Life of a Door Gunner | Vietnam Veteran

66 to 1972 I was an airfield defense guard I had my first experience of Iroquois helicopters at Fairburn Air Force Base being what they called a tea bag winched up and down from the parade ground and a few rides in helicopters while we were there I went to Vietnam a couple of times and my second trip in 1970-71 I spent as a door gunner I volunteered as a nun quite a number of airfield defence guards had to become door Gunners and in fact the helicopter beside me here my second day of training as a door gunner was on this very helicopter and if you can picture a taking off from Nui Dat with 15 people on board we're quite literally getting ready to go and we kept on getting people coming up Americans and Australians where you're going where you're going oh we're going here we're going there we're going everywhere oh I'm going to this particular place can I get a lift yeah yeah climb on board now of course we hooked up to the fuselage of the aircraft boy what we called a monkey strapped big strap buckled around our waist and hooked up to the fuselage in effect one of my mates on what we called a hashing trash taking hot boxes of food out to a fire support base on the way back an empty hot box fill out he's skipper ask him to move forward and make sure nothing else fell out well he fell out so he's got his safety a monkey strapped on hooked up to the fuselage dangling below the skids and took or I believe the copilot the crewman and a passenger to drag him back up and I'm told that he was quite visibly shaken and still trembling after a few beers in the Airman's club later on that day it's strange that I have a great deal of difficulty climbing up ladders yet I had no problem at all in sitting in a helicopter and doing the job on one of the battalions returning home I was the gunner on a chopper that did 27 trips to the ship from from nuit debt load up with troops fly out drop them off fly back to new we did back pull back forward so that was a big day I became qualified as a door gunner on gunships when it came torn - providing support to army units that were in strife if we were on the gunships we would go out we'd be getting indications of where to lay down our suppression fire the pilots got very very good at operating the Gatling machineguns and the rocket pods and we would linger as long as we could what the guys were in strife until such time as he the fuel or ammunition forced us to go back the Iroquois would noise coordinate included obviously medevacs I had one where we were hovering above the jungle I was the gunner crewman was winching up a wounded patient from the combined Anzac company the contact was still happening down below what we as the crew didn't know what as we were carrying on with our tasks was that a pair of American Cobra gunships had been authorized to come in and do firing passes there were some very exploitive deleted comments when they opened up with their rockets and machine guns as we didn't know what the devil was going we're concentrating on what was happening the medevacs landing pad at number one Hospital at Bank L was named vampire pad so if you were heading into vampire pad they knew that you had some seriously wounded people on board some of them didn't make it of course but then of course the medevacs would happen with the c-130s taking to butterworth and then back on to Australia and one of the other tasks was a thing called sniffer aircraft rigged up like this they had a meter box in the fuselage pipes going out onto the skids they would bring air into the machine it could read the air and the components in it and if there was smoke or sulfur that might indicate an enemy camp another flight back from Nui Dat as a piano we within about 5 to 10 minutes or five minutes of Nui Dat we would disarm the guns as I completed doing that I looked up and there was a pair of South Vietnamese sky raid a propeller driven aircraft flying past the left of the aircraft and the closest part to me had this huge grin on and I'm thinking to myself Oh My heavens if he had been an enemy I was gone but he just smiled and waved [Music] we did a lot of support to the SAS amongst other things apparently they had some pretty good parties although I never went to one but quite a few of my mates did I was the gunner on the helicopter the board out the last SAS Patrol and when we picked them up they'd been in water up to about the thighs for quite some time clearing the area and making sure that everything was secure if they got bumped they wanted to be out of the area very very quickly they did have a very very good working relationship with this quadrant sadly it was a member of the SAS I'm not sure whether he was a signaler or a trooper one of the six that was missing in action at the end of the Vietnam conflict they'd been in strife helic no one's got an helicopter had come across they couldn't land so they'd thrown ropes down something the patrols had practice many times hook onto the rope and away you go unfortunately with this gentleman and something went wrong he fell about 60 meters and he couldn't be recovered it was about 17 years ago that an army team located his body along with the three other soldiers that were missing in action in Vietnam my time with nine squadron was a little bit hectic during the six months I was there we lost at least five helicopters one in which one of my mates on my same airfield defence guards caught was a crewman and he was medevac back to Australia the skipper of that aircraft and the gunner had been killed the copilot stayed in Vietnam although he'd been injured he recovered and went back flying it was a good time but when those two aircraft got shot down I started to wonder what the hell I was doing me I did have subsequent interaction with Iroquois at one time up at Butterworth as a supplier we done the flight suit again for an air display up there and fired some blank rounds from the Gunners as the gunner one made Peter stayed with helicopters post-vietnam sadly in 1974 on a flood relief mission flying out of Amberleigh he was on a helicopter of the crashed somewhere out the other side of Warwick he was killed instantly the skipper of the aircraft gentleman named reg van Leuven died in hospital the next day I'd flown with both of them in Vietnam and you know you survived a a warzone and come back and get killed in a peace mission oh just sorry the the emblem the emblem for the squadron goes back to its days as a virtually a naval cooperation squadron and albatross was the callsign for the slicks so in Vietnam so you might have a fly - 4 so 0 1 0 2 0 3 0 4 that sort of stuff that's it I'm out of I'm out of Verve

Channel: jachin

Views: 3,374,462

Rating: 4.8842616 out of 5

Keywords: vietnam war, huey, veteran, emotional, story, documentary, gunner, pilot, jets, uh1, sas, australia, raaf, vietnam, stories, interview, ww2, soldier, helicopter, aircraft, 1960s, 1970s, battle, combat, footage, war, music, door gunner, medevac, cobra, australians in vietnam, usaf, dustoff, war footage vietnam, air force 2021, cinematography, film, filmmaking, cinematic, anzac

Id: caLuALEpVSM

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SupremeReader]

He looks like the stereotypical meme Australian.

[u/THISTASTESLIKEROB]

....was Australia in Vietnam?