Word: battalion
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Hunting the Hunters. It wasn't that easy for Specialist Fifth Class Daniel Torres, 25, of Corpus Christi, Texas. A medic with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment of the Air Cav, Torres was standing by when a radioed cry for help came in from another company that had just been ambushed and decimated. Torres volunteered to go out with a rescue patrol, grabbed seven litters from MEDEVAC helicopters, and moved out. About 11 p.m. they found the wounded-some 45 men huddled around a giant anthill. On litters and on foot, 18 wounded got back. Torres searched...
Struggling to set up a perimeter near the base of a hill, the 2nd Platoon of B Company found itself under such severe shelling from mortars that it was soon forced up a fingerlike slope-apart from the rest of the battalion and in the very midst of the enemy. Finally taking refuge on a narrow ledge, the isolated platoon fired at the khaki-clad North Vietnamese attackers from as close as five to ten feet. Sergeant Clyde Savage stood up to blast down three of them, found to his horror that his automatic rifle was empty. "I didn...
...Zone X Ray, in the Chu Pong foothills. Intelligence had long suspected the Chu Pong massif of harboring a large Communist base fed from the Cambodian side of the border. X Ray seemed a likely spot to find the enemy, and so it was. No sooner had the 1st Battalion of the Air Cav's 7th Regiment rushed from its choppers in the landing zone than the shooting began...
Glowing Red. The main battalion force soon had an even larger tragedy on its hands. At dawn, two platoons of C Company manning X Ray's southeast corner fanned out on patrol. The Communists cunningly sniped and retreated ahead of them, then sprang an ambush from the flanks and rear. Simultaneously a direct Red onslaught smashed head-on at the main ¶Company positions back at the landing zone, diverting both attention and possible aid to the two trapped platoons. Both were virtually annihilated. When relief forces arrived, they found several G.I.s who had been taken prisoner, later shot...
...force scattered and took cover, a Communist battalion sliced through its middle, cutting the Americans into two isolated halves. "After that," said an officer later, "it was man-to-man, hand-to-hand fighting between two very well-disciplined and very determined outfits." Though artillery and air support were soon on the way, and reinforcements were rushed from Pleiku (where many were abruptly called out of a memorial service for their dead at Chu Pong), la Drang quickly succeeded Chu Pong as the costliest U.S. battle of the war in human lives...