Word: cobras
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...relating the uses of the helicopter, as refined in Viet Nam, to the Army of the '70s and '80s. Should TRICAP prove out over the next three years, it will employ tanks for shock on the ground, Hueys and CH-47 Chinooks for troop transport, and either Cobra gunships, or the new Lockheed Cheyenne missile platforms for air support. The modernized division will be assigned as part of the U.S. commitment to NATO defensive units in Western Europe...
Mission Accomplished. In mid-afternoon the first chopper, a Cobra gunship, swinging low to check the landing zone, came under heavy fire from the ground. It tried to roll out, but nosed into the jungle and exploded. The second, a Huey troop carrier, managed to land and evacuate 17 men. The third was hit by machine-gun fire and crashed. Two hours later, two more helicopters landed and rescued the downed chopper's crew and the last ARVN troops...
...Sanh, the distinctive pump and whir of hundreds of helicopter rotor blades began at 7 a.m., even before the morning fog started to lift. Drowsy pilots walked out to their UH-1 Hueys and malevolent-looking OH-6 Cobra gunships, checked out the oil levels, the instruments and the control linkages, and then strolled back to their tactical operations centers. The call to combat came as it has almost every day since the Laotian operation began, well before midmorning. At the heavily sandbagged T.O.C. of the 4th Battalion, 77th Field Artillery, 101st Airborne Division, blond, mustachioed Warrant Officer Fred Hayden...
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...
...pilots pushed the Cobra into a steep dive. Before they pulled up-at about 500 ft.-Walters had fired two pairs of 2.75-in. rockets into enemy positions. Diving again, Hayden let go with his 7.62-mm. minigun against a pocket of North Vietnamese caught in the open near the perimeter wire. Terrified, the Communists scattered back into the tree line, leaving 15 bodies on the ground. There was another strike, then another and another, until Hayden had expended his entire 2,500-lb. load of ordnance. By noontime, he was back at Khe Sanh to refuel, rearm and wait...