Word: 1st
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sealed Off. The destruction of Ben Sue, a Saigon River village complex that supported the Viet Cong, was typical. It took only a minute and a half for 60 helicopters to descend on the village with a battalion of the U.S. 1st Division. While loudspeakers warned residents to stay in their homes, infantrymen quickly sealed off the town, catching many of its Viet Cong defenders by surprise. The villagers were assembled and the men between 15 and 45 led off for questioning. Within three days, Ben Sue was deserted, its people and their possessions loaded aboard boats and shipped twelve...
...truce ended, the Communists struck in earnest. Their target was a 100-ft.-high hill near Bong Son on the edge of the Central Highlands where a U.S. battery of 155-mm. howitzers and another of 105 mm. had been dug in for a month. Three platoons of the 1st Cavalry were on duty defending the twelve big guns and their crews. Under cover of evening rain, elements of North Viet Nam's 22nd Regiment slithered up the hill, snipping the detonating wires of Claymore mines strung round the camp, and neutralizing trip flares. They ran their field-telephone...
...commanding general of Fort Ord, Calif., was surprised to receive this letter, written last month by 43 members of A Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade. First, recruits do not often write letters to the commanding general. Second, when they do write, they rarely praise drill instructors, their traditional scourge. But the most significant fact about the letter is that it was composed by white men-all but two of them from Texas-in praise of their drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Joshua Ashley, a Negro. No presidential report could better document the dramatic gains in status and esteem that the Negro...
...just such men, the freshly infiltrated 101C North Vietnamese Regiment. Once again, la Drang became "the Valley of Death"-though the battle was on a far smaller scale. Lured into an ambush when they pursued a small group of Communist troops that they had sighted, two platoons of the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile), the division that inflicted last year's la Drang defeat on the Communists, were heavily outnumbered and badly mauled by the "gooks"-as the Air Cav has taken to calling the North Vietnamese to distinguish them from the Viet Cong...
Father Quealy, 37, a Roman Cath olic priest for ten years, volunteered for duty as an Army chaplain and was shipped out last January to South Viet Nam. Assigned to the 1st Division, Quealy - against the advice of senior officers at field headquarters in Dau Tieng - insisted on boarding a helicopter of medics and troop reinforcements flying to the relief of the Big Red One's 1st Battalion, under attack in War Zone C northwest of Saigon (see THE WORLD). Landing at the battle site, Father Quealy hurriedly gave last rites to dying soldiers from a platoon...