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The advent of the helicopter does not permit him to neglect his individual weapon or other battlefield disciplines which have been essential to survival since recorded history. Airmobility, if anything, is particularly unforgiving of carelessness or sloppiness. The after action reports of airmobile units tend to repeat lessons learned in Korea and World War II on such things as ambushes, mines, and booby traps, rather than highlight new helicopter techniques. Indeed, some of the operations fought by the 1st Cavalry hardly make mention of their airmobility.

These records indicate in a way that these units took airmobility for granted and only mentioned aircraft technology when there was a need for improvement—just as jeeps and ¾ tons were seldom mentioned in dispatches of earlier battles. This is an indication that the helicopter was doing its job so well and so routinely that it was not considered worthy of mention.

This was not unique to the 1st Cavalry operations alone, for in writing this study, I was struck by the similarity of other units who used attached airmobile assets in a matter-of-fact attitude. To a large degree, these units considered themselves as much airmobile as the 1st Cavalry Division although they were not officially designated as such. This is a great credit to those separate airmobile companies and battalions who supported these units. Obviously they became so identified with the 173d, the 101st, and so forth, that they functioned with almost the same continuity as those helicopter units which were organic to the 1st Cavalry Division. This takes away nothing from the individual helicopter crew or the unit that they supported; but, there is a wealth of examples which demonstrated that airmobile expertise which had been carefully developed over a period of months suddenly was downgraded by the shifting of attachments. Every commander instinctively knew that he could do certain things with "his" Hueys that he couldn't write do with "somebody else's."

By the end of 1965, it had become apparent that the "business-as-usual" approach to the aviation training base and helicopter production lines soon would create a major deficit in the Army's inventory of pilots and aircraft. Belated recognition of this fact produced an almost unmanageable surge in the pilot training program and a strain on every helicopter manufacturer's capacity, especially Bell. It would be almost two years before the aviation assets approached the Vietnam aviation requirements. Many Army aviators would find themselves faced with repetitive tours in Vietnam and many operations in Vietnam would be structured around the limitation of available helicopters rather than the more basic