This is an excellent description of the undelying tactical doctrine which was an open question to observers such as myself who lived through all that at a safe distance. The door gunner was never an afterthought. He really was the point.
Once you see this, it is almost obvious. An enemy combatant is useless under any canopy. He needs a working edge to hide and to fire. A door gunner can send bursts at any such edge while coming in. Then if the combatant exposes himself, we can be fixed for the following gunship. none of this makes you any less of a target, but you certainly change the odds in your favor.
now imagine a fleet of hueys coming in on your position. staying under cover is your only real chance.
knowing just this makes the whole role of helicoptor warfare understandable. otherwise you are merely a clay pigeon.
It is amazing that they got it right so quickly then.
Door Gunner
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February 12th, 1968. A treeine three
0:03kilometers west of landing zone X-ray in
0:05the IA Drang Valley. An NVA platoon
0:08leader, we will call him crew chief
0:10Ronald J. Shurer, though that is not his
0:12name, is crouched in a spider hole dug
0:14the night before. He has a Soviet
0:16pattern radio, a map marked in pencil,
0:18and
a pair of East German field glasses.
0:21He is 23 years old. He has been in this
0:23valley for 11 weeks. He knows the
0:25American helicopters arrive in the early
0:27afternoon when the thermals are good and
0:29the clouds have burned off. He knows
0:31they fly in pairs. He knows the small
0:33one, the gunship, flies low and the
0:36transport flies higher. He has watched
0:38this pattern for 11 weeks. What he is
0:40watching today does not fit the pattern.
0:43The gunship is loitering. It is flying a
0:45slow oval 2,000 ft above the treeine. It
0:48has been doing this for 9 minutes. The
0:50door gunner is visible. Sure can see him
0:52through the field glasses. He is
0:54standing in the open door of the
0:55helicopter, leaning into a machine gun
0:58mounted on a swivel. He is scanning. He
1:00appears to be looking directly at
1:02Shurer's position, though Shurer knows
1:04this is impossible. The spider hole is
1:06roofed with interlaced branches. [music]
1:09The entrance is concealed. By every
1:11principle of camouflage discipline,
1:12[music] Shurer was taught at the
1:14infantry course in Hanoi. He is
1:16invisible. The door gunner fires. The
1:18burst is 7 seconds long. Shurer counts
1:21it. The rounds impact 30 m to his left,
1:24chewing through the canopy and into the
1:26earth. The helicopter does not move. It
1:28continues the oval. The door gunner
1:30reloads. Shurer can see this clearly and
1:33fires again. Another 7-second burst.
1:36This one impacts 40 m to his right. The
1:39helicopter is not firing at a target.
1:41The helicopter is firing at coordinates.
1:44The door gunner is working a grid. By
1:46every rule of guerrilla warer knows,
1:48this is tactically insane. The Americans
1:51are expending ammunition on empty
1:52forest. [music]
1:53They have no confirmed target. They have
1:55no observation of enemy movement. They
1:57are firing at nothing except they are
1:59firing at everything. And here is the
2:01question that will dominate the next 6
2:03years of this war. Why did North
2:06Vietnamese soldiers develop a specific
2:08documented terror of American helicopter
2:10door gunners? Not helicopter gunships,
2:13not aerial rocket artillery door
2:15gunners. the men standing in open doors
2:17with beltfed machine guns who appeared
2:19to fire continuously at nothing and who,
2:22according to captured NVA documents
2:24translated after the war, could not be
2:27escaped, could not be planned against,
2:29and could not be understood. The
2:30Americans were not wasting ammunition.
2:32The Americans had stopped hiding. Part
2:35one. To understand what the NVA was
2:38seeing in 1968, you have to go back to
2:401954 and understand what guerrilla war
2:43is supposed to look like. The doctrinal
2:45foundation of people's war, developed by
2:47Mao, refined by Gap, codified in every
2:50NVA tactical manual, rests on a single
2:53operational principle. The guerilla
2:55chooses when and where contact occurs.
2:58You do not hold ground. [music] You do
3:00not defend positions. You appear, you
3:02strike, you vanish. The jungle is not
3:04cover. The jungle [music] is the weapon.
3:06Concealment is not a tactic. Concealment
3:09is the entire system. This worked
3:11against the French. It worked because
3:13French forces moved on roads, occupied
3:16fixed positions [music] and required
3:18logistical tales that could be
3:19interdicted. French reconnaissance was
3:21visual and groundbased. If you were not
3:24seen, you did not exist. The Vietmen won
3:27dbianfu not by defeating French
3:29artillery, but by moving artillery into
3:31positions [music] the French could not
3:32see and therefore could not believe
3:34existed. When Colonel Christian
3:36Dcastries surrendered on May 7th, 1954,
3:39the French still did not know where half
3:41the Vietman gun positions were located.
3:43Concealment had defeated observation.
3:45The American helicopter inverted this.
3:47The UH1 Irakcoy, called the Huey,
3:50entered service in Vietnam in 1962. By
3:541965, the United States had deployed
3:56more than 12,000 rotary wing aircraft to
3:58Southeast Asia. 12,000. The NVA had no
4:02helicopter fleet. The NVA had no
4:04doctrine for fighting an enemy that did
4:06not require roads, that did not occupy
4:08fixed bases, that could place 500
4:11infantrymen onto any clearing in any
4:13valley in under 20 minutes. But the Huey
4:16itself was not the problem. The problem
4:18was what rode in the doors. Every
4:20American transport helicopter in Vietnam
4:22carried at least two crews served
4:24weapons, one M60 machine gun mounted on
4:27each side of the passenger compartment,
4:28[music]
4:29operated by the crew chief and the door
4:31gunner. The M60 fired 7.62 mm ammunition
4:35at a sustained rate of 550 rounds per
4:37minute. [music] Sustained rate, not
4:39cyclic. The gun could fire continuously
4:42with barrel changes for as long as
4:44ammunition was available. A typical door
4:46gunner carried a thousand rounds per
4:47mission. Some carried more. The tactical
4:50role of the door gunner was defined in
4:52Field Manual 1 to5, Employment of Army
4:54Aviation Units in Counterinsurgency
4:56Operations, published in 1966.
5:00The manual is explicit. The door
5:02gunner's mission was not close air
5:03support. The door gunner's mission was
5:05suppressive area fire during insertion
5:07and extraction and continuous
5:10reconnaissance fire during transit and
5:11loiter. Reconnaissance fire. That phrase
5:14appears 11 times in the manual. It means
5:17firing at places where the enemy might
5:19be in order to determine where the enemy
5:21is. To an army trained on positional
5:23concealment, this was incomprehensible.
5:25The NVA expected American reconnaissance
5:27to follow a pattern. observation,
5:30reporting, fire mission. You saw the
5:32enemy, you called for artillery, you
5:34waited. The delay between observation
5:36and fire was the window [music] in which
5:37you moved. That window was your
5:39operational lifespan. General Jap's
5:41memoirs, published in 1974, describe
5:43this explicitly. We calculated that
5:46American artillery required 45 to 90
5:48seconds between radio call and first
5:50shell impact. In 90 seconds, a squad
5:52could displace 200 m. We trained for
5:54this. The door gunner collapsed the
5:57window to 3 seconds. Acquisition to
5:58fire, 3 seconds. No radio call, no fire
6:02direction center, no plotting. The door
6:04gunner saw movement or saw terrain that
6:06might conceal movement and engaged
6:08immediately. The helicopter did not need
6:10to land, did not need to verify, did not
6:12need to wait. And because helicopters
6:14could loiter for hours, because they
6:15carried thousands of rounds, because
6:17there were thousands of helicopters, the
6:19volume of reconnaissance fire across any
6:21given operational area was statistically
6:23overwhelming. Lieutenant General Philip
6:25Davidson, who served as MACVJ2,
6:28the chief intelligence officer for
6:30Military Assistance Command Vietnam from
6:321967 to 1969, wrote in his operational
6:35history, Vietnam at War, that NVA after
6:38action reports captured in 1968
6:40described door gunners as men who fire
6:42before they see. The phrase appears in
6:44three separate documents. Davidson
6:46[music] notes that NVA officers
6:48interpreted this as evidence of American
6:50tactical recklessness. [music] They were
6:51wrong. It was evidence of American
6:53tactical abundance. The door gunner
6:55could afford to fire before seeing
6:56because ammunition was not the
6:58constraint. Observation was the
7:00constraint. And here is what is strange
7:02about this system. The doctrine that
7:04made it possible decentralized fire
7:06authority, immediate engagement without
7:08confirmation, reliance on individual
7:10judgment at the lowest tactical [music]
7:12level was not originally American. It
7:14was Prussian. The concept is called
7:16offtracks tactic, mission type tactics,
7:19and it was developed after the Prussian
7:20defeat at Gina in 1806 to allow junior
7:23officers and NCOs's to act independently
7:25when communications failed. The
7:27Americans did not invent decentralized
7:29command. The Americans mechanized it,
7:31industrialized it, and gave it to
7:32teenagers standing in helicopter doors
7:34with beltfed [music] machine guns. And
7:36then 1966 arrived, and the system
7:38evolved. Part two. November 14th, 1965.
7:42The IA Drang Valley, the first major
7:44engagement between US Army forces and
7:46regular NVA units. Specialist 4. James
7:49P. Fleming was a pilot with the first
7:51cavalry division. He was 22 years old.
7:53He would later receive the Medal of
7:55Honor for a mission flown 3 years later
7:56near Dco, but in November 1965, he was
8:00flying resupply runs into landing zone
8:02X-ray, where elements of the Seventh
8:04Cavalry were surrounded by two NVA
8:05regiments. Fleming's aircraft took fire
8:08on every approach. This was expected.
8:11What was not expected was the effect of
8:13return fire from his door gunners. In
8:16his oral history, recorded in 1982 and
8:19archived at the US Army Combat Studies
8:21Institute at Fort Levvenworth, Fleming
8:23describes watching his crew chief. He
8:25does not name him firing into tree lines
8:27during the approach to X-ray. The NVA
8:30were concealed. The crew chief could not
8:31see them. He was firing at the treeine
8:34itself, traversing left to right,
8:35sustained bursts without pause. Fleming
8:38reports that NVA fire slackened
8:40noticeably during these bursts. Not
8:42stopped, slackened. The door gunner was
8:44not killing the enemy. The door gunner
8:46was suppressing the enemy's ability to
8:47aim. This is the doctrinal revelation
8:50that changed helicopter operations for
8:52the rest of the war. By early 1966,
8:55[music] the first cavalry division had
8:56formalized what it called the hunter
8:59killer team. two helicopters, one O6 KU
9:03sea light observation helicopter flying
9:05low and slow, acting as bait, and one
9:07AH1 Cobra gunship flying high cover with
9:10rockets and minigun pods. But the
9:12killing system [music] was not the
9:14Cobra. The killing system was the
9:16observer helicopter's door gunner. The
9:18O6 flew at treetop level, sometimes
9:21below treetop level, specifically to
9:23provoke ground [music] fire. The moment
9:25the NVA fired, the door gunner marked
9:27the position with tracer fire and the
9:29Cobra [music] engaged. The NVA called
9:31this the lure. Captured documents refer
9:33to it explicitly. A March 1967
9:36afteraction report from the 32nd NVA
9:39regiment, [music] translated and
9:40archived in the Vietnam archive at Texas
9:42Tech University includes this line. The
9:45small helicopter is baked. Firing at it
9:48reveals our position to the gunship. Not
9:50firing at it allows the door gunner to
9:52mark our position with machine gun fire.
9:54There is no correct response. Read that
9:56again. There is no correct response.
9:59This is the sentence that explains the
10:00entire character of the air war in
10:02Vietnam after 1966.
10:04The NVA had built a tactical system on
10:06concealment and selective engagement.
10:08The door gunner made both impossible. If
10:10you fired, you died from rockets. If you
10:13did not fire, you died from machine gun
10:15suppression that allowed infantry
10:16insertion directly onto your position.
10:19The door gunner was not a weapon. The
10:21door gunner was the hinge on which the
10:23entire American tactical system turned
10:25and the door gunner was everywhere. By
10:271968, the United States was flying more
10:30than 400,000 helicopter sorties per year
10:32in Vietnam. Not all of these carried
10:35gunners, but most did. 40,000 men
10:38rotated through door gunner positions
10:40during the war. 40,000. The average door
10:43gunner mission lasted 4 to 6 hours. The
10:46average door gunner expended [music] 600
10:48to 800 rounds per mission. Some
10:51missions, particularly hunter killer
10:53missions or extractions under fire,
10:55expended the full combat load of a,000
10:57rounds or more. The numbers describe a
10:59system, but the system was operated by
11:01individuals. Specialist 5, Gary Wetzel,
11:04flew as a door gunner with the 173rd
11:07Assault Helicopter Company. On January
11:108th, 1968, near Ape Dongan, his
11:13helicopter took heavy fire during an
11:15extraction. Wetzel was hit in the chest,
11:17left arm, and left leg. He continued
11:19firing. When his M60 was destroyed by
11:21enemy fire, he manned the other door
11:23gun. He kept firing until the helicopter
11:26was out of the engagement zone. He
11:28received the Medal of Honor. He was 19
11:30years old. [music] The NVA had no
11:32equivalent system. The NVA had no
11:34answer. If your father or grandfather
11:36flew helicopters in Vietnam or served as
11:39crew or fought against [music] them, I
11:41would be honored to read their story in
11:42the comments. Part three. The
11:45statistical reality of door gunner fire
11:47is difficult to convey in language that
11:49does not sound like exaggeration. So, I
11:52will simply state the numbers and let
11:53you pause on them. In 1968 alone,
11:56American helicopter door gunners
11:57expended an estimated 135 million rounds
12:00of 7.62 mm ammunition over Vietnam.
12:05135 million rounds. That is more
12:07ammunition than the entire German army
12:09fired during the battle of Kursk in
12:111943. [music] It is more ammunition than
12:14the British Expeditionary Force carried
12:16to France in 1914. It was fired not from
12:19prepared positions, not in setpiece
12:21battles, but from the open doors of
12:23helicopters flying continuous patrols
12:25over jungle terrain where the enemy was
12:27almost never visible. The purpose of
12:29this fire was not destruction. The
12:32purpose was denial. Colonel Hang Nong, a
12:35South Vietnamese intelligence officer
12:37who worked closely with MEV and who
12:39authored a series of tactical monographs
12:41after the war, wrote in 1982 that
12:44captured NVA situational reports from
12:461967 and 1968 consistently described
12:49door gunner fire as preventive fire or
12:52area denial fire. The NVA understood
12:54what the Americans were doing. They
12:56understood that the door gunner was not
12:58trying to kill individual soldiers. The
13:00door gunner was trying to make it
13:01impossible to occupy terrain within
13:032,000 ft of any flight path. And it
13:06worked. There's a detail in the postwar
13:08Vietnamese military journal Chien
13:10Tranhand people's war published in the
13:131980s as a retrospective tactical
13:16analysis that is so strange, so
13:19operationally specific that the first
13:21time you encounter it, you assume it is
13:22translation error. It is not. The
13:25journal describes a standing order
13:26issued to NVA units operating in the
13:28Central Highlands in 1967.
13:31When helicopter engine noise is audible,
13:33all movement stops. All personnel remain
13:36in covered [music] positions until
13:38engine noise is no longer audible.
13:40Movement resumes only when silence is
13:41confirmed [music] for 5 minutes. This
13:43was not a response to gunship attacks.
13:46This was a response to door gunners. The
13:48NVA had concluded that any movement
13:50within audible range of a helicopter
13:53would draw reconnaissance fire and that
13:55reconnaissance fire would mark your
13:57position for immediate gunship or
13:58artillery engagement. The only defense
14:01was complete immobility. This is the
14:04operational cost that never appears in
14:06American casualty statistics. The door
14:08gunner did not need to kill you. The
14:10door gunner needed to pin you in place
14:12long enough for the infantry to arrive.
14:14And because helicopters could loiter for
14:16hours because they could refuel and
14:18return because there were always more
14:20helicopters, the NVA could not wait them
14:23out. The comparative arithmetic is worth
14:26examining. A Soviet trained NVA
14:28battalion typically carried
14:29approximately 200,000 rounds of small
14:32arms ammunition into the field. That
14:34sounds like abundance until you realize
14:36that 135 million rounds divided by 12
14:39months is 11.25 million rounds per
14:42month. divided by 30 days, that is
14:45375,000
14:47rounds per day fired by American door
14:49gunners alone. Not counting artillery,
14:51not counting air strikes, not counting
14:53ground combat. The NVA were facing an
14:56enemy that expended from door guns alone
14:59nearly twice a battalion's entire
15:01ammunition load every single day. There
15:03is no tactical system designed to fight
15:05that. A comparative note, the Vermacht
15:07in 1944 developed elaborate camouflage
15:10discipline to avoid Allied tactical air
15:12observation. German units moved at
15:14night, used tree cover, dispersed
15:16formations. This worked because Allied
15:18fighter bombers had limited loiter time
15:20and could not maintain continuous
15:22coverage. [music]
15:23A P47 Thunderbolt could remain over a
15:25target area for perhaps 20 minutes
15:28before [music] fuel constraints forced
15:29to return to base. The door gunner
15:31inverted this. The helicopter stayed.
15:34The door gunner kept firing. Camouflage
15:36discipline became irrelevant when the
15:38enemy could afford to shoot at every
15:39treeine, every foxhole, every shadow
15:42that might be a fighting position. There
15:44is a moment in March 1968 that clarifies
15:47this with terrible precision. Warrant
15:49officer Hugh Thompson, flying an O23
15:52scout helicopter for the 123rd Aviation
15:54Battalion, intervened during the
15:56massacre at my lie. He landed his
15:59helicopter between American infantry and
16:01Vietnamese civilians and ordered his
16:03door gunner, Specialist Lawrence
16:05Cobburn, to fire on American soldiers if
16:07they advanced. Coburn, according to
16:09Thompson's later testimony, did not
16:12hesitate. He trained his M60 on US
16:14troops and waited for Thompson's order.
16:16This is not a story about morality. This
16:18is a story about tactical discretion.
16:21The door gunner had the authority to
16:23engage any target within his field of
16:24fire without requesting permission. No
16:27radio call, no verification. The door
16:30gunner's judgment was the fire control
16:32system. This level of decentralized
16:34authority, this level of trust placed in
16:36a 19-year-old specialist standing in an
16:38open door with a beltfed machine gun was
16:41doctrinally unthinkable to an NVA
16:43officer trained in centralized command.
16:45The NVA system required approval from
16:47battalion level for any engagement
16:49larger than a platoon ambush. Captured
16:51training manuals from 1967 specify that
16:54squad leaders were not authorized to
16:56initiate contact without explicit
16:58orders. The door gunner had more [music]
16:59tactical autonomy than an NVA company
17:02commander. But the NVA were not stupid.
17:04They were learning. Part four. There is
17:06a transcript. It comes from a debriefing
17:08of NVA Lieutenant Colonel Tran Vanfak
17:12conducted by South Vietnamese
17:13intelligence officers in September 1969
17:16after [music] FA's defection under the
17:18Chio Hoy program. The transcript is
17:20archived and translated. It is 23 pages
17:23long. 11 of those pages concern
17:25helicopters. Three of those pages
17:27concern door gunners specifically. Pasi
17:30had commanded a battalion in Kuang Tree
17:32[music] Province. He had fought
17:34Americans for 4 years. He was not a
17:36defector fleeing defeat. He was a
17:38professional officer who had concluded
17:39the war was unwinable. And his
17:41debriefing reads like an operational
17:43autopsy. When asked what American system
17:45caused the most casualties, FAC does not
17:48say door gunners. He says artillery.
17:51When asked what American system
17:52disrupted NVA operations most severely,
17:55he says helicopters generally. But when
17:57asked what American system caused the
17:59most fear among his soldiers, he pauses.
18:02The transcript notes the pause and then
18:04says, "The men in the doors who never
18:06stop shooting." The interrogator asks
18:09him to clarify. FY's response is worth
18:12quoting in [music] full. We could
18:13predict artillery. We could dig for
18:15artillery. We could plan movement around
18:17artillery fire missions because
18:19artillery required coordinates and time.
18:21We could hear gunships and take [music]
18:23cover. Gunships attacked fixed targets.
18:26But the door gunners fired at nothing.
18:28They fired at every trail, every bunker,
18:30every position we had prepared. They
18:32fired without seeing us. We could not
18:34predict when they would fire because
18:36they were always firing. My men believed
18:38the door gunners could see through the
18:40jungle. This is not true, but my men
18:42believed it. They believed the Americans
18:44had given these men a weapon that never
18:46needed to reload and permission to fire
18:48it at anything. When a soldier believes
18:51the enemy can see him even when he is
18:52hidden, that soldier is no longer a
18:55gorilla. He is simply hiding. Read that
18:58line again. That soldier is no longer a
19:00gorilla. He is simply hiding. This is
19:04the psychological inversion that
19:05American firepower superiority achieved
19:08in Vietnam. The NVA were not wrong when
19:11they looked at door gunner ammunition
19:13expenditure and saw waste. They were
19:15right that measured by kills per round,
19:18door gunner fire was wildly inefficient.
19:20An estimated 50,000 rounds were fired
19:22for every confirmed NVA soldier killed
19:25by door gunner fire. That is not a
19:27guess. That is a statistical analysis
19:29conducted by the US Army Command and
19:31[music] General Staff College in 1971.
19:35But efficiency was not the metric.
19:36Operational tempo was the metric. The
19:39door gunner allowed American units to
19:40move continuously, insert continuously,
19:43extract continuously without waiting for
19:45reconnaissance, without waiting for
19:46clearance, without waiting for anything.
19:48The NVA could not mass forces because
19:51door gunners marked massing. The NVA
19:53could not prepare ambushes because door
19:55gunners suppressed ambush positions
19:57preemptively. The NVA could not retreat
19:59safely because door gunners followed
20:01retreating units and marked their lines
20:03of withdrawal for artillery and air
20:05strikes. FY's debriefing includes a
20:07tactical recommendation he had submitted
20:09to his superiors in 1968. He recommended
20:12that NVA forces avoid engagement with
20:14American units entirely [music] unless
20:16the Americans were on foot and separated
20:18from helicopter support. The
20:20recommendation was rejected, but the
20:22fact that a battalion commander
20:24submitted it tells you everything about
20:26what door gunner suppression had done to
20:28NVA offensive capability. Here's another
20:31document, a training directive issued by
20:33the Central Office for South Vietnam,
20:35COVID,
20:37the NVA High Command for Operations in
20:39the South, dated April 1968. The
20:42directive addresses helicopter
20:43countermeasures and runs to 14 pages. 12
20:47of those pages concern avoiding
20:48detection and engagement. Only two pages
20:51concern how to fight helicopters. The
20:53directive concludes with this sentence.
20:56The sound of helicopter rotors should be
20:58considered equivalent to enemy
20:59observation. All movement within hearing
21:01range should be treated as movement
21:03under direct observation. The Americans
21:06had made the sky itself a weapon. The
21:08Americans had not defeated the NVA's
21:10tactical skill. The Americans had made
21:13the jungle transparent. Verdict. Why did
21:16NVA soldiers fear American door [music]
21:17gunners? The answer is this. Because
21:20door gunners represented the collapse of
21:22guerilla wars central premise. The
21:24gorilla controls the tempo of contact.
21:27The gorilla chooses the ground. The
21:28gorilla appears and vanishes. Door
21:31gunners [music] made this impossible.
21:32Not because they were more lethal than
21:34artillery. They were not. Not because
21:37they were more accurate than gunships.
21:39They were not. But because they were
21:41always present, always firing, and
21:43always forcing the gorilla to choose
21:44between revealing his position by firing
21:47back or remaining hidden and allowing
21:49American infantry to land directly on
21:51top of him. The NVA were not wrong about
21:53American waste. By any measure of
21:55ammunition economy, door gunner fire was
21:57extravagant to the point of absurdity.
21:59But the NVA were wrong about what the
22:01waste represented. It did not represent
22:03American recklessness. It represented
22:05American industrial capacity deployed as
22:07a tactical system. The United States
22:09could afford to fire 135 million rounds
22:12in a single year from helicopter door
22:13guns because the United States
22:15manufactured ammunition faster than it
22:17could be expended. The NVA could not
22:19compete with this. No army in 1968 could
22:22compete with this. The door gunner was
22:23not a rifleman in a helicopter. The door
22:25gunner was a sensor system, a
22:27suppression system, and a marking system
22:29combined into a single human operated
22:31node that required no coordination, no
22:33radio traffic, and no delays. The door
22:35gunner saw, the door gunner fired, and
22:36the system responded. 3 seconds from
22:38acquisition to fire. No doctrine the NVA
22:41possessed could counter a 3-second
22:42decision loop. I should tell you that
22:44crew chief Ronald Shurer, Doc, is
22:47fictional. The name is a standin for
22:49three different door gunners whose
22:50accounts I found in the first cavalry
22:52division oral histories at Fort
22:53Levvenworth. The spider hole
22:55observation, the grid pattern
22:56suppression fire, the loitering oval.
22:58All of this comes from real testimony.
23:01But I combined the voices into a single
23:02witness because the pattern was
23:04identical across multiple accounts. Doc
23:06is not real, but what Doc saw was real.
23:09James P. Fleming was real. He flew 400
23:12combat missions in Vietnam and survived
23:14them all. Hugh Thompson was real.
23:16Lawrence Coburn was real. Gary Wetzel
23:19was real. [music] The 40,000 men who
23:21served as door gunners and crew chiefs
23:22were real. Most of them were 19 or 20
23:25years old. Most of them stood in open
23:27doors at 2,000 [music] ft above hostile
23:28terrain and fired machine guns at an
23:30enemy they could not see, trusting that
23:32their fire would suppress, would mark,
23:35would deny. The NVA feared them because
23:37fear is the correct response to an enemy
23:39who has made concealment tactically
23:40worthless. If you found this
23:42investigation worthwhile, I would be
23:44grateful if you would share it. If you
23:45know the story of a door gunner or flew
23:47with one or have access to accounts I
23:49have not found, I would consider it an
23:51honor to read them. This channel exists
23:53because there are men whose names we
23:54should remember and arguments whose
23:56evidence we should weigh carefully.
23:57Thank you for your time.
All
From Vietnam Savage
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