Word: sergeanting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is how our Saigon bureau's Robin Mannock summed up his feelings after the event. Reporting for this week's cover story on the Negro in Viet Nam, British-born Correspondent Mannock, 36, had gone out on a long-range patrol with Sergeant Glide Brown and, as described in the opening passages of our story, had landed in the midst of the Viet Cong...
Mannock has flown more than a hundred helicopter missions in Viet Nam, was inside Plei Me when it was attacked by the North Vietnamese, and had several close scrapes 2½ years ago during the Congo fighting. But this, he concluded, topped all his previous experiences: "Sergeant Brown's courage and professional skill kept us alive and me sane that night. After the rescue helicopter had finally lifted us to safety next morning, I found myself singing above the engine's roar like one of the Animals, 'We gotta get out of this place...
...arrived on the scene to help round out the coverage. "This was my first experience reporting a war," recalls Terry, "but not my first experience reporting violence. For nearly seven years I have followed the development of the Negro revolution in all corners of America. Now a Negro airborne sergeant kidded me about being safer in Viet Nam than I was during the Harlem riots (when I was knocked out by a rioter's brick), the Birmingham and Jackson demonstrations, and in Watts...
...long for the patrol to discover that it had landed smack in the midst of a Viet Cong concentration. As skilled as Victor Charlie in the deadly blindman's buff of jungle warfare, Team Two soon realized that the enemy was following its every move. Each time Staff Sergeant Glide Brown Jr. halted his men, they could hear a couple of footfalls close behind-and then a bristling silence. As the jungle dusk deepened into blackness, Brown set up a defense perimeter and listened more closely. Above the keening of insects, geckos and night birds, he heard the snap...
Bright Strands. Sergeant Brown, 24, is a Negro from the black belt of Alabama; in 16 sorties into Indian country he has not lost anyone on his five-man team, none of whom is a Negro. The cool professionalism of Glide Brown's patrol underscores in microcosm a major lesson of Viet Nam-a hopeful and creative development in a dirty, hard-fought war. For the first time in the nation's military history, its Negro fighting men are fully integrated in combat, fruitfully employed in positions of leadership, and fiercely proud of their performance. In the unpredictable...