World: The Charge of the Air Cav

Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward.

—Alfred Lord Tennyson

For a cavalry charge, it was something of a flop. The objective was a sprawl of scrub-grown hills known as “the Crow’s Foot,” and the mounts were hulking, olive-drab helicopters. Not a single cavalryman carried a saber; instead they cradled automatic rifles in their arms. No plumed, defiant enemy fell to their swift assault, only 47 scrawny, half-naked guerrillas. Yet in its unromantic rendezvous with the Viet Cong last week, the U.S. 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) was far more effective than anything recorded in the dancing dactyls of Tennyson.

Leap & Smash. Since the 18,000 men of the Air Cav arrived in Viet Nam just a year ago, they have killed more than 5,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops, and lost only 900 dead of their own. Their swift sorties into the Red-dominated central highlands have captured 1,200 other Communist troops, along with some 2,000 weapons. Chinese-manufactured machine guns line the walk leading to Air Cav Major General John Norton’s headquarters located near An Khe, a proud display of hard-won enemy weaponry. Air Cav troopers, using the strategy of General Custer’s day, have struck swiftly and destructively at the enemy’s food supplies: more than 1,000,000 Ibs. of rice have been systematically destroyed in the Air Cav’s first year of action. In the process, the Air Cav, or “the First Team” as it likes to call it self, has brought to maturity a totally new dimension of warfare: air mobility.

The Air Cav tactic of leap and smash was perfected in 53 major operations—more than one a week—that ranged from the la Drang Valley (“the Valley of Death,” as the division remembers it) to the Bong Son Plains, hard by the South China Sea. Its 430 choppers, flying from a carefully cropped launch pad outside An Khe, have carried men and whole batteries of snub-nosed 105s and 155s into places no one would have imagined. The Air Cav’s noisy “gunships” have developed to a fine art the use of their rocket artillery in close support of the heliborne troops. As a result the Air Cav moves faster and hits harder than any army since Genghis Khan’s.

Inside the Barrier. Back at An Khe (pop. 12,000), the division has created a home away from home. Last week business was booming in An Khe Plaza, the sanitary “Sin City” that houses bars and brothels under strict Army medical supervision (TIME, May 6). Highway 19, the east-west road that was once controlled by Communist ambushes, is now open all the way from Qui Nhon. In General Norton’s tidy mess on “the Hill,” a high-rise hummock that houses division headquarters, officers show up at dinner in gleaming boots and bright, gold-and-black scarves—the colors of the Cav.

Near completion is “the Barrier,” a ten-mile defense perimeter consisting of cleared fire lanes, minefields, 68 watchtowers and an encircling snare of concertina wire that, if stretched out, would measure 10,000 miles. Inside the Barrier is Camp Radcliff (named for the first Cavalryman to die in Viet Nam), where some 2,100 structures are abuilding. They range from wood-and-tin hutments (to “get the troops off the mud”) to an elegant lumber-and-natural-rock mess hall that advertises itself as “the Red Hawk Inn.”

On the Golf Course. Dial phones-some 3,000 of them—are being installed, and Cavalrymen can tune in to Big Valley Radio, a twelve-hour FM station built by the troopers from scrounged equipment and featuring mainly rock ‘n’ roll tapes contributed by the men themselves. In the heat of An Khe’s sunny clime, ice is still a luxury. When the Cav arrived, a local entrepreneur hauled in ice from Pleiku every day, most of it melting before he got there but the remainder providing a cool profit. Then one day he failed to show up, and troopers found his creaky, decrepit truck leaking ice water on Highway 19. The truck and its owner were riddled with Viet Cong bullets, and a note near the body read: “Do not take the dirty money of the Americans.” Now an ice plant is being built to ease the heat a bit.

Also being built is a new fuel supply system that will include a tank farm inside the base perimeter and individual feeder pipes to each of the Air Cav’s 430 helicopter stands. The Cav burns about 85,000 gallons of fuel each day. Heart of the camp is the Golf Course, where the first troopers hacked out an airfield with a machete in one hand and rifle in the other. Today the Golf Course boasts a 3,300-ft. runway built of aluminum planking that can handle C-130 “Herky Bird” transports. Army engineers are busy paving everything from hardstands to the 20 miles of all-weath er roads that link the base facilities.

Bus service ties the camp to downtown An Khe and the airfield. By comparison with Stateside bases, the Air Cav’s lO-sq.-mi. complex is small. “But then,” notes one officer wryly, “you don’t need a training area here.”

High Morale. Most amazing of the Air Cav’s feats has been its ability to replace itself almost entirely during the course of a year’s hard combat. Only 500 of the original troops who arrived at An Khe are still on duty in Viet Nam. The rest have been rotated Stateside, many to instructors’ billets at the Air Cav home base in Fort Benning, Ga., where their combat expertise is well applied. The new First Team is still 70% “regular Army”—career soldiers rather than draftees—and thus man ages to retain a solid base of experience among junior officers and sergeants. Nearly 100 Air Cavalrymen re-enlist or extend their duty in Viet Nam each month—a credit to the division’s high morale.

“If anyone needs to get somewhere in Viet Nam or get out,” says General Norton, “we have the pilots who can do it. This division can do many things that no other division can do. And it can go anywhere Charlie is.” To that end, the helicopter far excels the horse, and as any Tennyson-reading Air Cavalryman would be quick to explain, half a league is only H miles—the distance a chopper can fly in 40 seconds.