Word: cavs
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...Cav tactic of leap and smash was perfected in 53 major operations-more than one a week-that ranged from the la Drang Valley ("the Valley of Death," as the division remembers it) to the Bong Son Plains, hard by the South China Sea. Its 430 choppers, flying from a carefully cropped launch pad outside An Khe, have carried men and whole batteries of snub-nosed 105s and 155s into places no one would have imagined. The Air Cav's noisy "gunships" have developed to a fine art the use of their rocket artillery in close support...
...controlled by Communist ambushes, is now open all the way from Qui Nhon. In General Norton's tidy mess on "the Hill," a high-rise hummock that houses division headquarters, officers show up at dinner in gleaming boots and bright, gold-and-black scarves-the colors of the Cav...
...tune in to Big Valley Radio, a twelve-hour FM station built by the troopers from scrounged equipment and featuring mainly rock 'n' roll tapes contributed by the men themselves. In the heat of An Khe's sunny clime, ice is still a luxury. When the Cav arrived, a local entrepreneur hauled in ice from Pleiku every day, most of it melting before he got there but the remainder providing a cool profit. Then one day he failed to show up, and troopers found his creaky, decrepit truck leaking ice water on Highway 19. The truck...
Also being built is a new fuel supply system that will include a tank farm inside the base perimeter and individual feeder pipes to each of the Air Cav's 430 helicopter stands. The Cav burns about 85,000 gallons of fuel each day. Heart of the camp is the Golf Course, where the first troopers hacked out an airfield with a machete in one hand and rifle in the other. Today the Golf Course boasts a 3,300-ft. runway built of aluminum planking that can handle C-130 "Herky Bird" transports. Army engineers are busy paving everything...
...service ties the camp to downtown An Khe and the airfield. By comparison with Stateside bases, the Air Cav's lO-sq.-mi. complex is small. "But then," notes one officer wryly, "you don't need a training area here...