Archie to SAM: A Short Operational History of Ground-Based Air ...

AIRMEN VERSUS GUERRILLAS
Army figures, which acknowledge 2,166 helicopters lost in
combat and 2,075 lost to noncombat causes during the entire
war. There are allegations that the Army disguised the magnitude
of their chopper losses by repairing many damaged machines
that did not deserve such efforts. One source states
that the Communists downed 5,600 Army helicopters, but the
Army successfully retrieved two-thirds of these. One critic puts
total helicopter losses at 10,000. 30
In March 1972, the North Vietnamese attempted to knock
the South Vietnamese out of the war with a massive conventional
invasion. The Communists used weapons heretofore not
seen in the war in the South: tanks, 130 mm artillery, and the
SA-7. The latter was a shoulder-launched, man-portable,
heat-seeking missile with a range of just under two miles and
able to reach almost 10,000 feet. The SA-7 gave the guerrillas
a potent weapon against air power and put the slow-moving,
low-flying aircraft, especially helicopters and propeller aircraft,
at considerable risk. It knocked down a number of helicopters,
observer aircraft, and, in June, an AC-130. Between 29 April
and 1 September, the Communists fired 351 SA-7s at American
aircraft in 221 incidents and downed 17 fixed-wing and nine
rotary-wing aircraft. It took 1.8 missiles to down each helicopter—as
compared to 10 required for each slow-moving fixed-wing
aircraft kill—and 135 missiles to destroy one F-4. The American
Airmen used flares to decoy the SA-7, but most effective of all,
they increased both their speed and altitude. Thus, although
the number of aircraft downed was not great, SA-7s had a
major impact, forcing American aircraft to fly higher where
they were less effective and to put some aircraft, such as the
A-1, out of business. 31
The Communists employed their SA-2s differently during the
1972 campaign. Before their invasion, they deployed SA-2s to
cover the demilitarized zone and on 17 February 1972 fired 81
missiles there that downed three F-4s. In March, once the invasion
started, SA-2s downed two AC-130s over Laos and the
next month an EB-66. The SA-2s also took on B-52s, which
now ventured further north (fig. 62). The Communists fired 23
SAMs on both 21 and 23 April in defense of Vinh and destroyed
a B-52, the first loss to Communist fire. During Linebacker
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