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The Dark Life of Vietnam Door Gunner



The Dark Life of Vietnam Door Gunner

If you look at old footage of Vietnam, you’ll see the doors of the Huey wide open and a soldier tightly holding a machine gun. They looked calm and collected, but you can see in their eyes that these men had been through the horrors of war. Today, you’re going to see just how dangerous their job in Vietnam really was, and why they still had to do it no matter what.

Chapters:

00:00 – Calm faces, hidden fear
02:50 – The war made for helicopters
04:01 – Flying into ambush
05:27 – Birth of the door gunner
13:29 – The price before the Cobra

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31 Comments

  1. Robert Jordan author of the wheel of time series was apparently a door gunner in vietnam. Its really interesting to me to see how those experiences and performing from that military role affected his writing and characters especially Perrin (a character who is constantly at odds with his own animalistic rage and a man who just wanted to live a peaceful life) who Jordan said was the character most like himself

  2. My uncle spent multiple tours as a UH1 Crew Captain and went through some seriously insane shit.
    He didn't talk much about it, but when he did, I understood why he drank so heavily right up until the day he died from Agent Orange exposure.

  3. You should make a video about the infant system that the hughes corporation made for the Huey gunships. My uncle Lynn was a door gunner on one of those Huey gunships equiped for night fighting, that's what the infant system was, Iroquois night fighting and night tracking. He was in the 235th assault helicopter company, they called themselves the delta devils, and they operated mainly in the Mekong delta and a little west of there. Hence the name. But learning more about that technology would be pretty cool to see, and it'd fit perfectly into your videos about the topic.

  4. Have a friend who is 77 now retired door gunner. 800 plus mission. Three tours. Search and destroy stuff. Out of the 20 that signed up for the job , only he survived. Story he can talk about are crazy. I hope one day his full story can be shared and not redacted. Funny story he got to go up in a chopper 15 years ago on base, got in jump seat and fired off some rounds. Him telling the story you could see the spark in his eyes.

  5. US is the only country where they'll go fight a useless war on some random farmers, come back and make movies about the poor soldiers coming back traumatized after having murdered hundred of innocent people

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