Word: 173rd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Abruptly, the ground rules had changed. Some 3,500 combat marines from Okinawa landed to secure Danang Airbase. Advance units of the 173rd Airborne also streamed in. One of the most significant U.S. moves was to assign U.S. planes to bomb and strafe Viet Cong units in South Viet Nam itself...
...navy in 1905, combat engineers turned the natural harbor into a major port. Twenty miles down the coast, the "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st Airborne Brigade began operating as a mobile strike force. In the guerrilla-infested jungles around Saigon prowled the 1st Infantry Division ("Big Red One"), the 173rd Airborne, a 1,200-man battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, a 250-man New Zealand artillery unit...
...head surgeon of the marines' "Charlie Med" hospital at Danang. "The sterilized linen never dries. Bugs crawl into our surgical packs. Mud is everywhere." An earthier-or muddier-protest came from a jungle-hardened trooper in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, bivouacked with the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade. "Ya know, I been here for six weeks, and for five of 'em I've never been dry," he lamented. "If a man ain't wet with sweat, he's drenched with rain. Me clothes are rottin' and me boots are fallin...
...First Mistake. For the U.S., one of the bloodiest battles of the war be gan as a platoon of paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne cautiously threaded their way through an apparently deserted V.C. camp only 30 miles north east of Saigon. It contained freshly dug fortifications, bamboo picnic tables, even a bathing hole. The trooper on "point," leading the way, spotted a pair of black pajamas drying on a tree, went over to pull them down. Precisely at the moment he touched them, four concealed Communist machine guns opened fire...
Only four of the 3rd Squad's twelve men survived unscathed. Soon, from other dug-in positions, the machine guns of two Viet Cong battalions -some 700 men, perhaps - had the 173rd's C Company pinned down in a withering crossfire. "We got in posi tion," growled a U.S. sergeant later, "and when I say we got in position, I mean we got on the ground...