The TERRIFYING First 30 Days Every Vietnam Door Gunner Faced 

The TERRIFYING First 30 Days Every Vietnam Door Gunner Faced 

You’re 19, sitting in an open doorway a thousand feet above Vietnam. There are no doors. There never was a door. The wind is blowing at a speed of one hundred miles per hour. Two thousand rounds of ammunition lie between your boots, and only one nylon strap holds you up. A few weeks ago you got off the plane and the men returning home looked at you as if you were already a ghost because everyone knew that number.

They said that a gunner lives for five minutes. This number is also a ghost. The records tell a stranger and worse story. This is not a myth. This is what the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association casualty records, the Coffelt casualty database, military doctors, and the men themselves who sat in that hole testify to.

So who was really hanging in that door? Probably not the one you imagine. Most people imagine a teenager who was accidentally captured, given a gun, and pushed out over the jungle. The Huey crew consisted of four people. Two pilots in the front and two privates in the back, one on each door. Here’s a detail that almost everyone misses.

 One of these two men was usually the crew commander, and he was not a passenger. He was the owner of this aircraft. He was a trained mechanic who kept the machine flying, and he flew it because it was his. The man at the other door was the second shooter. And it is here that folk history has a grain of truth. At the beginning of the war, both positions were occupied by specially trained crew members.

Later, due to a shortage of men, this second position was sometimes filled by a volunteer from the infantry or auxiliary units. A person who crossed over for flight money or to escape the swamp, with almost no shooting training. A man named Nicholas Carter took just such a path. He arrived at the 129th Assault Helicopter Company as a mechanic, got tired of turning nuts, volunteered to fly, and was given an onboard machine gun.

 According to his own words, he was taught to repair a helicopter , not to fight from it. There was even a formal school for airborne gunners at places like Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. So, the completely unprepared guy is mostly a myth. Remember what a veteran named Tony Lawless said. People ask what he was doing there, and he usually says he was just a gunner.

 But in reality he was the crew commander. Now let’s go back to those 5 minutes. They are everywhere. Look up the life expectancy of a gunner in Vietnam and you will be told over and over again that it is 5 minutes, and that this figure is taken from Time magazine. There is one problem. No one can find her.

 Look for the article itself, the issue, the date, the sentence—they simply don’t exist. Even the reference pages that repeated this quietly label it as a legend. A story without any reference. There is a second number that is intertwined with this one. 19 minutes. She is descended from a helicopter pilot named Lou Jennings, who named his memoir after her.

 But if you read his own book, he calls it a rumor. Something he heard about at the time. This points to an aviation magazine from 1968 , and this source is also unverifiable . And pay attention to what it describes. Pilots, not gunners.  A completely different job. Merged into one and the same legend. Then 2 weeks and 13 to 30 days appear.

 Numbers that appear even on real memorial pages dedicated to the dead . And again there is nothing under them. Each version points to the same thing. An exact, reliable number. And nothing confirms it. So if these folk figures are empty, what do the real records say? This is where the story takes a turn. And it relies on two databases that most of those viral videos never opened.

The first is a database of losses maintained by the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association. Created over decades by a veteran named Gary Rausch. It is organized by aircraft , by tail number, incident by incident, and contains thousands of records. Although its authors admit that it only covers about half of what happened.

The second is the Coffelt database. Started by a Kansas lawyer named Richard Coffelt. And now it is stored in the National Archives . Its advantage is accuracy. It can establish a person’s affiliation with a company. But here’s a conclusion that quietly refutes the premise of a terrible first 30 days. None of the databases, not even the Pentagon’s main casualty file, records the day a person arrived in the country.

There is no start date. There is no arrival field, which means you can’t calculate how many people died in the first 30 days, or the first week, or the first mission. Because the number you would need was never written down. Neither for the onboard gunners nor for anyone else. Think about this for a moment, because it quietly reframes the whole question.

 The famous statistic that recruits die the fastest comes from a separate study of ground warfare conducted by a Pentagon analyst named Thomas Thayer, and it was built around infantry. This was never an indicator of the helicopter crew. So that measured, marked first month does not exist. He never was. The clock everyone is referring to has never ticked.

 This does not mean at all that the work was safe. Pay attention, because this is where the myth turns everything upside down . The truth doesn’t need those 5 minutes. It’s already heavy enough on its own. If we sum up the helicopter war, the numbers are staggering. According to casualty data compiled by the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, helicopter operations claimed the lives of approximately 6,175 Americans.

 That’s almost one in ten of all Americans killed in this war. They died only during helicopter operations . Time magazine, reporting on these same records in 2016, directly stated: about 5,000 aircraft were destroyed. And among those who flew professionally, more than 2,000 pilots and about 2,700 flight engineers and gunners died.

Realize this. The people in the back died in greater numbers than the pilots in the front. And the earliest accurate data we have suggests the same thing.  A US military aviation doctor named Frank Keel counted every helicopter death through the end of 1965. His count was 194 Americans. And when he classified them by position, it turned out that gunners and flight engineers together died in almost the same number as pilots with co- pilots.

 The doorway was not a safe place. It was a place with a machine gun and no walls around it. So the danger was quite real. The lie was only in the form of this danger. Because the real danger was never the countdown. It was a constant risk, repeated day after day. Think about how these people actually died .

 Not in one blurry mission approaching the 5- minute mark, but over hundreds of them . The helicopter rewrote the entire mathematics of war.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund offers one apt comparison. An infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II participated in approximately 40 days of combat over 4 years. In Vietnam, thanks to helicopters, the average infantryman experienced about 240 days of combat in just one year.

 Crews would shuttle these men back and forth again and again, sometimes making up to a dozen assaults a day. According to the Pilots Association itself, the Huey fleet alone has flown over 10 million hours. Each of those hours was a chance to get hit. The worst was the short finale, the last seconds of the approach, when the helicopter almost stopped, low, heavy, and unable to dodge.

 That’s when the earth opened fire. Nicholas Carter, the flight engineer we met earlier , said that a helicopter entering a landing zone under fire is just a big target that everyone is shooting at. You wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. So, those who survived were not in a race against time. They overcame difficulties zone after zone until their year of service ended.

 Those who didn’t survive mostly lost heads or tails on a normal day that turned fatal in an instant , and then went back to working at the door. The link in the description contains a full list of sources for this video. And next to it is a book I wrote about the MACVOG fighters, those who infiltrated across the border into Laos and Cambodia.

 It is based on primary documents , just like this video. If you are interested in the secret war, this book is exactly what you should read next. So what about those first few weeks that the title refers to? Here’s an honest answer, and honesty is the main goal of this channel.  A new crew member did not immediately fall under the machine gun.

 He would arrive at a distribution center, usually a place like Bien Hoa , and pass through a replenishment battalion before being sent to his unit. Then he joined an attack helicopter company and learned the job the only way possible: in the air, on board, next to the flight engineer. Nicholas Carter accurately described this system.

People were not sent in whole units. They came one by one, individually, to the companies , where experienced fighters were constantly sent home, and newcomers were constantly starting over . Was that first period dangerous? Almost certainly.  The inexperienced shooter didn’t yet know how to read the tree line, know when to open fire, or understand what it felt like to be approaching a hot spot.

 But here’s what the archives don’t give us . There is no wave of first- hand accounts from onboard gunners describing the first 30 days as some kind of separate, defining ordeal. Most of them are talking about the entire service in general and the drop-off areas, not the calendar. So we won’t invent a countdown that the fighters themselves never described.

The fear was real.  The 30-day countdown is something that the storytellers added later . So imagine the tools of the trade, because two of them have their own myths. The primary weapon was the M60 machine gun, and crews used it in two ways. On transport helicopters, it was mounted on a fixed mount.

 On combat helicopters, it was often hung on an elastic cable so that the gunner could extend it over the skids and even fire under the helicopter.  The official ammunition consisted of several hundred rounds. The crews completely ignored this number. They set up large boxes and took about 2,000 rounds of ammunition because, as one American Rifleman crew member said, they would rather die than allow themselves to run out of ammunition.

 Next— seat belts, what you saw at the beginning. This single nylon ribbon. You could hear that the gunners were tied or even chained to the plane, like prisoners chained to a cannon. This is not true, and it is the exact opposite of the true purpose. This tape was a lifeline , and it existed to give them freedom.  A gunner tied to the floor could extend far out of an open door, hang over the rail, and cover sectors he couldn’t reach from a chair.

 It wasn’t a leash. It was the opposite. And another fact that turned out to be true. The crews were actually sitting on their bulletproof vests. They were issued a breastplate, which the men called a ” chicken plate,” and since the killing fire usually came from below, many riflemen would tuck this plate under their seats instead of wearing it to protect the part of their body that was being targeted.

This is not folklore. This is recorded in the documents. So discard the myths, and what remains will not be statistics. This is a young man who quickly learns that everything depends on luck. We keep coming back to Nicholas Carter because he lived the journey that this video is about. Mechanic, then gunner, then crew chief.

 All this in one term of service. He will tell you that most of Vietnam was routine . Transportation of supplies, regular flights. And then he will tell you about the other 10%. But there was that 10% of pure terror: “I’m not going to get out of here.” And 10% of the time you see other helicopters that didn’t make it out.

 Which flew into the landing zone and remained there as, you know, burning wreckage. Sometimes the crew was selected, sometimes not. That is, this is a combat landing. This is war. And you quickly realize, especially in helicopters, that it’s all luck. You’re either lucky today or you’re not. This is the truth that numbers can never contain.

 Even 5 minutes. Luck stretched over a year of flights to the landing zones. Carter returned home. His friend, a man who had been planning to fly for 20 years, didn’t. And Carter carried this burden for a long time before he realized that it was never his burden. So, here’s the honest answer to the question in the title.

 The horrific first 30 days, as a countdown that began with the arrival of the machine gunner , were never real. No record kept such an account. Those 5 minutes were a ghost, and the people who repeated it were mourning something real with a false number. Because real history never needed that number. Approximately 2,700 crew commanders and gunners did not return home.

They died in the doorway with a machine gun, a nylon belt, and no walls around them. One landing pad after another until their luck ran out or their year was over. There never were doors. This part, at least, has always been true. If you want more history told based on facts, not myths, subscribe and stay with us.