Word: platoons
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...itself came under heavy fire at home after last month's battle for Hills 881 and 861 below the DMZ. "We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19," wrote a Marine Corps rifleman to his family after the battle. "Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. Practically every one of our dead was found with his [M16] torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it." TV newsmen, in particular, took up the cry that U.S. troops were being betrayed by their...
...because he was convinced that "you couldn't make it really big" as a Negro on the outside. Promotion came slowly, and he was once busted for arguing with a sergeant. Then, on a fiery slope near Bien Hoa in November 1965, Joel met Victor Charlie. As his platoon was devoured by enemy crossfire, and he himself took two slugs in the legs, Joel hobbled and crept through the holocaust to patch ripped chests, plug bottles of plasma into dangling arms, give bloody mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to corpses and wounded alike, shoot Syrettes of morphine into mangled...
Viet Nam is no war for the classic military historian. It offers no vast clash of arms; no divisions sweep and pivot to the grand strategy of latter-day Clausewitzes. Instead there are quick, dirty fire fights-usually on no more than platoon or company scale-set in copses of bamboo and thorn vine so thick that men kill at a range of 10 ft. without having once seen each other. It is a war of leg-shearing booby traps and dung-smeared punji stakes, of professional skill and personal courage. It is also a war that is tailor-made...
Ominous Evidence. Crazy Horse began quite by accident when a patrol of Montagnard mercenaries, led by a U.S. Special Forces sergeant, "zapped" a North Vietnamese platoon in the mountain massif to the rear of the Air Cav's An Khe headquarters. In a tin box on one of the Communist bodies was a Chinese mortar sight, on others a compass, quadrant and binoculars: ominous evidence that the North Vietnamese might be preparing to clobber An Khe with mortar fire in preparation for an assault. Into the mountains swept chopper loads of Air Cavalrymen to "spoil" the Red attack before...
Though the Air Cav ultimately drove an entire North Vietnamese regiment off the hills, it paid a bloody price. On one landing zone-"a burned-off, trampled and rubble-strewn glacis about double the size of a basketball court" -an Air Cav platoon led by Sergeant Robert L. Kirby, a slight, solemn, 29-year-old Los Angeles Negro, was ambushed by a full company of North Vietnamese. With the platoon was Look Editor Sam Castan, 32, working on a story about "the thoughts of men facing death." Kirby managed a quick radio call for help before taking four shell fragments...