Chas Dearie threw up his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. He had just flipped a few bottles of drinking water from a US Navy helicopter to haggard villagers plodding along a tattered ribbon of road flanked by total devastation.

The villagers raised their hands in thanks, but the water, biscuits and other aid rushed to tsunami-shattered communities along the Indonesian coast yesterday were still just droplets in an ocean of need.

"There is nothing left to speak of," said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Vorce, of San Diego, California, among more than 30 helicopter pilots flying from the USS Abraham Lincoln to the northern tip of Sumatra, where last Sunday's tsunami took its greatest toll.

The giant aircraft carrier and four other US Navy vessels, crewed by more than 6,500 sailors and Marines, Saturday moved into position off Indonesia to begin one of the largest US military operations in Asia since the Vietnam War.

From a low-flying helicopter, the scene for some 110 kilometres down the shoreline from the city of Banda Aceh was that of a veritable skeleton coast. Bodies were still floating at sea a week after the tragedy, which killed more than 80,000 in Indonesia and an estimated 150,000 throughout southern Asia and Africa.

One after another, communities well-rooted for generations had been obliterated in moments. Bleached concrete pads was all that was left of most substantial structures. Nothing was visible of flimsier village houses except for scattered corrugated iron roofs crumpled up like paper.

The returning pilots and crewmen, bleary-eyed after seven hours of non-stop flying, struggled to find words to describe the scale of the devastation.

"You can't really explain. There used to be towns and cities there. All the people once had homes and lives and now there is nothing. No homes, no food, no water," said Scott Wickland, of Cumberland, Wisconsin. The petty officer first class, trained in combat search and rescue, said the food they handed out to survivors would last a night, and they would have to return again and again.

Only a few mosques survived intact, rising eerily out of bare wastelands.

Thousands of neat rice paddies that carpet the Aceh landscape in multi-hues of green had been peeled away, replaced by fetid swamps, mud, mangled tree trunks and sea slime.

The thundering wall of water, powered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake centred not far away, had clawed its way through the towns, palm groves, paddies and even up hillsides, surging into inlets to penetrate the interior.

When a helicopter landed at Kuede Teunom, a town 110 kilometres Southeast of Banda Aceh, several hundred people waited anxiously for relays of Indonesian soldiers to quickly unload crates of biscuits and water. Rifles slung across their backs, the troops had moved in to prevent the hungry mobs which rushed the helicopters on Saturday.

When a seaman handed out a few sticks of candy, a brief tussle ensued.

About 8,000 people, from a population of 18,000, were killed in the town, Indonesian journalist Alfinn Hanzah estimated. Hanzah, from the Pena Indonesian News Service, had been there for two days and said the residents urgently needed rice, medicine and gasoline.

No building in Kuede Teunom, flanked by a broad and now lifeless coastal plain, survived the tsunami intact. At its core, around what was once the marketplace, three partially ruined houses still sported satellite dishes.

The rooftop of the fourth was studded with potted bright red flowers. A nearby mosque still carried its roof and minaret, but the insides were gutted and awash with mud.

A few minutes later, the helicopter lifted off as another descended from the sky.

Dearie, a petty officer second class from Sulphur, Louisiana, looked out from the chopper's open door for the knots of villagers hugging the only stretches of low-lying dry land, the largely destroyed road hugging the coastline.

Others were huddled together on hillocks behind the coastal plain, some having received bright orange and blue tents from international agencies. Others appeared to be living in the open.

On the return flight to Bandah Aceh, the helicopter came down several times, Dearie dropping off the last of his water bottles for small groups of people running toward him.

Another helicopter evacuated five men stranded on a stretch of highway surrounded by fields of water. Gaunt and delirious, they had been walking for five days and were still some 65 kilometres from the nearest help, said Lt. John Cauthien of San Mateo, California.

Back at Banda Aceh, a medical team told the pilots that the group probably would not have lived through another day.