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feld

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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Interesting chat with my wife's uncle this weekend who is a Vietnam vet.

I asked him if he felt like the south Vietnamese were supportive of their efforts to keep the north in check and he yes but they had a lot of issues with people sneaking across the lines and switching sides all the time to whoever they thought was going to win.
feld

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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> Mounted on each side of the Seawolf Hueys were 2.75-inch rocket launchers, and two M-60 flex-mounted machine guns per side. Unique to the Seawolf gunships were its two gunners, one seated on each side of the helicopter with a freehand, shoulder-fired M-60 machine gun. These very special young gunners hung out of the helicopter with one foot on the rocket pod and fired to the side, under, and to the rear, as the gunship rolled in and out of an attack run.

I thought when he was talking to me about this that they were mounted. He was hanging out the chopper shooting an M60 FREEHAND?! That's wild

He told me originally they didn't have the 50 cal and when they added that to the Hueys to penetrate the bunkers they had issues with the machine gun literally moving the helicopter and taking them off target
feld

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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At one point they needed to recover the tail section of another chopper and the south Vietnamese wanted to barter for it I guess, so they took a trip to one base to go pick up some cases of beer, then flew over to another base in Cambodia to trade it for a cooler full of steaks, then took the steaks with them to trade the Vietnamese for the tail section. They jammed it sideways through the doors of the helicopter and flew it out that way.

feld

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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He said they'd sleep with their clothes on and when they got the announcement SEAWOLVES SCRAMBLE they had 10 minutes to put on their shoes and run to load up and take off to go assist/defend another unit from the air

Replying to @feld@friedcheese.us
feld

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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They'd take off so aggressively that they'd drop down off the side of the ship and you could stick your foot out the door and touch the water before they'd catch the airfoil and lift off

Also they were trained to release the rocket pods and kick out the ammo box sitting in the middle if they were ever going to go down, but it never happened.

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Replying to @polishdub@bsd.network
feld

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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@polishdub what's interesting to me is that my mother in law and nearly all her siblings were in the Navy, but nobody seems to recognize the very special and dangerous unit he was in during Vietnam. Most of the others I think are a bit younger so they never really saw active duty like that, but still... they should know

my wife has never known what he went through. She just always thought of him as Santa Claus because of his white beard