Word: choppers
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Walters dipped the Cobra's nose and rolled out to the northwest. A set of scrambled alphabet letters came in over the T.O.C. radio, and Hayden pulled out his "Whiz Wheel" decoder to decipher the grid coordinates of his mission. As their chopper raced over the bomb-pocked Laotian countryside, a second Cobra pulled up alongside. Twenty minutes later, the Cobras arrived over a scene of total chaos. As Hayden and Walters carved circles in the sky several thousand feet above the fire-scarred hilltop, they watched errant rockets from choppers already on the scene blazing into friendly...
...ferocious seesaw struggle with a Communist force of up to 2,000 men, backed by Soviet-made PT-76 light tanks. As the fighting raged, the smoking hulks of broken Communist tanks and shattered U.S. helicopters littered the battlefield; B-52 strikes thundered so close, said a downed chopper crewman, that the dust "made our eyes water." Though the outcome of the battle remained in doubt at week's end, the Lam Son toll was already substantial: in three weeks, no less than five ARVN battalions had, for all practical purposes, been knocked out of action...
...often rated as ARVN's best fighting general, and his feats of personal bravery became legend. During last May's campaign in Cambodia, Tri frequently swooped down in his chopper to take personal command of a unit in trouble. On one occasion, after the man standing next to him was killed by an enemy shell, the plucky general leaped aboard an armored personnel carrier and urged it toward the source of the gunfire, shouting, "Forward, forward...
Last week, a VNAF chopper, carrying Newsweek Correspondent François Sully, General Do Cao Tri and eight others to a staging area in Cambodia, exploded shortly after takeoff and crashed in flames. All were killed. The urbane, Paris-born Sully, 43, was a bon vivant with a penchant for tailored shirts and vintage wine. He first came to Indochina in the mid-1940s, and, as a combat correspondent for TIME, was one of the last newsmen to leave Dienbienphu before it fell in 1954. He was the 34th journalist to be killed in Indochina since 1965 (another...
Reading Disability. Sully's death underscored the danger of flying in VNAF helicopters. Though General Tri had a South Vietnamese pilot for his fatal flight, most other Vietnamese generals now travel in U.S. Army choppers, fearful that VNAF pilots may lose their way. Fortnight ago a VNAF helicopter carrying U.S. newsmen got temporarily but totally lost over unfamiliar terrain in South Viet Nam. In another case, a VNAF pilot casually chalked map coordinates to his destination on the outside of his chopper windshield, only to find himself forced to try to read them backwards from the inside...