Word: recoilless
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...cars bristling with automatic weapons, and are often preceded by diesel-powered machine-gun-bearing armored cars called con rua, or "turtles," by the Vietnamese. But armored cars are easily blown up, and even turtles can be turned back by heavy machine-gun fire or a 57-mm. recoilless-rifle shell...
Down in the Mekong Delta, South Vietnamese infantrymen flushed another hidden hard-core Viet Cong unit into fierce fighting scarcely 40 miles southwest of Saigon. The Communists blasted back with machine guns and 57-mm recoilless rifles. Saigon soon concluded that it had a veteran Viet Cong battalion at bay, ordered in the largest number of Vietnamese troops to be used in a single battle in the long war to try to encircle and crush the Reds...
...afraid of the sons of bitches. Why don't they bring on their fight?" They talked with respect of Sergeant Eugene Pennington, 25, a laconic Kentuckian who during an ambush methodically counted the North Vietnamese facing him (84), the number of heavy weapons they carried (four mortars, five recoilless rifles), and even the number of shots they fired back while being mowed down (two). Said Pennington: "That's what the captain said...
Loudspeakers boomed out messages of doom to the attackers: "We have just killed your commander" and "Our brothers have just captured three of your recoilless rifles." One by one, the Red guns fell silent; then the defenders fixed their bayonets and sprinted from their rifle pits. The Reds fled-only to return in regimental strength four days later and trigger a bloody battle among the rubber trees that was still raging at week...
...arms fire. Then a 20-man outpost in a clearing below the fort was overrun-the defenders died in their bunkers. At the main fort, U.S. Special Forces Captain Harold M. Moore radioed for help. Soon flare ships were splashing naked light over enemy positions as the Reds' recoilless rifles slammed round after round through the camp's longhouses. The 2,300-odd montagnard women and children living at Plei Me disappeared underground for a week-long hibernation. All, that is, but the older boys-twelve years and more-who grabbed carbines nearly as tall as themselves, strapped...