Kien Long
The first major action for RANHFV '70 occurred on October 11 near Kien Long, on the eastern fringe of the U Minh about fifty miles south-west of Can Tho where an enemy force thought to be a battalion with a heavy weapons company was entrenched in a treeline. EMU aircraft landed four times under heavy mortar and B40 rocket fire to insert ARVN troops. Five of the helicopters were hit and one, with
LEUT B.G Abraham as co-pilot, was forced down nearby. The enemy withdrew to the U Minh as night fell, leaving twenty-six dead in the field. The ARVN troops suffered eighty-eight casualties.
Near the end of the month, the direct combat support helicopter assigned to Dinh Tuong was badly damaged while parked on a road when a small boy threw a rocket canister into its tail rotor.
Dinh Tuong province remained the major area of enemy activity in Military Region 4 during November. The Viet Cong continued with the pattern of night attacks which they had established three months earlier by harassing small outposts on moonlit nights to probe their defences in preparation for later attacks during moonless nights.
On 5 November, the EMU gunship platoon killed three Viet Cong in the Ca Mau peninsula and the following day, near Mo Cay, Kien Hoa province, two Viet Cong were killed by the crew of the command and control helicopter and one by the Taipans.
Taipan gunship in action
Early in the morning of 22 November, armed Viet Cong were detected attempting to land from a junk onto a beach in Kien Hoa province. The EMUs took ARVN troops to the area and the command and control aircraft killed one Viet Cong. The main target of Viet Cong attacks in December was the South Vietnamese pacification program, by which the government sought to extend education, health and social welfare schemes to the rural population.