Word: battalion
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...Cambodia meet, there is a valuable piece of real estate: a natural valley that funnels through the worst border mountains out into the gentler highland countryside rolling down to the sea. Astride the valley sits Dak To, until three weeks ago a dusty airstrip guarded by one U.S. battalion and a 500-man Vietnamese paramilitary unit in a Special Forces camp...
Bleeding White Sap. Meanwhile, the U.S. 1st Division's reaction force was moving in reinforcements. The first to arrive were two helilifted batteries of 105-mm. howitzers and two rifle companies, the vanguard of two battalions. A third battalion later followed and began sweeping the rubber groves east of Loc Ninh. It proved an eerie enterprise. Moving down the corridors between the evenly spaced, parallel rows of trees, the troops were frequently brought up short by jungle birds whose screeches mimicked the whine of bullets. The almost purple earth underfoot teemed with a fierce breed of red ant whose...
...with a football body block and a right to the jaw. Later that same night, the Viet Cong massed among the trees for another attack across the runway but were driven off by U.S. jets. Still another large force of Viet Cong tried to overrun a U.S. battalion positioned west of Loc Ninh; they were forced back in bloody combat, suffering 200 dead...
...America Response. Minutes after the attack started, nearly every American officer was either wounded or dead. Among the dead was the battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Terry de la Mesa Allen Jr., 38, whose father had commanded the Big Red One in its World War II drive from Tunisia to Sicily. At a temporary base camp one mile away, the battalion operations officer heard the firefight and hesitated not a moment. With the agility that made him an All-America end at West Point in 1954, Major Donald W. Holleder, 33, raced toward the furious action and rallied a group...
...carrying its wounded and most probably many of its dead. It left behind 103 V.C. corpses. U.S. losses were the heaviest taken in a single engagement since early summer: 55 killed, 66 wounded. But elsewhere the ground action was relatively light. Though the Allies sent a total of 56 battalion-size sweeps searching for enemy throughout South Viet Nam, the only other place where the Communists fought rather than ran was in the northern I Corps area. Near Quang Tri City, 80 miles north of Danang, U.S. Marines fought a series of sharp skirmishes with North Vietnamese regulars...