Word: 173rd
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...Taboo. In one of the biggest battles yet mounted by U.S. forces, paratroopers and helicopter-borne troops of the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade plunged into eight hours of furious hand-to-hand combat with screaming, cymbal-clashing Viet Cong guerrillas 30 miles northeast of Saigon. The toll of Red dead may have reached 600. Three days later, in jungles controlled by the Communists for 20 years, a battalion of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division repelled scores of attacking Viet Cong, killed at least 150 before the assault was broken. At the coastal town of Chu Lai, U.S. Marines, backed...
...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...
...sink to its door handles. On the perimeters, the marines and infantrymen live like soldiers on perimeters everywhere-primitively, with pup tents, ponchos and C rations. The airmen at Danang boast big airy tents with screened windows and solid floors, a new PX and mess hall. Most of the 173rd Airborne and Big Red One troops at Bien Hoa now have hot meals and floors under their tents...
...Viet Cong threat until eventually it required 24,000 men. But it was not until last March, when the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade of 3,500 men swarmed ashore at Danang, that the first U.S. combat troops entered the fray. Like the 7,500 men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the 101st Airborne's Danang 1st Brigade that soon followed, the marines' first assignment was defensive: creating a protective enclosure around bustling Danang airbase and harbor. The 173rd was thrown around Bien Hoa airbase, together with the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division...
...Some 30 miles northwest of Saigon, the 173rd Airborne, together with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, struck back into the "Iron Triangle" combed by allied forces only three weeks ago. The first operation encountered few V.C., but the guerrillas love to slip back into an area recently "cleared," and so this time the allies were double-checking with lethal thoroughness. Twice B-52s from Guam pounded the Triangle's rain forest and rubber trees. When the Airborne moved in, they carried tear gas-to protect the innocent as well as to flush...