Apache Copters: Deadly Havoc in the Dark of Night : Weapons: Using night-vision sights, air cavalry visits devastation on Iraqi troops behind the lines.

Through the powerful night-vision gun sights, they looked like ghostly sheep flushed from a pen--Iraqi infantrymen bewildered and terrified, jarred from sleep and fleeing their bunkers under a hellish fire.

One by one, they were cut down by attackers they could not see or understand. Some were blown to bits by bursts of 30-millimeter exploding cannon shells. One man dropped, writhed on the ground, then struggled to his feet; another burst of fire tore him apart. A compatriot twice emerged standing when shot at. As if in pity, the U.S. Army attackers turned and let him live.

For the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps, the ground war had begun earlier. It was carried straight to the enemy in the blackness of night, at 50 feet above the sand, by the Army’s longest punch: the fast, deadly and controversial AH-64 Apache attack helicopter.

Then, upon the Apaches’ return to forward attack bases--like here, with the 5th Squadron of the 6th Cavalry, the Knight Raiders--the evidence of this early ground fighting is displayed in startling, sharp, intensely violent videotapes from gun cameras.

The $10-million-plus Apaches are night fighters and tank killers. Their pilots are guided by an infrared optical system that turns blackness into a bright phosphorescent daylight in which you can all but read the expressions of shock on the faces of the Iraqi soldiers as they are ground up by cannon rounds and an ugly sampler of rockets.

For those who try to stay in bunkers, laser-guided Hellfire missiles are launched to an altitude of a half-mile, from where they arc almost straight down onto the target.

In the briefing tent, the officers play the tapes and a hush falls over the room. Even hardened soldiers hold their breath as the Iraqi soldiers, as big as football players on the television screen, run with nowhere to hide.

These are not bridges exploding or airplane hangars. These are men.

“We’re out there to kill their tanks and trucks, to harass and demoralize their troops,” said Lt. Col. Randy Tieszen, a squadron commander from Rapid City, S.D. “We’ve been here since August. We’ve waited a long time for this.”

Tieszen rides in the front seat of the Apache, working an arcade of weaponry and directing his squadron attack. Behind him, peering over his helmet, sits the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Ron Balak, of Beemer, Neb.

The next phase of the Persian Gulf War may be the greatest tank battle in a half-century. But the soldiers who fly the Apaches believe they will kill half the Iraqi tanks from their hovering position, low and off in the distance.

And with readiness reported at high levels for the complicated and often-doubted Apache, their pilots are growing increasingly confident.

Balak--sitting in his flight suit, the zipper shiny from wear, a .38-caliber revolver slung over his shoulder--described his first combat mission in a 20-year flying career: “For almost five months, we’ve been leaning forward to do this job. . . . You always envision some scenario how combat will be. But I just didn’t envision going up there and shooting the hell out of everything in the dark and have them not know what the hell hit them. . . .

“A truck blows up to the right, the ground blows up to the left,” he said. “They had no idea where we were or what was hitting them.

“When we got back, I sat there on the wing, and I was laughing,” he added. “I wasn’t laughing at the Iraqis. I was thinking of the training and the anticipation. . . . I was probably laughing at myself. . . . I laid there in bed and said, ‘OK, I’m tired, I’ve got to get to sleep.’ And then I’d think about sneaking up there and blowing this up, blowing that up.”

Later, he recalled, “a guy came up to me, and we were slapping each other on the back and all that stuff, and he said, ‘By God, I thought we had shot into a damn farm. It looked like somebody opened up the sheep pen.’ ”

Before the war, the Apache was high on the “troubled” list of U.S. weapons programs. Its reliability was so often challenged that even some pilots said they had their doubts about the craft. But now, with around-the-clock maintenance available and a limited combat role, thus far the Apache is slowly gaining respect.

As designed, the gunship represents not just advanced technology but a complete reversal of Army ground tactics. In Vietnam, the Americans fought during the day and went home or holed up later. The night belonged to the enemy.

But, beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating into the mid-1980s, Army doctrine emphasized night fighting. Originally, the idea was that a smaller U.S. force with night-fighting capability could hold off a larger Soviet force in the event of a European war. Now, in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Army believes its advantage is greater because the Iraqis reportedly have little sophisticated means of carrying the battle past sunset.

So the low-slung, wasp-like Apaches wait out the sunlight hours on the ground, spread wide and far across the hardpan desert here along the front. Their crews live nocturnal lives, too. With the moon, the men, most of them young warrant officers--the top of their flight classes, for this is the elite of Army aviation--spring to life, heading north in their machines of death.

This report was reviewed by military censors.

THE APACHE ATTACK HELICOPTER

The Army’s fast, deadly and controversial AH-64 Apache attack helicopter has made its mark in the Persian Gulf. It fired some of the first shots of the war, knocking out Iraqi early-warning radar:

COST: $10 million plus

WHAT: Night fighters and tank-killers

HOW: Pilots are guided by infrared optical system, which turns blackness into a phosphorescent daylight

WEAPONS: 30-mm cannon, laser-guided Hellfire missiles

BACKGROUND: Since going into production in 1982, the Apache has had a history of mechanical and logistical problems. Its reliability was repeatedly questioned. But its role in the Gulf has helped it gain respect.