Word: choppered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...boarded a chopper with a Northeast Command colonel for a lightning supply and inspection visit to a forward company command post in a remote foothills barrio in Isabela province. As the scenery below us quickly changed from the lush lowland rice fields to the forbidding forests and gullies of the Sierra Madre highlands, the pilot climbed to 2,000 feet, respectfully out of range of Thompson submachine guns and AK-47s. Suddenly, when he spotted the tiny H-shaped landing pad, he put the chopper into a tight sinking spiral and landed in the barrio. The supplies were unloaded...
...sign of the troops holding the barrio. Only after spotting the floppy jungle hats, ubiquitous badge of counterinsurgency, could one distinguish them from the villagers. They were stripped to the waist, dangling their M-16s with that insouciance which seems universally to characterize men in jungle combat. With the chopper unloaded and the formalities exchanged, we took off again. The whole visit, one small episode in the campaign, had lasted less than three minutes...
...Vietnamese airmen whose job it is to fly out the wounded are remarkably unwilling to come into the stretch of Highway 13 that now serves as a landing strip. To confuse enemy gunners who have the strip zeroed in, chopper pilots can land almost anywhere in a stretch of road two kilometers long. In theory, the landing zone for each mission should be selected so as to allow the wounded to be on hand near by. But that never happens. Instead, the Vietnamese choppers come streaking in low along the highway, and hover two or three feet above the ground...
...helicopter crash, while flying by night from his headquarters at Pleiku to the embattled city of Kontum, he had spent nearly ten of his 47 years in South Viet Nam. Two other Americans-the Army pilot and another Army officer -also died in the crash of the chopper...
...episode occurred early in the Communist offensive. An ARVN force of 20 or 30 troops found itself surrounded by the North Vietnamese near An Loc. As the South Vietnamese fought the Communists oft, the three American advisers with the ARVN unit radioed for an evacuation helicopter. When the tiny chopper arrived, it was rushed by desperate South Vietnamese troops; some of them grabbed the American crew chief and tried to throw him off. The overloaded machine finally got airborne after several hard bounces along the ground; one ARVN soldier aboard was swinging from the legs of an American adviser...