Word: cavs
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...Cavalry (Airmobile) were given a single vital mission. Their job was to swoop down out of the skies on the enemy's big main-force units wherever they could be found, engage them in battle and then whirl back to the landing pads of the Air Cav "golf course"at An Khe in the Central Highlands to await the next alarm. Brilliantly executed, the assignment helped to turn the tide against the Communists. The Air Cav carried out 53 major leap-and-strike operations in 52 weeks ranging from the la Drang Valley near Cambodia to the coastal plains...
Lately the Air Cav has had a different and less dramatic mission-but one that may be even more important. In the populous, rice-rich and Viet Cong-ridden province of Binh Dinh on the South China Sea, midway between Saigon and Danang, it is fighting what the Pentagon calls "the intermediate war." That is the layer of the war that lies between the glamorous big-unit battles and the paddy-level process of pacification, and combines a little of both. Its aim: to root the Viet Cong headmen, tax collectors and policemen out of the Binh Dinh villages that...
Denying Food & Taxes. In a typical operation in the intermediate war, an Air Cav company quietly surrounds a village in the predawn hours, throwing a cordon around its sleeping inhabitants. At dawn, they tighten the noose, moving into the village and taking watchful control. They do nothing else unless, as often happens, a Viet Cong among the villagers foolishly tries to escape the net. Next, in flutters a giant Chinook helicopter carrying a contingent of Vietnamese National Police armed with burp guns and long metal rods. The policemen question and search the villagers, poke the ground with their rods...
...Buffalo, is a hard-riding Negro battalion commander of the 1st Air Cavalry Division (Airmobile), the elite "First Team" that has killed more Viet Cong than any other U.S. division in the war. The 600 men who fly Hamlet's 75 Hueys-and carry many of the Air Cav's troopers into combat-respect him for riding along on even the hottest missions and for talking straight to his bosses. Hamlet, who enlisted as a private in 1943, likes to recall that "there...
Duty & Dogs. In the enlisted ranks, few Negro G.I.s are better known than Sergeant Lonnie Galley Samuel, another Silver Star winner, who leads a "Blue Team" of an Air Cav battalion. His job: to draw enemy fire from a chopper, then land and engage in hopes of provoking a major battle ("Sam" has provoked a batch in the past year). Asked why he does not apply for a commission, Sam, at 41, laughs: "I can't do that, man. I'd be the oldest lieutenant in the Army...