Word: choppering
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...chopper spiraled down from its 4,500-ft. cruising altitude, darted over the flood-swollen Mekong toward a riverbank landing spot. Cambodian soldiers sucking Buddha amulets for luck leaped from the helicopter, lugging cases of food and ammo as they sprinted for shelter. As I jumped out of my seat and sloshed through knee-deep water toward the shore, insurgents began firing at us: the pilot had ill-advisedly put us down in a no-man's land between the two forces. We were lucky...
Getting into Kompong Cham was a matter of a 35-minute chopper ride; getting out was not so simple. Deterred by ground fire, the choppers had stopped landing. I decided to ride out with the night convoy. The trip upriver takes 24 to 30 hours, because the boats are heavily loaded, but the return trip to Phnom-Penh is only five or six hours...
...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...