There to the Bitter End: Ted Serong in Vietnam

More than 35 years ago, the CIA and the Pentagon invited Ted Serong, an Australian soldier, to advise them on the conduct of the war in Vietnam. This is Serong’s previously untold story of that war. When the Australian government made the decision to send a group of Australian jungle warfare experts to Vietnam as a contribution to the American alliance, it was Serong who led this team and personally chose its members. He had two additional assignments, the first as advisor to the U.S. military commander in Vietnam, and the second, secret until now, as an advisor to the CIA on counterinsurgency. Concerned from the outset that the U.S. had no strategy for carrying on the war, Serong warned John F. Kennedy’s special group of the dangers ahead. Serong stayed on to advise the last president of South Vietnam as the North Vietnamese army converged on Saigon, to escape only in the final helicopter evacuation from the U.S. embassy roof.