Word: infantryman
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...alert under thick brown brows. His tunic was ablaze with the trophies of three wars - six tiers of campaign ribbons and medals from battles in North Africa and Sicily, France and Germany, Korea and Viet Nam, as well as the silver emblem of the master parachutist and the combat infantryman's badge...
...infantryman's war continues to escalate in fury in Viet Nam. Figures released in Saigon for the week ending March 25 showed a grim new record of 274 American soldiers dead in a single week. The previous high of 240 had stood since the week before Thanksgiving in 1965, when the battle of la Drang Valley took place. The toll was exacted at an immense expenditure of Communist blood, with a new record of 2,774 enemy dead in the week. The figures brought to 8,560 the number of Americans fallen on the battlefields of Viet Nam since...
...tactics of Delta warfare are far from ideal. Helicopters swoop in low and drop troops in the open. Other armed choppers orbit overhead, ready to help out if the enemy is in the trees, but the infantryman must slog forward, sinking up to his knees at times in oozing, smelly mud, wading through canals that cut across the fields every few hundred yards, and finally rushing into the village to overrun the enemy's positions. Vietnamese troops, who seldom weigh much more than 100 Ibs., move with considerable ease through the mud and can keep going from sunup...
...bright lights, Rockefeller enlisted in the Army as a private nearly a year before Pearl Harbor. He earned a commission at officers' candidate school, became a company commander in the 77th Division, and sailed to the Pacific battles behind a swashbuckling D'Artagnan mustache. An able infantryman who enjoyed the challenge and camaraderie of military life, he was popular with the troops, who called him "Brother Rock." He gave each soldier a silver dollar for Christmas, and woolens knitted by Mother Rockefeller and her friends. The 77th went through the Guam and Leyte campaigns, and Rockefeller became...
...does have drawbacks. Its lightweight, plastic butt is liable to shatter in hand-to-hand combat, where the infantryman often clobbers his enemy with the stock. Moreover, its high sight -necessitated by the carrying handle that serves as the rear sighting plane-means that a dug-in rifleman must expose his head and chest to aim carefully. But the rapid rate of fire more than compensates: in Korea with the slow-firing Garand, less than one-quarter of the troops fired their weapons in battle; in Viet Nam with the M16, everyone fires copiously. Many riflemen lug 600 rounds into...