Pool_1

the teachers, in abbreviated training courses. Shortages of everything, including experience, were packed into one hastily conceived and Christened concept - Air Cavalry! It was a structure built on a single word, speed. Speed, the means to counter surprise and to inflict it. Speed was its mother. Dispatch was its father. Over three thousand vehicles and nearly 500 aircraft in under a hundred days. Damn. Choreograph that with 20,000 men quickly assigned to bombs, napalm, 20 mm cannon, grenade launchers, aerial rockets, scout helicopters which call in command helicopters which solicit and manage the lethal dance of the fighting helicopter cavalry. Cavalry, air horses sprung from a dead Medusa. Air horses as laden with men as was the hag's head with snakes. Snakedancers, handling the new M16 vipers. And there were the paired serpents twisted on the oaken wand of Aesculapius the much needed rescue and medical helicopters. This was not play time. So many men already turned to stone thence to dust. Is this the way of humanity? Azrael just wept. In the north, Lieutenant Colonial Nguyan Huu An set out his counter strategy. Move inside the American assault columns, "grab them by the belt", and get so close, so mixed, that air assault and artillery is useless. There were to be no lines, just jungle, sounds of breathing, and a vapor of death. Going west above Route 19, between Plei Me and Chu Pong mountain in the Ia Drang Valley approaching the Cambodia border, you lurch into the besieged Hospital Unit of Special Forces Duc Co. There, the new deployment of regular field infantry of the North Vietnamese Army, was murderous. Although the NVA caught the US Special Forces by surprise, in ambush, they were denied conquest by the speedy new 1st Cavalry Airborne, whose only track record was one operation of chaos measured in