Word: airstrips
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...commotion since Pancho Villa tromped over the border in 1916, and it was hardly prepared for the crush. Extra telephone lines and fast-transmission Telex machines were jammed into ranger headquarters at Panther Junction to handle press copy, and a car stood ready to rush outgoing material to the airstrip 120 miles away. For Lady Bird's five-hour raft journey through the wild gorges of the Rio Grande, rangers had floated box lunches, soft drinks and coffee, and portable toilets to the sand bar where the party was to stop for lunch. The river, which frequently falls...
...some 350 Montagnard mercenaries, their families and their 20 green-bereted American Special Forces advisers, A Shau in the best of times was an uneasy home. A barbed-wire and earthen-walled fortress bordered by a small airstrip, A Shau stood deep in Viet Cong-controlled territory not far from the Ho Chi Minh trail on the Laotian border. The camp existed for only one reason: to monitor traffic coming down the trail. Over the months, a kind of truce between the local Viet Cong and the Special Forces had evolved: live and let live by leaving each other alone...
Next morning, the weather again helped the enemy. With a mere 200-ft. ceiling, the choppers and planes had to come in right on the Communist guns-and six were shot down. One skidded safely onto the airstrip in a gear-up landing, and its pilot, Major Stafford ("Jump") Myers, 46, jumped out and scrambled into a trench. Minutes later, his fellow pilot, Major Bernard Fisher, had braved the hail of fire to land his Skyraider on the same short strip. "Nobody's ever seen an old man like me run so fast in his life," Jump explained later...
...Charlie's wife went down to the airstrip One day at quarter past three...
...work is being done with impressive speed. Military insistence on standardization of buildings has helped, and so has the services' willingness to lend the companies idle equipment. Carving a jet field at Cam Ranh out of scrub and sand dunes in 66 days, the companies built the airstrip with a material that had been used only experimentally in the U.S. before it came to Viet Nam: a thin, interlocking and sandwiched aluminum plate called AM2. The airstrip came out as smooth and as strong as a cement field-which would have taken eight months to construct...