Word: battalion
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Pleasant Living. Far and away the most important operation was White Wing, led by 1st Air Cav Colonel Hal G. Moore, 43, a lean, laconic Kentuckian who earned a battlefield promotion at bloody la Drang last November. In that fight, he held together a single infantry battalion surrounded by three battalions of North Vietnamese regulars. This time he was the aggressor, leading the largest allied force of the war: five infantry battalions, four artillery battalions, plus a team of combat engineers and a troop of aerial reconnaissance men, all riding the helicopters of the most mobile force warfare has ever...
...army's "Big Red One" division punched in atop armored personnel carriers escorted by M48 tanks, while the 173rd Airborne and the Roy al Australian Battalion swept in aboard 200 helicopters. Except for snipers in spider holes and an occasional machine-gun nest, there was nobody home. But home was something else again-an astonishing network of tunnels equipped with all the conveniences, from freshwater wells to a hospital, a post office and a briefing room complete with blackboard and chairs...
Meanwhile nearly every other major U.S. field combat unit in Viet Nam was out hunting in battalion-or larger-sized operations-and so, too, showing the flag of allied support, were the South Vietnamese, the Koreans, Australians and New Zealanders. The other G.I.s had little luck compared with the 173rd's: whether out of tactic or sheer prudence, the Viet Cong lay low. That, in a measure, deprived the U.S. of the firm point Johnson wanted to make: that to underestimate his resolve could be disastrous. So the U.S. made it in other ways. The bombers usually busy over...
...Everything rusts or mildews," complained Navy Lieut. Commander Richard Escajeda, 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...
...Chief local plotter: Mamadou (Petit) Touré, a distant cousin of the President who was fired last year from the directorship of a national textile firm for embezzlement. Last week Little Touré was rumored to be under sentence of death, along with two former government ministers, an army battalion commander and a slew of petty traders - all members, apparently, of an outfit known as PUNG (Parti de I' Unité Nationale de Guinée), which Big Touré feels must be expunged...