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The Dark Reasons So Many Door Gunners Died in Vietnam | Unbelievable true stories | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: The Dark Reasons So Many Door Gunners Died in Vietnam
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Operation Lam Son 719 was a large-scale, ill-fated air assault into Laos during the Vietnam War, designed to disrupt enemy supply lines but resulting in significant losses, particularly for helicopter crews and door gunners, who displayed immense bravery under heavy fire.
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It was the largest air assault of the
entire Vietnam War and one where the
most helicopters were shot down. The
operation was a gamble from the very
beginning and it would just go sideways
almost immediately. However, helicopter
crews and especially their door gunners
would show just how brave they could be,
risking their lives over and over again
to help their comrades. In early 1971,
American commanders launched Operation
Lamson 719, a bold attempt to strike
deep into Laos. The mission was to hit a
key enemy supply hub near the village of
Chapon and sever the Ho Chi Min Trail,
the lifeline the North Vietnamese used
to move troops and weapons into the
south. That trail ran through the jungle
covered mountains of Laos, and
Washington wanted it shut down once and
for all. But there was a catch. Just a
month earlier, Congress had passed a law
banning American ground forces from
stepping outside of South Vietnam. So,
this operation had to rely entirely on
South Vietnamese troops to do the ground
fighting while American forces would
provide the air support.
That meant the ARVN, short for the Army
of the Republic of Vietnam, would be
alone on the ground for the first time.
It was the first real test of whether
they could carry the war themselves. And
to pull it off, the US committed almost
everything it had in the air. Nearly
every bird in Vietnam was assigned to
this single assault. transport choppers,
gunships, medevacs, all of them were
flying into Laos to support the
operation. And on them were the men with
a crucial task, dangling from the sides
of helicopters and giving their absolute
best to help their allies on the ground.
Door gunners would play a major role
here and also be the only thing
preventing just complete obliteration of
helicopters. To get a better picture,
helicopters didn't have any armor, and
you could literally punch the aluminum
skin and dent it. So, there was no
protection from the fire. And to make
matters worse, they were about to
encounter the heaviest anti-aircraft
fire of the entire war in Southeast
Asia. The plan for the operation was to
send South Vietnamese armored units
racing down Highway 9 toward Chapon
while US helicopters inserted ARVN
infantry around the highway to cut off
enemy reinforcements and destroy supply
caches. Over 12,000 South Vietnamese
soldiers crossed the border. For many of
them, this was their first time flying,
but also their first time fighting.
However, no one knew that very soon
around 60,000 North Vietnamese troops
would gather to stop them and that they
were already well aware of the upcoming
attack. They had plenty of time to dig
in, lay out ambush zones, and prepare
anti-aircraft defenses. They would even
have tanks, which was also not taken
into significant consideration. American
intelligence also wrongfully assumed
that the enemy reinforcements would take
14 days to arrive marching, but they
were much closer, much faster, and in
much greater number. From the very
beginning of the mission, the problems
began to stack up fast. First thing was
the language barrier between US and ARVN
forces. They had their interpreters, but
once the actual battle began,
communication simply became chaotic
through translation going back and
forth. The armored column barely made it
halfway to Chapone before getting bogged
down by heavy fire and the mission began
going sideways very fast. That's when
high command made a bit of a desperate
attempt to solve the situation. They
decided to insert troops by helicopters
directly into three forward landing
zones called Lolo, Liz, and Sophia to
outflank the enemy and jumpst start the
stalled advance. But when the
helicopters approached the LZ's, they
could see hundreds and hundreds of
camouflaged enemy soldiers moving
through the trees like a living carpet.
No one could have even imagined that
they would be there in such number. They
opened fire on the helicopters with
everything they had, and they had a lot
of it. From AKs, heavy machine guns up
to Soviet supplied 37 mm anti-aircraft
cannons, helicopters were now flying
directly into a storm of fire to insert
South Vietnamese troops. Within minutes,
multiple helicopters were shot down. The
rest could just desperately watch other
birds going down and hear surviving
crews radioing for help, but they
couldn't do anything at that point. The
gunships that weren't hit were circling
above crash sites, and door gunners laid
fire to protect surviving crews from
being overrun. They did that until they
were either shot down themselves or ran
out of fuel or ammo. Many of the
helicopters that could still fly even
with wounded crew returned to Kesan
base, refueled, rearmed, and went back
to try to rescue crews of downed
helicopters. As the operation began, and
although initially gaining some
momentum, somewhat surprising the North
Vietnamese on the ground, they quickly
reorganized and counterattacked in what
was described by veterans as one of the
most successful counterattacks in
history. The ARVN and their American air
support, on the other hand, were about
to suffer tremendously.
Helicopters were frantically going from
mission to mission, back to back, flying
fire support, medevacs, extracting and
inserting troops. Landing zones were
just a complete chaos, surrounded by the
enemy that fired at helicopters
attempting to touch down. And in the
middle of all that chaos, there were
door gunners. They were the only form of
protection helicopters had, and they sat
at the most exposed position in the open
sides with only air between them and the
enemy. No matter what would happen, they
must not stop firing or else they would
all be dead. So before we go any
further, we need to talk about them and
what made what they were doing almost
insane. First thing to keep in mind is
that, as we said, they were flying into
hot landing zones under fire in aircraft
that couldn't take a hit. When you
consider this, you'd understand why
almost half of all helicopters deployed
during the Vietnam War crashed. And add
to it that those birds were flown by
young, often hastily trained pilots,
many of whom were actually learning
under live fire. Then on top of all
that, add not so reliable early
helicopters operating in extreme heat
and humidity with a whole lot of angry
North Vietnamese. So after the
assumption that helicopter speed would
be enough to protect them from ground
fire was shattered, crews tried to find
some form of protection. A typical UH1
Huey that characterized the war had a
pilot, co-pilot, and a crew chief. and
that crew chief was the first one to
start hanging out of the side door with
an M60 machine gun strapped in with a
harness or bungee cord and try to put
down covering fire during landings. They
soon realized one gun on one side wasn't
enough. So, they added a fourth man, now
a designated door gunner. But that role
quickly grew and the door gunner became
a full member of the crew, participating
in all activities needed for a
helicopter to be effective in combat
missions. As the role evolved, so did
the weapons. What started as a single
M60 soon turned into full-on direct air
support. Door gunners began using pintal
mounted machine guns or twin M60s which
were modified specifically for this
purpose with a higher rate of fire,
modified trigger mechanisms, and thicker
barrels. Soon came experimental
variations with 50 caliber machine guns,
grenade launchers, and miniguns. The
concept immediately proved effective,
and the Huey got a new role as an
improvised gunship. Some got rocket pods
mounted and carried more weapons and
ammo. From there, the design kept going,
eventually leading to the creation of
the AH1 Cobra, the first true dedicated
attack helicopter. And we could freely
say that it wouldn't exist without the
evolution of door gunners. However, the
door gunner job came with a heavy cost.
They logically had the highest casualty
rate among the crew. Although the whole
helicopter wasn't armored, the rest of
the crew at least had something in
between them and enemy fire. There is
also the factor that door gunners were
feared by the enemy, so snipers would
shoot them first. They wore flack
jackets and chest ceramic plates that
could stop AK rounds, infamously called
chicken plates. But they were bulky and
hot, and a lot of guys chose not to wear
them because they needed to move fast.
They had their helmet with intercom for
coordination with the rest of the crew
to help pilots guide them during
landings in tight LZs and to help with
loading and unloading the cargo or
wounded. Their most important moment was
during landings and takeoffs from hot
landing zones. The North Vietnamese had
learned to predict where Americans might
land and turned those areas into
ambushes for helicopters. To insert
troops, the helicopter had to hover and
touch down, at which point it was a
sitting duck for enemy fire. During the
approach and takeoff, the door gunners
would reign continuous fire to suppress
the enemy, and by time for the airborne
infantry to mount down and take cover,
and also for themselves to not get shot
down, preferably. But they were also
quite useful in hunter killer missions,
erasing enemy caught in the open and
supporting ground units in trouble with
accurate fire. They had to be very good
shooters because they were firing from a
moving and vibrating platform at a
moving target on the ground. So they'd
have to make all sorts of adjustments to
their fire to hit what they wanted. They
would always aim ahead or behind their
intended target. So volume of fire was
required for them to be effective. Now
going back to operation Lamsson, that
region in Laos was so critical to the
war that the US had been bombing it for
years with more explosives per square
mile than any other country in history.
That's not an exaggeration. Thousands of
sorties by B-52 bombers had torn apart
the Ho Chi Min Trail, but it somehow was
still in function. So this time the goal
was to once and for all cut the artery
and walk away with a win. Operation
began with an overwhelming display of
American air and artillery power. Then
came the main force of ARVN troops. Many
of them young, undertrained,
inexperienced, and barely prepared for a
fight of this scale. And right from the
start, things went wrong. First thing
was the terrain, where visibility was
almost zero, and the enemy knew it
intimately. The NVA had been operating
there for years. And more importantly,
they saw the attack coming. So by the
time the first helicopters crossed the
border, they were already dug in with
heavy weapons. Now, as the battle kicked
off, the only way to move ARVN troops,
supplies, and wounded through that
jungle was by helicopter. For days,
there were dozens of insertions,
extractions, resupply missions, and
medevacs. And every single one of those
was just a nightmare for helicopter
crews flying through clouds of
anti-aircraft fire. Helicopters were
being shot down at a massive rate, and
losses were piling up fast. At LZ Lolo,
for example, over half the helicopters
were shot down during a single insertion
attempt. Some were destroyed midair,
while others crash landed and their
crews were either killed or captured.
Some veterans recounted helicopters
falling in flames while their gunners
were still firing at the enemy even in
their final seconds. Despite these
losses, helicopter crews continued
flying missions non-stop. Most of the
flights were launched from Kesan Combat
Base just across the border in South
Vietnam over the course of a month. The
South Vietnamese were desperately trying
to push their armor and infantry
through, but the trails were already
presited for ambushes. Soon, fire bases
along the flanks of the main route 9
push started getting attacked with some
of them being overrun and hundreds of
South Vietnamese killed, captured, or
missing. Meanwhile, helicopters were
non-stop frantically flying mission
after mission with their door gunners
trying to protect their allies on the
ground as best as they could. In the
first two weeks alone, over 100
helicopters were shot down with more
than 600 heavily damaged. But they just
had to keep flying. Even after capturing
Chapone, the operation was running on
fumes. It turned out it had little
strategic value by that point. While the
ARVN's main advance had stalled and the
flanks were being overrun. By the second
week of March, the South Vietnamese
began retreating, and the withdrawal
quickly turned into a nightmare. The NVA
launched even more attacks on the
convoys, blocking roads with tanks and
pounding the retreating columns with
artillery. One ARVN commander even had
to abandon Route 9 entirely and bulldoze
a new path through the jungle to escape
across the Sepon River. All while US air
power provided frantic cover overhead.
And even though the US declared the
operation a victory, pointing to the
temporary capture of Chapone and some
enemy casualties, the cost was
staggering. The ARVN suffered nearly 50%
casualties with thousands killed,
wounded, or missing. The US lost 253 men
along with six fighter bombers and at
least 117 helicopters shot down. Some
historians described the result as the
near decimation of America's helicopter
fleet in Vietnam. The Ho Chi Min trail
was not cut. The enemy's supply lines
were barely disrupted, but the door
gunners in this mission proved their
worth once again as outright savage
fighters who gave their lives for the others.
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