My best friend and hunting buddy was a Cobra pilot in Vietnam.
He died 12 years ago, one week after finally receiving a silver star for retrieving a downed Cobra Gunship from behind enemy lines. He hiked several miles to where the chopper was down, got it started and although leaking oil, limped it back to base in a dozen or more small hops. He could not fly it more than a half mile at a time without over heating, so he took it in half mile steps, landed it and waited for the engine to cool enough to continue, which was just about as long as it took for the VC to catch up to him on foot between hops.
Zulu Cobras (AH-1Z Viper) are my favorite. I saw two landing at the USMC base at SFO. My daughter had her face pressed against the glass since she love helicopters so much.
There’s something about the 4-blade rotors that make the gunship so much more insidious-looking.