Oct. 5, 1962 - The Communist Viet Cong threw a powerful counterpunch at a Government task force of more than 1,000 troops today, killing a U.S. helicopter crewman and crippling an entire company of South Vietnamese Rangers. The Government reported that 100 guerrillas had been killed in the action. The battle occurred a few hundred yards from the temporarily deserted hamlet of Ap My Luong, and it was over almost as soon as it began. Eleven U.S. Army helicopters roared into the attack area at dawn and were greeted by heavy ground fire even before reaching their objectives. American gunners in nearly all the battle-scarred H21’s in the group blazed away with their 30-caliber machine guns, and tracer bullets churned the watery fields below into fountains. Here and there, running Viet Cong rebels fell and did not move again. The first wave of helicopters landed in an inundated field. The ill-fated Ranger company, 90 men strong, leaped from the idling machines and ran toward Ap My Luong. A wall of gunfire, some of it from machine guns and other automatic weapons, hit the unit. Within minutes, 13 Rangers were killed. Thirty-four others were wounded, many seriously. The helicopters roared away as soon as the Rangers were off and running. But within several hundred yards after takeoff, Communist fire found its mark and two copters went down. Aboard one of them, a U.S. Army sergeant, crew chief and gunner for his craft, was dead. It was the first death suffered by the 57th Helicopter Company since it came to Vietnam last December. The sergeant’s name was withheld pending notification of kin.
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