 Cavalry, a four-footed blitzkrieg, fast-moving, hard-hitting. The idea then was, get the fastest means available of moving over varied terrain, and build a fighting unit around that mobility. Times changed, but today the idea is exactly the same. Only now the cavalry moves on the wind, and the saddle trooper has become the sky trooper. Air Mobile is the military word for such a unit, and the Army's first such combat division is now in being. The first cavalry division, Air Mobile, the new first team. Okay, move out. Published activating a new unit, being known as the First Cavalry Division. For more than a decade after the first cav was born at Fort Bliss, Texas, it remained a horse cavalry unit. But World War II was on its way to change all that. By 1943, when the first cav arrived in Queensland, Australia for last-minute training before combat, it was organized and functioning as an infantry unit, but it kept the name First Cavalry Division. On foot, it fought its way through the Admiralty's campaign. New Guinea, Los Negros. Late 1944, on to the Philippines. Late in the early 1945, Luzon. Manila was liberated, and the next step for the first cav. When the first team rolled into Tokyo in September of 1945, it brought with it the scars and know-how of 521 days active combat. Through the rest of the 40s, the first cav pulled occupation duty in Japan. Then came June 1950 to fight a delaying action until an aroused free world could react in strength. The breakout from the Pusan perimeter came, the first team led the way. 102 miles in 21 hours, the fastest advance in the history of arms. And on the way, they knocked out 13 enemy tanks and captured some 200 North Korean troops. They linked up with the 7th infantry at Osan. Then they kept moving, north. By year's end, the North Korean forces were defeated. But Chinese faces were beginning to appear south of the Yalu, and a whole new war began. Again, it was pullback. Through the months that followed until the Truestalks began and the war became stabilized, the first cavs stayed and fought. In December of 1951, the first cavalry was shipped back to Japan, a nice Christmas present. Until 1957, the first team would remain in Japan, garrison duty, spit and polish. But also the constant demand to be fully ready for action. Should the call to action come, field training was not overlooked. The last formal review in Japan was held in August 1957. American forces were leaving the islands of Nippon, but not the Far East. Back to Korea, this time to help stand guard over the uneasy truce signed three years before. The grass had grown deep in the unused valleys of the demilitarized zone. But death still waited for the unwary or the unauthorized. Routine work, but work which the continuing tensions of the Far East made urgently necessary. In 1957, the men who kept watch over the DMZ in Korea were little aware that in Vietnam, a situation was developing which would one day deeply affect the first team. By the Communist Viet Cong, and it progressed to full-scale guerrilla warfare, aimed at overthrowing the South Vietnamese government. It was the latest tactic in communism's drive to dominate all of Asia. They called it a war of liberation. The Vietnamese government asked for equipment and advisers to help them meet this new aggression. With jungle and mountain terrain working to the advantage of guerrilla forces, ways had to be found to counterbalance that advantage. Superior equipment and mobility soon emerged as a major part of the answer. The most good has always depended on his ability to overcome the impersonal hostility of terrain. 500 years BC, a Chinese tactician named Sun Tzu said, rapidity is the essence of war. To get from here to there faster has been the struggle of armies since armies began. And so at Fort Benning, Georgia, a revolutionary concept in army organization was to be tried out. Commanding the new test division was an able professional. Major General Harry Conard, a West Pointer who had known combat in Normandy and Bastone, and wore the eagles of a full Colonel before he was 30. In the early summer of 1962, the Secretary of Defense directed that a study be made to determine in essence how best to move our troops over normally impassable terrain with the speed that will be required on a modern battlefield. General Hamilton H. Howes, then commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, was appointed to head a board of distinguished officers to make this study and offer recommendations. As a result of the study, refined by subsequent field tests, experiments, and war games, a revolutionary means of maneuver was born. The Army Air Mobility Concept. General Conard saw to it that this new concept got a thorough shakedown, beginning with the men who would have to make the concept come alive in the field. Here in the 11th Air Assault Division were the seeds of what was to become the new first team. There was a confidence course for the pilots and aircraft of the new unit, too. Practice were an important part of the curriculum. After the new division was tailored for its particular job. The OH-13 Su, for example, agile, quick, lightly armed, and ideal reconnaissance and observation aircraft. The rugged and versatile UH-1, called the Huey, would be the Skytroopers' prime means of transport. It, too, could take advantage of terrain. Going where no truck or armored personnel carrier could travel, using terrain features for cover, adding a vital new dimension to movement in a battle area. For CH-47, the Chinook would add beef to the lifting power of the Air Mobile Unit, whether for carrying troops, vehicles, or heavy weapons. The CH-54 Sky Crane could move up to 10 tons at a time. The People Pod attachment would house 58 soldiers with full combat gear. The fixed-wing Mohawk, crammed with electronic and photographic reconnaissance gear, would give fast, long-range scouting capabilities. The rugged Mohawk was designed to work from the kind of rough short airstrip, which can be quickly bulldozed out of an open field. And the same was true of the larger tactical cargo aircraft, the Kerabu, able to stop almost as soon as its wheels touched down. 434 aircraft in all would give the Air Mobile Division more than four times the airlift of an infantry division, with the ability to put a full one-third of its 16,000 fighting men into the air at a time with their equipment. That was the general concept. And for three years it was put up against every conceivable obstacle and difficult. The very terrain of the Fort Benning Reservation was an ideal test laboratory. In the course of those years, the radical new concept was tested in 83 major field exercises, tests, war games. Realism was the keynote, a necessity because important questions had to be truly answered. How well can armed copters protect the troop carriers flying escort on the point and flanks? What is the best balance of mobility, manpower, firepower? Where are the weaknesses, the undiscovered vulnerabilities? Where the special strength, the answers were sought and found and retested as men and machines were welded by action into a fighting force of a truly new kind. Sky Trooper came into being. Force could be delivered to battle sharp and ready, not half exhausted by the terrain they had to cover on the way in. With practice the timing got sharper. Reinforcing waves would come in fast, unload in seconds, and start back for more. But what could be done with practice, they did. They learned to keep an operation going once it was started. The necessities of combat, against the day when those necessities would be urgently real. They tested the capacities of their airlift, the ability to maintain in a combat environment the machines on which mobility depends. They demonstrated the startling swiftness with which an air mobile commander can reconnoiter gather the field intelligence without which any commander, however bold or skillful, must be a man groping in the dark. Possibilities were explored, evaluated, proven. A new kind of fighting force to work the bugs out of a radical concept. And in the end to provide the United States Army with a working practical realization of that concept. The need was vital and immediate, well within the allotted time it was met. 1965 at Fort Benning, Georgia, the first cavalry division air mobile came into being. In a matter of days the orders came down. The new first team was to be on its way. Destination? Vietnam. Men and machines to the various ports from which they would embark for Southeast Asia. By bus. By train. And in convoys of their own vehicles they fanned out toward the sea. It is no small matter to prepare and then transport the machines of an army division by sea. Even an air mobile division whose weight of equipment is only about a third that of a standard infantry division. At ports on the eastern seaboard the aircraft of the division and white cocoons to protect them from salt air and spray were loaded aboard carriers for the sea voyage to Vietnam. The protective cocoons were just one more of the many special techniques needed to handle the new air mobile concept in practice. Each part of the team knew its job. The loading went forward with a disciplined economy of time and effort. No protective covering was needed for the aircraft which were to be carried on the interior hangar decks. Day by day the work went on. The proficiency of loading teams increased. The rhythm of loading picked up its tempo. After narrow crate of rotor blades followed the copters aboard. The fixed wing Mohawks joined the division's rotor-borne aircraft. The timetable was demanding but it was met. The final lashings were secured on schedule and the first cavalry division air mobile was ready to go. In Vietnam a place was being prepared for them. The advance party of a thousand men and 254 tons of equipment had been airlifted to a place called An Ki. Their job, prepare a giant heliport and airstrip for the first team here in the heart of the Viet Cong infested central highlands. It took a lot of equipment, ammunition, supplies, mountains of barbed wire, thousands of gallons of fuel. Again time was short but the job got done. The first team was about to become the largest single concentration of fighting men and machines in Southeast Asia since the French had left in 1954. Elsewhere at Cameran Bay, 190 miles north of Saigon, an engineering miracle was taking place. With some 15 miles of smooth beaches it was being transformed from one of the world's most underdeveloped natural harbors into the central supply point for all U.S. forces in Vietnam. Here would be the headquarters of logistics, a jet runway more than two miles long able to handle the largest jet transports and bombers. And barracks, administrative facilities for a port destined to equal the capacity of Charleston Harbor back in the states. The local business enterprise was putting down its roots in anticipation of a growing market. The first team's crossing was without mishap, their arrival on schedule. After the enforced inactivity of the trip, the renewed demands of a timetable, preparing the copters for fly-off came as a welcome change. The choppers lifted off for the short flight to shore. From the troopships, landing craft ferried the men of the division to the beach. The new first team was only weeks old when the main body of its 16,000 men began unloading onto Vietnamese soil. They were a welcome and much-needed addition to the American fighting strength. And the commander of United States forces in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, was there in person to greet them. The next step, airlift to the division area at An Ki. Once again, the division was traveling as it had been designed to travel, bringing a fight to an enemy in a faster, more agile, harder-hitting way than ever before. Now they would begin to do what they had trained to do. Now a new testing was to begin. The enemy they faced now was real, and they went to search him out, trained to fight on the earth, but able to move above it. They were freed, as never before in military history, from the tyranny of terrain. In minutes, they were approaching the objective area in this area. The first team's mission was tersely descriptive, search and destroy. The initial wave was landed, the second wave moved in. The timing was right. The months of planning and practice were paying off. Because the objective area had been reached by air, the Sky Troopers could begin their mission with full reserves of strength. And this was terrain which made heavy demands. The search had to be thorough. The enemy had benefit of many years of practice in the art of remaining unseen. Stream by stream, and village by village, the sweep of the objective area was carried forward. They had to search for the enemy, but to bring the active friendship and support of the American forces to the people of the remote villages, from whom the enemy had gained support through promises or threats. The primary mission remained, however, as the book defines it, to close with and destroy the enemy. From the start, they proved their ability to do just that, inflicting a heavy ratio of casualties on the Viet Cong, capturing weapons, depriving the enemy of the tools of aggression. As always, a price to be paid. But that price was the less because of the determination and skill that the men of the new first team brought to their job. Troopers learned fast the hard way, but the only way was the beginning in Vietnam. But the job of the new first team goes on. There can be no let up until the enemy finally is brought to the realization that the aggression he has begun in Vietnam will cost him more than he can pay. The men of the first cavalry intend to do what they can to bring that lesson home. A radical concept in military organization has proven itself. It is an important step in a world where the speed with which a fighting force can react in the field can be the deciding factor in victory. The new air mobile division is not a replacement for its heavier infantry counterpart. But it is, like the old cavalry, a fast, hard-hitting doer of special jobs. A new agile, important addition to the versatile combat capability of the United States Army. The first cavalry division air mobile. The new first team.