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The story of airmobility has been long—so my summary will be short. I've tried to interject my honest opinion where it seemed appropriate in the text. Only a few final observations are necessary.

For the reader who has borne with me through this account of ten years of airmobility in Vietnam and the fundamental decisions in the decade preceding that, the obvious question is, "What does all of this mean?" The one inescapable conclusion is that the airmobility concept is irreversible. The thousands of officers who have learned to think and fight and live in three dimensions will never allow themselves to be restricted to two dimensions in the future. Airmobility will change and grow, but it is here to stay.

In the first chapter we learned that the growth of the airmobile concept did not take place in the framework of guerrilla warfare. It was conceived out of the necessity to disperse on the modern battlefield under the threat of nuclear weapons and still retain the ability to mass quickly for decisive actions, then disperse again. The actualities of Vietnam have since obscured these origins and have led many people to the assumption that airmobility was designed for and limited to counter-guerrilla contingencies. The very nature of the terrain in Vietnam with its jungles and mountains has led many to connect helicopter operations to this type of terrain. Indeed, the opposite is true. Airmobility worked in Vietnam in spite of the tremendous problems of working in the jungles and the mountains of an undeveloped country. The helicopter overcame the obstacles of limited landing zones, primitive road nets, restricted observation, and high density altitudes as no other vehicle could. But, in the open countryside of Europe or a desert in the Middle East, the airmobile force has far greater flexibility and many more options than even the armored forces of Rommel in North Africa. Vietnam represented only a fraction of the possibilities for airmobile tactics.

A casual observer of Army aviation in Vietnam could easily have arrived at the conclusion that there was no need for special-