Word: riflemen
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Eight Hours of Lead. Things became a lot more certain the next day. Major Guy S. Meloy was leading 400 of his riflemen through the Tay Ninh jungles when, as he put it, "all hell broke loose." An ambush of 1,500 Communist soldiers opened up with automatic rifles and machine guns on the Americans-and kept on firing and firing. "For eight hours it was nothing but solid lead," said Meloy later. "Where the V.C. got all the ammunition, I've got no earthly idea." Six times the Red soldiers launched human wave charges, yelling and screaming above...
...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 battle (v. 72 rounds per man in Korea...
...marksman, yet his shooting on that day would have required remarkable skill: two direct hits on a moving target in less than six seconds with a rifle that had a defective scope. In the Marines, he scored only one point above the lowest ranking in one competition. When expert riflemen test-fired the weapon later, none could match Oswald's speed and accuracy...
Scornfully nominated last week for its worst Busters were the unknown riflemen who last summer slaughtered more than 100 sea lions on California's Santa Barbara Island, then bravely blew up the unattended ranger station. Second award went to the unidentified vandals who, late last fall in the Cascades, demolished George Tanner's parked Volkswagen while he lay dying of cold and exposure a few hundred yards away...
...their own revised version of the guerrilla-warfare manual that Communists from Havana to Hanoi had long regarded as holy writ. With stupendous firepower and mobility undreamed of even a decade ago, U.S. strike forces swooped into guerrilla redoubts long considered impenetrable. Like clouds of giant dragonflies, helicopters hauled riflemen and heavy artillery from base to battlefield in minutes, giving them the advantages of surprise and flexibility. Tactical air strikes scraped guerrillas off jungled ridges, buried them in mazelike tunnels, or kept them forever on the run. Unheard from the ground, giant B-52s of the Strategic Air Command pattern...