Rough Time for the Choppers

THE ten-year-old war in Indochina ushered in the Age of the Chopper, and the allied thrust into Laos last week vividly demonstrated why. The whirr of helicopter rotors accompanied the vast operation at every stage: airborne Cobra gunships softened up, or "prepped," landing sites with machine-gun and rocket fire; workhorse Hueys lifted entire battalions of South Vietnamese troops into enemy territory and evacuated the wounded; giant Chinooks supplied ground forces with everything from medicines to cannon. During a single day of the offensive, U.S. helicopters flew 1,100 sorties into Laos. Yet even as the wondercraft of the war showed that it has come fully of age, it also showed that it has some glaring weaknesses.

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By official estimates, 12 helicopters had been lost in the Laos operation by week's end. Because the Army counts only craft that are totally destroyed as "losses," however, the actual number of those shot down was almost certainly higher. Along the lower part of the thickly fortified Ho Chi Minh Trail, 51-cal. and 37-mm. antiaircraft guns sprayed out a murderous shield of defensive fire. "They've got stuff out there, man, we don't even know what it is," said one pilot returning from Laos to Khe Sanh. "I had things flying past me looked big as basketballs." At least one chopper company received enemy hits on every one of its craft during a single day.

The helicopter has been doing service in Viet Nam since 1962, at first mostly to transport troops. As the Army realized the necessity for rapid mobility in a guerrilla war, commanders began urging Washington to free them from what they called "the tyranny of the terrain." There are now 3,500 helicopters, worth nearly $1 billion, in Viet Nam. With the arrival of the high-speed, heavily armed Cobra in 1967, the ships became flying combat-assault platforms for entire brigades in mass lift operations. More than any other weapon, they enabled the U.S. to fight the guerrillas' kind of war.

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Copter pilots, usually men aged 25 and younger, take 32 weeks of flight training, arriving in Viet Nam with at least 210 hours of flying time. Often they fly "pigs-and-rice" or "ash-and-trash" missions--supplying outposts, moving men, carrying mail. "But you do fly six hours a day, rarely over 3,000 feet, and over very wild country," says an Army colonel who did two hitches as a pilot in Viet Nam. "Everything is a challenge."

The helicopter's major military weakness is its vulnerability to enemy fighter planes and antiaircraft fire. In Indochina, where the U.S. was never challenged in the sky, artillery is the chief problem. All told, 4,219 machines have been lost during the war, at least 1,928 of them in combat. Last week the Communist Pathet Lao's representative in Vientiane, Colonel Soth Pethrassy, said that the mountainous terrain in the Laos operation made it especially easy to shoot at U.S. helicopters. "We place three men on each hill, and when the helicopters come in low we can shoot at them in an almost horizontal line," he said. Soth might have been exaggerating his forces' efficiency. But in any case, it will be some time before the South Vietnamese will be able to fill the air with a locust-like swarm of 600 helicopters, as the U.S. did in the Lam Son offensive.

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