site was clear of militia.

The aircraft carrying the patrol landed near it.

Three members of the patrol were dropped in a small clearing nearby.

They recovered the packs they’d left and took weapons from the dead militia.

The second Black Hawk hovered over them, its guns providing cover.

Then they left.

From the first shot to the extraction, the fight lasted about an hour and a half.

Sources differ on the number of attacks.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs account says the militia tried to probe the position three more times after the initial contact.

The Herald account refers to four more attacks.

Either way, six men were attacked repeatedly in rough terrain by a force ten times their number, with help arriving 20 minutes after the call.

None of them was harmed.

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How do six men walk out of that without a scratch?

Not by outshooting 60 men, but by barely firing a shot at all.

Here are the numbers.

According to Horner’s regimental history, the patrol’s machine gun, the medic’s Minimi, fired about 200 rounds in the entire action.

The largest ammunition box for that weapon holds a belt of 200 rounds.

So, over 90 minutes of being attacked from all sides, the heaviest weapon in the patrol fired roughly one belt.

The carbines fired 67 rounds, and not 67 each. 67 rounds between them all for the whole fight.

A standard magazine holds 30 rounds.

All the rifles in the patrol together fired less than two and a half magazines.

And one member of the patrol didn’t fire at all.

Horner’s explanation is simple.

No militia element appeared in his arc of responsibility.

His job was to watch his sector of the circle, and no one passed through it.

So he didn’t fire.

He didn’t join in, didn’t feel part of the battle, didn’t make noise.
267 rounds, six men, 90 minutes.

Against a group of 60 armed men, those are the numbers in Horner’s history.

To understand why, consider the shape of a typical firefight when a small unit is pinned down.

The instinct is to fill the air with bullets, to keep enemy heads down with volume of fire.

It feels like control.

And that’s how patrols run out of ammunition.

A machine gun firing in long bursts consumes a belt in less than a minute.

The Minimi’s rate of fire is roughly 700 to 1,000 rounds per minute.

Under sustained pressure, a 200-round belt is gone in about 15 seconds.

This patrol fired that much in 90 minutes.

A soldier firing on automatic empties a magazine in about 3 seconds.

A patrol that fights that way for 90 minutes runs out of ammunition before the enemy does.

The Australians fought differently.

Each man fired at a target or movement he had reason to believe was a target in his own arc.

Then he stopped.

Horner’s term for it was “fire discipline” and he called it exceptional.

The militia’s own fire tells us the rest.

The patrol heard rounds passing high over their heads all morning.

Men firing a lot and hitting nothing.

Six men firing little, and by Horner’s count, killing at least four.

Put those things side by side and you get the full picture of the battle.

And now the candid part where sources differ.

First, the 60 men.

The title says 60 militia and that number is real.

It comes from later intelligence recorded in Fennell’s book and from Department of Veterans’ Affairs accounts, which say the patrol was surrounded by about 60 armed men.

But the 60 men weren’t all at the stream at once.

The pursuit force consisted of 60 armed men followed by 40 unarmed.

The men who actually attacked the patrol came in small groups, six at first, then two, then seven to nine at a time with more behind them.

Chris Coulthard-Clark’s encyclopedia entry describes the patrol as being subjected to repeated attacks by more than 20 militia members.

The patrol was heavily outnumbered, but it didn’t face 60 rifles in open ground.

Second, the casualties.

There’s no agreement on the numbers.

The Sydney Morning Herald, in its March 2000 report, said three militia were killed and three wounded.

Horner says at least four were killed, and four more are believed wounded.

Local villages reported five killed and three wounded, which couldn’t be confirmed.

Farrell records the bodies of three militia being found by response teams that returned to the area later.

The honest number is somewhere between three and five killed.

Anyone who gives you a precise number without a range is guessing.

Third, the British sergeant himself.

We’ve been putting ourselves in his place for half an hour.

His place in the patrol is derived from the most widely circulated account of this battle, which cites Fennell’s memoir and Horner’s history.

The Herald’s 2000 account and the Veterans’ Affairs page say it was a patrol of only six men.

They don’t mention any Brit, and he never told this story publicly as far as any records we found show.

We don’t know his name.

We don’t know what he was thinking.

Everything here is what the records put in front of his eyes.

The close pass on the trail, the militia at 7 meters, the bullets in the dirt a foot from his position, the grenades, and the long wait for the helicopters.

What he saw is recorded.

What he made of it, he kept to himself.

Fourth, the start of the battle.

Fennell’s television account and the version in the history books don’t match on the distance or the number of rounds he fired first.

But they agree on the important thing.

The Australians fired first from close range at armed men advancing toward them.

The hours after the battle left one question hanging.

Six hours after the contact, a company from the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment swept the area.

They found no trace of the militia.

No record says where the men who spent the morning hunting six Australians went.

Where were they heading?

Farrell records intelligence from Falintil, East Timorese independence fighters who knew the ground better than anyone.

Their sources said the militia in that area were part of a group trying to cross the border into Atambua in West Timor after being trapped.

If true, the patrol had set up its observation post across the escape route of a group with every reason to fight its way across.

And the question of who organized them remained unanswered.

The intelligence that Kopassus heard the helicopter during the insertion wasn’t confirmed in any record we found.

Farrell notes that intelligence reports speculated about Indonesian military involvement in trying to cut off and destroy the patrol.

While newspapers wondered who these militia were and who trained and armed them.

That controversy continued for years, long after the mission ended.

When East Timor’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its final report, it blamed the Indonesian military for the 1999 violence and described the militia as groups created, armed, and trained by the military.

What that meant for a stream bed on an October morning, no record says.

Meanwhile, the international force completed its mission.

Six days after Aidabasalala, on October 22, SAS troops flew into the Oecusse enclave by Black Hawk with landing craft in support. 40 militia were captured there.

The rest are believed to have fled across the border.

On February 28, 2000, the international force handed East Timor over to the United Nations Transitional Administration.

Aidabasalala was described as the deadliest battle so far in Australia’s deployment to East Timor.

The Sydney Morning Herald used those words on the morning of March 25, 2000.

That morning was the medal presentation.

The Queen was in Canberra.

Sergeant Steven Oddy received the Medal for Gallantry.

Here’s what that medal is.

Australian bravery decorations were created by letters patent in January 1991.

Above them all sits the Victoria Cross for Australia.

Below it come three: the Star of Courage, the Medal for Gallantry, and the Commendation for Gallantry.

The Medal for Gallantry is awarded for acts of gallantry in action under hazardous circumstances.

The historical records of the SAS Regiment list one Medal for Gallantry for the regiment in East Timor.

Just one.

This was it.

The official honors list records it was awarded for gallantry on October 16, 1999, while leading a patrol near Aidabasalala in East Timor during Operation Warden.

His full citation was classified because he was serving in the Perth-based special forces regiment.

An abbreviated version was released.

It said his composure under fire was the reason the mission was successfully executed.

And it closed with the usual line: “His courage and gallantry in action reflect great credit upon himself and the Australian Army.” At the same ceremony, Major General Peter Cosgrove, who commanded the international force, was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Oddy’s own view of his medal never changed.

He said it plainly: “I don’t think what I did was any more courageous than anyone else’s.

If you get a medal, you know you didn’t earn it for your individual actions.

Without the other five men in the patrol, I wouldn’t have received any recognition at all.” Five other men, one of them British.

A television segment about his book estimated Keith Fennell’s years in special forces at 11.

In the years after Timor, his work took him to Afghanistan and Iraq.

When asked on television whether the stream at Aidabasalala was the first time he ended a human life, he answered yes.

He described the feeling as neutral at first, and only later did he think about it.

He compared it to two football teams where one must lose, and said he held no hatred toward any of it.

He later admitted he was addicted to adrenaline.

He left the regiment, in his words, to be a father to his children and a husband after a life that cost his marriage several separations.

He wrote the book.

He became a schoolteacher.

Steven Oddy never claimed that day for himself.

And what the British sergeant took with him from that stream, the records don’t say.

Back to 7 AM that morning and the British sergeant on the bank.

He had been sent to the other side of the world to learn how another regiment fights.

What the records put in front of him is this: six men hunted by 60, three nights of moving without sound, one evening of standing still with the enemy centimeters from their chests, then 90 minutes of attack from every side, and the response to all of it wasn’t more fire.

It was the opposite. 267 rounds.

One man who never pulled the trigger because no one entered his arc of fire.

No Australian and no Brit was hit.

That’s what he saw.

Men who could have filled the forest with noise and chose not to.

If someone in your family served in East Timor, with the SAS, the 2nd Royal Australian Regiment, the Gurkhas, the New Zealanders, or the British in any unit, tell me about them in the comments.

Those are the stories that shouldn’t stay secret.

Six men entered that stream.

All six came out.

The British sergeant returned to Poole the following year.

He never spoke publicly about Aidabasalala.

No interview, no memoir, no lecture at the regiment.

Whatever he learned on that bank, he carried it quietly back across the world.

Perhaps that was the lesson itself.

The Australians hadn’t taught him how to shoot faster or move harder.

They’d shown him how to wait.

How to hold a circle, watch an arc, and trust the man beside you to watch his.

Years later, when East Timor’s veterans gather and the old patrols are recounted, one detail still stops the room. 267 rounds.

Six men.

Not one of them hit.

Not luck.

Discipline.

Six men entered that stream.

All six came out.

And one of them never fired a shot.

If you’ve ever served in a unit where silence was the hardest skill — or if someone in your family did — what did they bring home that the records never captured?

Tell us in the comments.