Vietnam Door Gunner’s Unbelievable War Stories | Full Veteran Interview

well I I got there and they assigned us to a platoon and I was put in what they call the Red Knights and uh Red Knights was a uh slick what they call a uh-1 slick which are troop carriers basically and they're the D model version of the UE helicopter a little larger platform they could carry uh supplies and up to about 14 combat soldiers and I was a crew chief and a door gunner on that helicopter depending if we're on the ground or flying and I also had another crew member which was assigned as a door gunner that flew on the opposite side of the helicopter and he and I both did the same thing we protected the helicopter on its flanks with an M60 and our our other weapons that we had and then we had a pilot and a co-pilot and then depending on what we're assigned to do that day uh we were ready for battle basically every day and we'd leave sometimes a dark wouldn't get back until after dark and we were in what we call the fourth core area of Vietnam which is the southernmost part of Vietnam south of Saigon and uh that is a big area it's mostly uh rice rice fields and marshes and if you get over next to Cambodia which is on the Eastern side of Vietnam you start running into some hills and I mean there are just Hills like three or four hundred feet high and they just come out of the grasslands uh you know it's not like there's a whole mountain range they're just spotty and we'd fly anywhere in that area every day patrolling the rivers the Mekong River and look for any activity but most of the activity was at night because that's when the locals turn into the enemy the constantly consequently they called the Vietcong and they were also combined with the North Vietnamese a few of them that basically oversold their missions and they put the fear of God into their families and that's how they got their recruits you know if they didn't join on there join up to fight their battle and they would do harm to their families and a lot of these uh VC were young kids you know they're 12 11 and I mean they come up to here to me on my chest and I used to show pictures of those young kids uh when I came back and said well those look like little kids and I said that's who they were using they were using those kids as part of their battle plan and those kids all they had to wear was just like a loincloth no shoes no shirt and they put a little Satchel around them and they carry their weapon and a night they would form packs and they'd be out in these long Dugout canoes and that's how they got around and so we'd be flying at night with a bug which is a ship with a big light on it and we'd be searching the rivers for any activity and our job was to uh destroy anything that looked like they were hostile and sometimes during the day we'd catch them out in the open and we didn't know sometimes if they're friendly or if they're faux and I assume they would return buyer at you if you'd fire at them they would sometimes not because they usually would be at a disadvantage there might be maybe a dozen of them and we'd be uh in like a flight of about four or five helicopters and when we come in we had lots of I mean pretty heavy Weaponry we had rockets and and m60s and miniguns and uh you know we could do a lot of damage real quick and there's no place to hide sometimes when we get when they get caught out in the open but they're pretty prepared because they've had years and years since the early 50s when they were their grandfathers and their fathers fought in those Wars against the French and the Chinese and when they were in those battles they dug all these trenches and bunkers in the tree lines and also in the jungle areas which in the Delta was fee and far between and those mountains I was describing were also good hiding points because they those little mountains connected with the uh what they call the uh or I have a loss for words it's the highway that the North Vietnamese used to transport food and weapons from North Vietnam down to the South and that was about a thousand miles long and it's uh a road that just basically carves its way through the jungle and the canopy of the Jungle is like 15 to 20 feet above ground so you couldn't hardly see him and they had to use infrared at night to to find uh where they were camping or a lot of their activity but usually the Jets and the heavier planes would come in and they would strafe in Napalm and that's where agent orange came in and uh so I'll tell you right now I'm 100 disabled uh because of Agent Orange and I flew in a lot of areas where the spray actually came up from our rotors and we were engulfed in it and we didn't know that while we were over there and in fact nobody did because they didn't tell us you know that you're going to be out there don't be breathing this we didn't have any kind of mask the only Hardware we had was our clothes and a like a flight helmet and I I contracted some significant heart disease from that chemical and uh that was uh just pretty much day to day and uh I uh I still have a lot of PTSD from some of the activities that we were involved in that get pretty uh I I don't have as many nightmares as I used to have uh when I got out of Vietnam I went through several relationships where I dream and I'd be screaming or jumping up and down on the bed and scaring the Holy Love and Dickens out of my girlfriend and I have one that had two boys and uh I went running across the bed one night and uh I I dreamed that these Viet Cong were under my bed with bungee sticks and they were jabbing them up to the mattress trying to poke me with them so I woke up and I'm literally like this on top of the bed screaming and I went running across the bed and my girlfriend had an artery board at the base of the bed set up and I jumped on that ironing board and it collapsed and I fell into the dresser and bloodied my face and the next uh day my girlfriend says you're gonna have to move I can't deal with this and so that was a typical relationship that I was in when I got out of Vietnam it was a events that caused your PTSD or those events where you guys took casualties or were you were fired what both both uh I was in Vietnam during tet 19 you know actually uh chat was in uh the latter part of January early part of February of 1968 that's probably one of the worst battles all the Americans were engaged in for a period of two or three months and my best friend uh Gerald slingerland died one of the guys that I saw on the Honor Flight over in Vietnam on the wall and did the rub on the wall and his whole crew all four of them died at one time and he was in a different platoon he was in the cobras and I was in the Red Knights but when we were down we were like brothers and I only knew him he died in October era was it October yeah October of 1967 and I got in Vietnam and uh June of 67. so in just a few months but a few months it was like we grew up together and we're both 19 and we'd go out drinking on our day off we go walk into town with some other GI as we go into the bars and we sit there and we'd get drunk and have a good time and sometimes we would miss curfew and we'd have sneak back on the base I mean those are the kind of things we did and uh he uh he died over there with uh David Griffith another 19 year old in fact he was he died day before his birthday his 19th birthday and uh it wasn't really combat related they were out patrolling in their gunship and they were right down on the deck and they thought they were getting fired on from behind and the pilot says I'm going to go back and get those guys they heard this on the radio because there were two helicopters and they kind of witnessed it he did a 180 with his helicopter I mean literally he's flying 100 100 knots and he turns that helicopter around and as he turns it around one of the rotor blades comes loose and flies off and the helicopter just exploded at that point in the ground killed everybody and the second helicure just got there as the thing was on fire there was nothing left of it all they they could see it was one of the rotor blades was several yards way out into the mud but as a defect in the rotor head and if you're familiar with helicopters they have what they call uh it's like a big nut a cap nut that holds everything together and the blades go into like a uh Hub and they've got a bolt to go through and secures everything well that nut had a crack in it apparently and the thing came apart so the whole rotor had just went up into the air and caused it to that was a a casualty other than combat but those guys were in combat every day with us uh face to face with people shooting at them and that's how they died and then uh pool my Gunner uh during tet we were getting mortared that night and everybody was running out to the Airfield and our staging point was a bunker under the command post which was a uh like a 20 or 30 foot high tower control tower and we were to stay down the bottom and my Gunner went out to pick up our m60s out on the flight line and he got right next to the helicopter and uh a motor around an 85 millimeter rocket landed right next to him killed him instantly that was my Gunner pool and uh I got a he flew on that that first helicopter there in that picture he was he was with me for several months and uh he's buried in Kentucky but he's on the wall and uh my my worst experience is flying over to the Cambodian border and we landed in a little it's kind of a I call it a mud hole because we had some Green Berets that were stationed in this little complex surrounded with the Costino wire the only good thing about that little base is they had a great Tiki Bar and every time we got there we were bringing them rations and steaks and stuff for because they they took care of those guys but while we're there we got a call from a captain in the Air Force he was flying one of these the light observation planes and he spotted combatants out by the mountain area and it looked like uh they were hostiles and we were the only helicopter within probably 100 miles that could engage these guys so we jumped in our helicopter and we flew out there pretty soon we spotted the airplane and he's telling us uh he's going to drop smoke on him he's got these rocket pods on the wings of his uh airplane and he shot a smoke grenade in the location of the combatants and so when he did that we could spot him right now because these guys are traveling across this Savannah with a waste High Grass and water and they've got a ox cart with an oxen pulling it and then they got 55 gallon drums in the back and they're armed and we got out there and the captain got clearance for us to kill all these guys so we uh we did that and my captain on the aircraft told us we're going to go down we have to take pictures and get a body count so we went down there and he set the helicopter down right on top of the we didn't get it set down in the water we were just kind of hovering and I didn't tell them but I saw a movement and I jumped out of the helicopter and I went looking for that that guy that was I saw and I couldn't find him at first and then I saw this uh pile of straw or weeds and I knew he was either on the back side of it or he was hunkered down in the water right next to it and all I had was a 38 caliber pistol so I'm walking over there and I've still got my flight helmet on and I just unplugged my intercom I didn't even tell him I got out of the helicopter I just instinctively did that and I'm walking over there and I go around there and here's this guy he's laying on his belly and he turns real quick and I I stopped from shooting him because I noticed his back had a bullet one for my M60 all the way down his back and went through this cap and in through his heel and he was pretty badly wounded so he was just staring at me and he was just shaking so I I picked him up I threw him over my shoulder and as I turned around to go back to the helicopter my helicopter took off they didn't know I jumped out of the helicopter and my Gunner was just focused on what was going on on the other side of the helicopter so he figured I was doing the same thing so it took about maybe 20 minutes to a half an hour before they came back and I'm I'm standing there out in the Middle where all these bodies are and I got this guy on my shoulder and my pilot turns around and he comes back and they see me there and I put the guy in the hill and the helicopter and he's bleeding he's still alive and I put my intercom back on and my Pilot's just screaming me and I said sorry sir I uh just instinctively uh had to had to do that and uh anyway they were going to court martial me and they changed their mind they decided I was you know I was okay but all the way back to our base which was over an hour flight I had to look at that guy staring at me because I he was he gave me the the look that I'll never forget and he probably I don't know he was all had a white hair Gray beard and Asians don't have much hair on their face but he just blared at me the whole time didn't say anything he just looked at me like I was the most evil person there is and I had never got over that but we did the body count and one of the combatants was a little girl and she I don't know how old she was but we left him there for another helicopter come out and pick him up and uh I still have nightmares of that day to this day I still see remember seeing that guy stared at me all the way back don't know if he survived or what happened to him but he was to be interrogated and uh that the rest of the time I was in combat you don't know if you hit anybody uh you know if you get hit because you hear the bullets hit your helicopter and of course if uh you know your helicopter crew gets wounded you know about that but you don't know generally because it's not like you're face to face out there like uh that particular day we were face to face because we just kept doing circles around them and my Gunners I didn't tell you that my door Gunners gunned my door gunner was pool and uh his gun jammed and he came over said Mo you're gonna have to take over because normally the door gunner is the one that does it everything on the right side so on the left side they turned everything around and went counter circles around the the combatants and uh we're I mean we have a lot of ammunition in those m60s are all souped up and they they put out a lot of ammo but they were those guys didn't have a chance uh they they were and and one little tight area and pretty soon they all work and we were just kind of hunting them down until we got them all and except for that one guy but yeah that story uh I was having PTSD and nightmares about that up until I got help a few years ago when I was working as a psych nurse over in Portland at a mental hospital and uh I became a nurse after I went through several years of uh my life going nowhere and I was 42 when I went back to LC but you might want to ask me about that that was pretty interesting yeah yeah well I know you've mentioned that you had an event that kind of triggered that can you tell that yeah yeah well as a nurse I was working at the Oregon state hospital and uh in fact if you ever watched the movie with Jack Nicholson One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that is where I was working and I was a psych nurse they're a travel nurse and I was on a real hardcore uh unit with a lot of men that had TBI you know brain injuries and they're very violent and then right next to us another unit with women same way a lot of them with dual personality or other disorders and they're doing a lot of self-harm cutting on themselves and uh I work sometimes back and forth but I was mostly on the men's unit and then one night I get a call it's about 10 o'clock at night so Jack we need you over here on the women's unit right away we've got a a patient that's chunking and uh we we've called 9-1-1 but we need you over here right away so I went over there and she's a heavyset girl and I was probably the biggest person working that night and I did the Heimlich on her and which she was getting her meds and the nurses aren't supposed to let them handle anything except for a little plastic cup rubber cup when they take their meds because they don't want them to ingest anything that could harm them well one of the meds that she had was in a little vial looks like a little ampoule and about the size of your thumb she grabbed the patient grabbed that out of the female nurse's hand and she stuck in her mouth and she swallowed it and I got stuck in her throat and when I got there she was purple and I was trying to do the heimlich on her and I couldn't get it to dislodge so finally I had her on the floor and I told I mean we don't we need oxygen we need oxygen and Murphy's Law whenever something's going to go wrong it's going to go wrong and in this hospital we had no full O2 bottles they were all empty and nobody had refilled them so they brought three or four bottles up there and she's getting more uh unconscious at the time in fact her eyes are starting to dilate and I knew she was gone and I couldn't give her a CPR because couldn't get any air in our Airway because it's plugged up with this vial and I could see the cap inner throat but it just wasn't coming out and we're still minutes away from the EMTs getting there and I I couldn't revive her she died in my arms right there or actually when the EMT showed up she was 23 years old but that wasn't the first time she did something like that she she went to the ER at uh I think it was a good Sam's in Portland North Portland many times and they have a in fact to this day I think it's still there they have a big board on the wall and uh her name is on it says some something about Rita's wall or something it's all things that she did to hurt herself they got her to the ER uh knives uh pencils and Med bottles all kinds of things over a pair of she'd been in that hospital for well she she was 23 since she was 18. and anyway she died and by the time I got out of the hospital I was supposed to leave the next day for my next assignment which is 13 weeks at another hospital so I had to go through an orientation with the administration that came in and do what something like that happens you know they've got protocol and uh everybody was giving me Assurance you know you did everything you could you know but I knew that all these things that happened contributed to her death and you had a brand new nurse that didn't know that she had to be real careful with that vial allowed her to grab it from her and stick it in her mouth that was number one number two we didn't have any Oxygen available which I'm not sure that would have helped because she couldn't breathe anyway and what could have helped if I would have had a pair of forceps I probably and I'm not trained for that but I probably would have done it I would have tried to pull it out with forceps and uh in fact that's what the EMTs ended up doing but she was already unresponsive and they pronounced her dead on the unit but that triggered all kinds of emotions from Vietnam right after that I started having having moments when I came back at the next hospital and I was crying a lot and pretty soon one of the doctors took me to the VA and I was seen by the triage team there and they hooked me up with uh a team that does a lot of work with vets that come back with PTSD and they have a lot of emotions going on Anger Management all that kind of stuff and I did that for a week and from then on I started getting involved with the veterans and I'm I was uh almost uh 41 42 but I've come a long ways since I was in my 20s and 30s and uh thank God I'm involved with other vets and even here in the local Valley I belong in my patch on the back I'm part of the combat vets Association and also I'm a contributor to the new Vet Center and I belong to the VA Veterans of Foreign Wars and uh a couple other organizations up in the uh or Winchester area and uh getting all that support and I just got my quilt of Valor last summer from the city of Craigmont up on the hill of all places and then I got kept to go on the Honor Flight I said wow life is good

Channel: The Vietnam Experience

Views: 226,389

Keywords: Vietnam war, Vietnam veteran, Vietnam vet, Vietnam war documentary, Vietnam documentary, Vietnam veteran interview, Vietnam vet interview, Vietnam war music, Vietnam music, Vietnam war song, Vietnam war songs, True war stories, Vietnam, Vietnam war movies, Vietnam movies best full movie, Vietnam war edit, Huey helicopter, Door gunner, Huey helicopter Vietnam, Huey helicopter sound, Door gunner full metal jacket, Door gunner scene full metal jacket, Full metal jacket, Platoon

Id: XRHqJ7QzrOc

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023