Word: choppers
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...rounds a minute. They knocked out Cuban mortar and gun positions that threatened the invading troops early in the action. But they also suffered casualties, some in heroic low-level flights to draw ground fire, thereby exposing the enemy position to attacks from other U.S. choppers. The Pentagon said five helicopters had been shot down. One transport helicopter, hit by ground fire as it brought troops into the Point Salines airstrip, struck another chopper in its uncontrolled descent. Both crashed...
...World War II, American soldiers darted across Europe in Jeeps and swarmed ashore on to Pacific islands from LSTs. By the 1960s, G.I.s were commuting to and from action in Viet Nam by helicopter. The chopper, in fact, is symbolic of that war, and memories of 'Nam still echo with the beat of rotor blades...
Helicopter tactics were still in the experimental stage when Warrant Officer Mason arrived at An Khe in 1965. Nobody knew much of anything except that Viet Nam was, as Mason writes, "a good place to buy stereo equipment." For months the Army suffered high chopper losses because pilots flew at low levels over Viet Cong-held villages and paddy-fields without varying their approaches and takeoffs. Men died because promised chest-armor plates for their cockpits failed to arrive. To exist, Mason learned to adapt to "the details of the job at hand, no matter how bizarre...
...April. Then Gustafson took a night helicopter tour of the notorious 66-mile border stretch from the Pacific inland past Chula Vista, Calif., where the Border Patrol picked up 49,511 interlopers in April, up 46% over the same period last year. When the pilot turned on the chopper's spot lights, hundreds of Mexicans could be seen striding across the desolate, scrub-covered fields deeper into the U.S. But it was not until three weeks ago, when a man came to wash his office windows, that Gustafson appreciated the full extent of the problem. "He asked...
This is a defect it shares with whoever conceived Blue Thunder, which is by far the lesser of Badham's back-to-back releases. The film's nominal plot has Roy Scheider as a good Los Angeles police department chopper ace assigned to test what amounts to a flying gun platform. Once he discovers its illiberal potential, he must fight his way past Malcolm McDowell, an old neofascist enemy from his Viet Nam days now employed as a power-elite gunslinger. After that dogfight comes a showdown with a couple of Air Force jets...