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.