On this Fourth of July ...
Special thanks to "The Man in the Doorway" ...
click below to read about "The Man in the Doorway":
From the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association website:
http://www.vhpa.org/stories/doorway.pdf
I arrived "In country" Jan 26th, 1968.
It was Jan 30th, "Oh Dark Thirty". The VC liked to start attacks in the confusion in middle of the 0200 changing of the guard.
The Tet Offensive was in full force and the
Viet Cong were inside our perimeter wire and we were out of ammo.
That was when I first met "The Man in the doorway" when he kicked the boxes of 7.62 out the doorway.
We never had a chance to thank these folks or the Cobra and Huey gunships which spent the rest of the night and the next night overhead.
THe M-134 (6000 rounds a minute) is amazing to say the least!
I remember the deafening sound and the red light from the tracer rounds which lit up the ground and overwhelmed the parachute flares.
M-134s from 20 or 30 feet away sound like a 10,000 Cubic inch chainsaw at full throttle!
I remember shoveling thousands of 7.62 casings and the green clips from M-60 ammo belts into 55 gallon drums the next day. They were 6 inches deep in some places.
These kind of scenes happened somewhere in Vietnam every day and night during this time!!