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for three to five years.
    Typical of the senior noncoms was Sergeant First Class Larry M. Gilreath, a Korean War veteran out of Anderson County, South Carolina.
    He was platoon sergeant of the 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, and had been with the battalion since 1961. During that time he trained more new second-lieutenant platoon leaders than he had fingers on his hands.
    Lieutenants came and went; Gilreath was forever. He was stability and continuity; he knew every man in his platoon and knew that man's strengths and weaknesses. There was someone just like him in virtually every platoon in the battalion.
    Once I had taken command, my goal was to create the absolute best air assault infantry battalion in the world, and the proudest. Every man in the battalion had to know and believe he was an important part of that best. We trained and tested. Senior military officials from throughout the U.S. Army and allied forces were frequent visitors to Fort Benning; the word had gone out that something new, different, and deadly in the art of warfare was being created here.
    Hundreds of helicopters were handed over to us, and the air crews and the infantry became a tight team as we flew on operations in the forests and swamps of Georgia and the Carolinas.
    If this system could be made to work, the soldier's time would be spent fighting, not walking or waiting for a truck or wondering whether supplies would ever find him. Like the knight on a chessboard, we could now attack the flanks and rear of the enemy in a matter of minutes. The helicopter would add a 110-mile-an-hour fast-forward capability to ground warfare.
    During those fourteen months before we sailed for Vietnam, we spent most of our time in the field, practicing assault landings from helicopters, and the incredibly complex coordination of artillery, tactical air support, and aerial rocket artillery with the all-important flow of helicopters into and out of the battle zone. Commanders had to learn to see terrain differently, to add a constant scan for landing zones (LZs) and pickup zones (PZs) to all the other features they had to keep in mind. We practiced rapid loading and unloading of men and materiel to reduce the helicopter's window of vulnerability. Total flexibility was the watchword in planning and attitude.
    There was one bit of sobering reality that I insisted be introduced at every level in this training: We would declare a platoon leader dead and let his sergeant take over and carry out the mission. Or declare a sergeant dead and have one of his PFCs take over running the squad. We were training for war, and leaders are killed in battle. I wanted every man trained for and capable of taking over the job of the man above him.
    The 11th Air Assault's graduation ceremony was the final test program, Air Assault II, conducted in the Carolinas during October and November of 1964. Some 35,000 soldiers were involved; the 11th Air Assault Division was pitted against the "aggressor" forces, the 82nd Airborne Division. Hundreds of VIPs from Washington popped in and out to see helicopter warfare in action; their presence lent weight to a first round of rumors that we were being trained for duty in Vietnam.
    Ironically, late one night in the battalion command post we listened in on the new PRC-25 field radio to an American forward air controller directing an air strike in Vietnam. We could hear the rattle of gunfire and the explosions of the bombs twelve thousand miles away on a freak bounce of radio waves that briefly brought the real war to the pine barrens of South Carolina where we were playing war games.
    For much of this time my battalion was at, or near, its full authorized strength of thirty-seven commissioned officers, one warrant officer, and 729 enlisted men. That changed in the spring of 1965, when we lost eight of our fifteen platoon leader lieutenants. Most were reserve officers who had completed their commitments and were released from active duty; others were