The HORRORS of Gunship “Puff The Magic Dragon” in Vietnam 

The HORRORS of Gunship “Puff The Magic Dragon” in Vietnam 

A man is lying on the floor of an aircraft. He has 40 pieces of shrapnel buried in his back and legs. He can barely feel his right leg. The cargo bay around him is chaos. Wounded crew members slumped against the fuselage. Ammunition canisters scattered across the floor. The aircraft groaning with over 3,500 holes punched through its wings and body by a mortar round that hit just seconds ago.

And then he sees it. Rolling across the floor toward the open cargo door, a lit magnesium flare. 3 ft long. Armed. Burning at 4,000° Fahrenheit. Surrounded by 24,000 rounds of live ammunition. He has a choice. He can try to crawl away from it. Or he can do something that no rational person would do. He throws his body on top of it.

Vietnam, 1964. The war is not going the way anyone expected. The Viet Cong have figured something out. Something simple, but brutally effective. They attack at night. Across the country, hundreds of small outposts, special forces camps, and isolated villages are spread out across the jungle. Each one defending itself with a handful of soldiers.

And when darkness falls, the Viet Cong come. Fast jets, the F-100s, the F-105s, they can respond. But there’s a problem. At night, flying at hundreds of miles an hour, finding a small target in dense jungle is nearly impossible. By the time a jet arrives on station, drops its ordnance, and clears out, it’s been on target for maybe 30 seconds.

And then, it has to go home. It can’t stay. It can’t watch. The Viet Cong knew this. Their tactic was almost elegant in its simplicity. Hit hard, hit fast, and be gone before air support could arrive. And if air support did arrive, wait for the flares to go out. Then hit again. But by late 1964, a captain in the United States Air Force had an idea so unconventional that his own commanders thought it was insane.

His name was Ronald W. Terry. And what he was about to do would change the nature of air warfare forever. The Douglas C-47 Skytrain had already won one war. It was the workhorse of World War II. Dropping paratroopers at Normandy. Hauling supplies over the Himalayas. By 1964, it was a relic. An old cargo plane from a different era.

But Terry had noticed something during a study tour in Vietnam. C-47s were already flying at night. Dropping flares to light up enemy attacks so other aircraft could respond. He watched these old planes circle in the dark. And he had a thought that seemed almost too simple. What if the plane itself was the weapon? The concept dated back to a 1926 proposal by Army Lieutenant Fred Nelson.

The idea of mounting guns perpendicular to a plane’s axis and flying a banking circle called a pylon turn. Keeping a fixed point on the ground in continuous fire. Nobody had ever made it work in combat. Terry championed it. He reportedly used some of his own money. He went directly to Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay.

And he nearly got sent home when he arrived in Vietnam. Senior commanders worried that arming a cargo plane would set a precedent that threatened the the Force’s budget claims against the Army. But he got his chance. Two C-47s were pulled from the First Air Commando Squadron at Bien Hoa Air Base. Terry’s team bolted three SUU-11/A minigun pods to the left side of the aircraft.

 Two pointing out of the rear windows, one through the cargo door. Eight surplus gun sight from an A-1 Skyraider was mounted in the cockpit window. A trigger was wired to the pilot control column. The first aircraft was ready on December 11th, 1964. The second, December 15th. They didn’t even have a name for it yet. But on the night of December 23rd, 1964, they got their first test.

And what happened that night would shock everyone, including the men who built it. And it was on that night that the Viet Cong encountered something they had never seen before, and would never forget. Three General Electric M134 miniguns, six barrels each, firing at a selectable rate of 3,000 or 6,000 rounds per minute per gun.

Let that number land for a second. 6,000 rounds per minute per gun. Three guns. The aircraft carried 24,000 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition and 45 magnesium parachute flares, each burning at 4,000° Fahrenheit, with roughly 2 million candlepower, bright enough to turn a jungle clearing into daylight. But here’s the thing about the way it fired.

Every fifth round was a tracer. That means for every streak of red light you could see raining down from the sky, there were four invisible rounds in between. What looked from the ground like a solid curtain of fire was actually 1/5 of what was actually hitting. The crew described their first live firing test this way.

We opened fire and it scared me half to death. I thought the guns had blown up. Flames not only came out of the muzzles, but also blew back inside where they licked around the cans where the spent cartridges were going. It was really noisy, too. The aircraft flew in a constant left banking circle, the pylon turn, at around 3,000 ft altitude and 120 knots.

Slow and steady. A fixed orbit. The pilot aimed through a side mounted gun sight and fired with a trigger on the yoke. 3 to 5 second bursts. Two guns at a time to prevent jams. And in those 3 to 5 seconds, they could saturate an area the size of a football field. One round for every 2 and 1/2 square yards. The Viet Cong, who had been attacking villages for years, who had learned how to wait out flares and survived jet strikes, they had never encountered anything like this.

And on December 23rd, 1964, they got their first introduction. An outpost called Tran Yen was under attack. A distress call went out. The FC-47, the plane didn’t even have its AC designation yet, arrived 37 minutes later. It opened fire. The Viet Cong retreated in minutes, confused, not understanding where the firepower was coming from.

Then the same aircraft flew 20 miles to another outpost under attack at Trung Hon. Same result. General Joseph Moore, US Air Force Commander of air operations in Vietnam, requested an entire squadron of them before the test period was even over. But what those numbers on paper couldn’t communicate was what it was actually like to be on the ground when Puff arrived.

The Viet Cong called it the dragon. When the AC-47 entered its pylon orbit overhead at night, the scene was unlike anything in the history of warfare. The mini guns fired so fast that the individual shots could not be distinguished by the human ear. What came out was a sound described by veterans as a low sustained roar, like ripping canvas, but deeper, more final, and visually, a solid red sheet of fire pouring from the sky in a continuous stream, connecting the aircraft to the earth below.

At Bong Son on February 8th, 1965, an FC-47 loitered over a Viet Cong offensive for more than 4 hours. It fired 20,500 rounds into a hilltop position. An escaped ARVN sergeant, who survived the battle, later described helping carry away 80 to 90 bodies. He said enemy troops were completely confused. Some thought they had been hit by a new type of ground weapon.

Some had no idea at all where the fire was coming from. USAF reported accounts state that captured enemy documents warned Viet Cong soldiers not to attack the dragon, that their weapons would be useless and would only anger it further. General James Ferguson, commander of Air Force Systems Command, wrote in February 1965 that the gunship’s results showed a psychological factor way out of proportion to the effectiveness of other aircraft strike efforts.

But the horrors worked both ways, because the men flying Puff lived inside something terrifying, too. And no mission proved that more brutally than what happened on the night of February 24th, 1969. Levito had 40 pieces of shrapnel in his body. He could barely move. And he still managed to drag himself to the cargo door and throw out a lit magnesium flare surrounded by 24,000 rounds of ammunition.

 Saving the aircraft and all eight crew members aboard. He flew 20 more combat missions after he recovered from his wounds. >> They were flying low while turning back around, only 1,000 ft off the ground, putting them directly into the path of an 82 mm mortar round. The explosion caused by the mortar put a 2 to 3-ft hole in the right wing of the gunship.

The explosion also sent approximately 3,500 pieces of shrapnel into the cargo hold, striking all four men there. While Major Carpenter tried to regain flight controls, the four men were all thrown to the floor, badly injured. John, who was hit by 40 pieces of shrapnel, struggled to make sense of what was going on.

He could feel pain throughout his body and his badly wounded legs were numb. He observed that another airman had fallen by the open doorway. Not even knowing if he could walk, John had to pull himself up and he took small steps toward the door. This wasn’t easy for him, not only due to his injuries, but also because the plane was bouncing and shuddering heavily.

John made it to the other man. He knew that there was a real risk of both men falling out of the doorway, but John carried on. He grabbed a hold of him and pulled them backwards away from the danger of the open door. At this time, John saw smoke and became aware of the next danger. Fire aboard the plane could ignite the fuel, ammunition, or flares, causing a catastrophic explosion.

As he made his way towards the smoke, reality hit John. The smoke wasn’t coming from a fire that could be extinguished. Rather, it was coming from the flare that he had just set the timer on just moments earlier. These flares have a pin that is attached to a 10-ft lanyard, which would allow the flare to begin its firing process as it fell to the ground.

However, the violent shaking of the plane sent the flare beyond 10 ft and its firing process had already begun. In less than 20 seconds, a series of explosions would ignite it. And since these flares burn at 4,000° F, John knew that inaction wasn’t an option. With the plane still bouncing, John struggled to make his way to the flare canister.

Just as he reached for it, the plane again turned. To his dread, John watched it roll away from him. Putting his pain aside, he continued toward it. And for a second time, the flare alluded his grasp and rolled away yet again. Growing increasingly weakened due to the shrapnel wounds and loss of blood, John didn’t want to risk not being able to grab the flare on his third attempt.

This time, he threw his body on the burning flare, finally getting and maintaining control of it. While still holding the canister to his chest, he made the painful crawl to the open cargo door at the back of the plane. In what must have felt like an eternity to John, he made it to the open door and pushed the flare out just as it exploded.

Major Carpenter was able to get Spooky 71 to a nearby airstrip, where they were able to make an emergency landing. After landing, John and the other injured crew were brought to an aid station to be treated for their serious wounds. Major Carpenter wasn’t aware of John’s act of valor until after they landed, and it didn’t fully set in until daylight, when he saw the trails of John’s blood covering the back of the cargo hold.

>> Major Kenneth Carpenter, the pilot of Spooky 71 that night, later said, “In my experience, I have never seen such a courageous act performed under such adverse circumstances. The entire eight-man crew owes their lives to John. How a plane with over 3,500 holes in the wings and fuselage stayed airborne defies description.

John Levitow died of cancer on November 8th, 2000. He was 55 years old. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But Levitow’s mission was not the only time Puff paid a brutal price. Of the 53 AC-47s converted for combat, 19 never came home. The AC-47 was never supposed to be invincible. It flew slow, it flew low, and it flew in circles.

A predictable pattern that every enemy anti-aircraft gunner learned to exploit. At around 3,000 ft altitude, it was well within range of heavy machine guns and even small arms fire. Of 53 aircraft converted, 41 served in Vietnam. 19 were lost to all causes, 12 in direct combat. On March 9th, 1966, during the desperate defense of the A Shau Special Forces camp, under assault by roughly 2,000 North Vietnamese Army troops, an AC-47 called Spooky 70 was forced below 400 ft by low cloud cover.

It took .50 caliber fire that destroyed both engines. The co-pilot, First Lieutenant Delbert Peterson, charged an enemy machine gun with an M-16 and a pistol to cover the rescue helicopter. The other three surviving crewmen were evacuated. Peterson was left behind. His body was never recovered.

 He was initially listed as missing in action and later reclassified as killed in action. He received the Air Force Cross posthumously. After losing several aircraft over Laos in early 1966, the Air Force halted AC-47 missions there entirely. The aircraft was simply too vulnerable over heavily defended territory. The last USAF AC-47 combat mission flew on December 1st, 1969.

The surviving aircraft were handed over to the South Vietnamese Air Force, the Royal Lao Air Force, and the Cambodian Air Force. Most were destroyed or captured when Saigon fell in April 1975. But the concept, the slow circling aircraft that owns the night, that never died. Today’s AC-130 J Ghostrider, still operated by the 4th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Florida, flies the same pylon turn orbit that Ronald Terry designed in a parking lot at Bien Hoa Air Base in December 1964.

It carries a 30-mm auto cannon and a 105-mm howitzer instead of three mini guns. But the logic is identical. The AC-47 started as a cargo plane from a different war. It became one of the most feared weapons in the history of Vietnam. Not for its speed or its sophistication. It had neither. But for what it could do that nothing else could.

It could stay. It could circle hour after hour in the dark. Over the men who needed it most. The men of the 4th Special Operations Squadron called themselves the Spookies. And the accounts say no outpost, no village, no firebase they defended was ever lost while they were overhead. That is the legacy of Puff the Magic Dragon.

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