SIMI VALLEY -- With feats that included chasing after Mexican bandit Pancho Villa to securing Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, the Blackhorse Regiment has served the country for 100 years.

The 11th Armored Cavalry's Veterans of Vietnam and Cambodia will celebrate the centennial anniversary of the regiment's founding with a reunion this week in in Washington, D.C.

"It'll be kind of a release of the stress that is bottled up because of Vietnam," said Simi Valley resident and Vietnam veteran Ken Jankel, who will leave for Washington today with his family.

Jankel, 54, was drafted and served in the regiment's B Troop from 1966 until he was severely wounded in an ambush March 9, 1967. The Purple Heart recipient said the reunion will allow him to renew friendships.

"It's like we are brothers," said Jankel, who plans to bring along an old fatigue shirt bearing his name -- one he wore in Vietnam that his 12-year-old son Devyn will wear at the reunion.

Some 1,200 veterans and their families are expected to attend the event, which will include laying a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and a speech by U.S. Army Secretary Thomas E. White, who served in the regiment. Regimental commanders including Major Gen. William W. Cobb, who led the 11th ACR ashore in Vietnam in 1966, also will attend.

Reunion attendees will be treated to a re-enactment of the 1901 formation of the 11th U.S. Cavalry at Fort Myer in Virginia, where it began 100 years ago.

World War I proved a turning point for the horse-mounted regiment. With the dynamics of modern warfare, it was ordered in the 1930s to look at using mechanized cavalry vehicles.

"It's a milestone for the regiment itself being 100 years old," event spokesman Eric Newton said.

Of the 21,000 troops who served in the Blackhorse Regiment in Vietnam, 768 were killed in combat, 5,761 were wounded and four were missing in action, said Newton, who was 18 when he served with the 11th ACR in Vietnam.

The cavalry's Veterans of Vietnam and Cambodia is one of the fastest-growing and largest veterans organizations in the nation, group officials said. From its start in 1986 with five veterans it is now a group of 19,000 veterans who served in Vietnam.

The 11th Cavalry is noted for leading a successful 1970 attack across the Cambodian border that destroyed North Vietnamese command and supply sanctuaries, according to its Web site. Other notable campaigns included quelling an insurgence in the Philippines in 1902, pursuing Villa in the last mounted cavalry charge in U.S. history and participating in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

The regiment was deactivated March 15, 1994, but the following October was activated again. It is now stationed at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin near Barstow, Calif.