More Shooters

Off the boats came the "Big Red One." Vietnamese girls with garlands were on the beach to greet the first of 11,000 new troops of the 1st Infantry Division arriving to take up positions in one of Viet Nam's most critical battle zones. U.S. military manpower within striking range of the Viet Cong now numbered 140,000. The new arrivals were not shooting yet, but a good many others were.

>> North of its An Khe base in the central highlands, a battalion of the 1st Cavalry Airmobile was helilifted into the "happy valley" of Song Con--ironically named because it is so Viet Cong-infested that until now every allied incursion has invariably drawn heavy gunfire. F-100s plastered the valley with 750-lb. bombs and napalm tanks before the 1st Cavalry landed, and rocket-artillery helicopters overhead covered their advance. When they hit a V.C. concrete bunker, the men of the 1st Cavalry slammed a wire-guided SS-11 missile designed for use against tanks into the bunker, knocked out the three V.C. snipers. Later they captured and dismantled one of the weirdest V.C. gimmicks yet: a giant crossbow, rigged with an 8-ft.-long arrow aimed to wing a helicopter.

>> Closer to the coast, northeast of An Khe, thousands of troops from the 1st Cavalry joined Vietnamese army and marine units in a far more important drive called Operation Shiny Bayonet. Three waves of B-52 bombers and a blistering artillery bombardment plastered the landing zones before the Americans swept in by helicopter in what might become the largest operation of the war so far. Eight troop-carrying choppers were hit by ground fire, but resistance was light as the operation began; by nightfall of the first day, the 1st Cavalrymen were hot on the heels of a 500-man Viet Cong force, and many more of the enemy doubtless awaited in the nearby countryside. Target of Operation Shiny Bayonet: the massive Viet Cong forces in the hills behind embattled Route 1 (TIME, Oct. 8). For weeks U.S. planes have bombed the Viet Cong concentrations, guns from the Seventh Fleet have pounded the coast east of Route 1, and government troops punched away--with casualties running into the hundreds for the Communists. "They must want something very badly," mused one U.S. officer last week, "maybe supplies from the sea, maybe rice from the coastal flats. Whatever it is, they haven't shown any inclination to leave."

>> Some 30 miles northwest of Saigon, the 173rd Airborne, together with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, struck back into the "Iron Triangle" combed by allied forces only three weeks ago. The first operation encountered few V.C., but the guerrillas love to slip back into an area recently "cleared," and so this time the allies were double-checking with lethal thoroughness. Twice B-52s from Guam pounded the Triangle's rain forest and rubber trees. When the Airborne moved in, they carried tear gas--to protect the innocent as well as to flush the V.C. out of their tunnels--and promptly used it. Recently added to the U.S. military's growing armory of sophisticated anti-insurgent weaponry: the "Mighty Mite," a 50-lb. blower used in home fumigation Stateside, and able to pump the harmless gas into tunnels at 180 m.p.h.

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