Word: hilltop
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...completely bright face on Lam Son 719's clouded conclusion. Only hours after the latest Washington assurances that all was continuing "according to plan," the South Vietnamese began streaming back-on foot, aboard armored columns repeatedly raked by enemy fire, and by helicopter from shell-scarred hilltop fire bases deep in Laos. The last group out, the 2,000-man 1st Marine Brigade, barely made it. After clinging to positions on fire bases Delta and Hotel until they could no longer hold off the waves of North Vietnamese attackers, the Marines abandoned their artillery and their dead and headed...
...them. The withdrawal from Laos was in fact divided into three fairly distinct parts, and Washington still maintained that it would not be completed until mid-April. According to the Pentagon, several thousand of the 20,000 South Vietnamese who went into Laos were sweeping southeastward toward home, hilltop hopping by helicopter and disrupting enemy supply routes. Some 10,000 more ARVN troops, whose armored column had been stalled for five weeks on Route 9, 15 miles inside Laos, began a slow creep back toward the border...
...onto the oil-soaked pad. Zipped into his brown flame-resistant flight suit, he had already scrambled into the front seat of his Cobra by the time Copilot Ronald Lee Walters, 22, clambered into the rear. Within two minutes the Cobra was bound for Fire Base Ranger on a hilltop eight miles inside Laos, where South Vietnamese troops were trying to fight off a North Vietnamese attack...
...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 and enemy positions alike. Other ships, including Medevac Hueys, milled around the Ranger landing zone but were unable to penetrate the murderous curtain of fire...
Hayden was lucky at Ranger, where, as he puts it, "nobody knew what was going on.'' In the week-long battle for the hilltop fire base, a number of U.S. helicopters were shot down, and more than a few of those that wobbled back to Khe Sanh were thoroughly shot up. Since the Laotian operation began on Feb. 8, the loss rate of U.S. helicopters -normally about one per 16,000 sorties -has quadrupled. So far during the Laos operation, Communist gunners have knocked out no fewer than 61 helicopters, about 10% of the fleet originally committed...