2,712. That is the number of non-pilot helicopter crew members, door gunners and crew chiefs, killed in the Vietnam War. Not wounded, killed. And that number does not count the ones who made it home, survived the jungle, survived the bullets, survived the crashes, and then spent [music] the next 20 years dying slowly from a poison their own government put in the air they breathed every single day.
We’re going to tell you everything about these men today, but I have to warn you that some of what follows is hard to sit with. Vietnam was not supposed to be a helicopter war. In the early 1960s, the helicopter was a logistics tool. It moved supplies, it carried commanders between bases. Nobody had seriously imagined it as the backbone of an entire combat doctrine.
Then the jungle settled the debate. Dense canopy, no roads worth naming, rivers cutting through mountains, an enemy that appeared from nowhere and melted back into nothing. The US Army needed to put soldiers into terrain that vehicles couldn’t reach and boots couldn’t cover fast enough. The helicopter was the only answer.
And the moment helicopters started flying into hostile territory, someone had to stand in the door and shoot back. The first door gunners were improvised. Crew chiefs grabbed whatever machine gun they could find and started returning fire from the doorway. It worked well enough that by 1965, it was official doctrine.
Every UH-1 Huey, the workhorse of the entire war, carried two door gunners, one on each side. Their primary weapon was the M60 machine gun, 7.62 mm, 550 rounds per minute, mounted on a bungee cord system that let the gunner swing it in almost any direction with mechanical stops built in [music] to prevent him from shooting off his own rotor blades or putting a burst through the fuel tank directly behind his head.
The open door of the Huey was his position. No glass, no armor plating, thin aluminum walls that buckled under direct hits. Nothing between the man and the sky. And they volunteered for it. That is the thing that demands an explanation. If you’re finding this story as important as we do, hit the like button right now.
It genuinely helps us keep making these videos. The First Cavalry Division arrived in Vietnam in September 1965 as the first fully airmobile division in American military history. They flew their equipment and their soldiers into combat rather than marching them to it. Their helicopters were their horses, their doctrine, their identity.
And in November 1965 in the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands, they flew directly into the first major engagement between US Army forces and North Vietnamese regulars. Landing Zone X-Ray, 3 days of some of the most intense combat of the entire war fought in a clearing surrounded by thousands of enemy soldiers.
The helicopters went in and out constantly, bringing ammunition, extracting wounded, [music] inserting reinforcements. Every approach was contested. Every door gunner on every bird was working. When the battle was over, 234 Americans were dead. The First Cavalry’s door gunners had kept those landing zones open under fire that most aircraft would never have survived.
That was the template for everything that followed. For the next 8 years across every major operation in every part of the country, door gunners flew into landing zones that intelligence said were cold and turned out to be the opposite. They flew into the Mekong Delta with the 9th Infantry Division.
They flew resupply missions into Khe San during the siege of 1968. They flew during the Tet Offensive when the entire country seemed to erupt at once. In February 1971, during Operation Lam Son 719, the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos with American helicopter support, 107 US helicopters were destroyed in 45 days, not damaged, destroyed.
The North Vietnamese had positioned heavy anti-aircraft weapons on every hill in the flight corridors, and the helicopters had to fly through them anyway because the men on the ground needed ammunition and the wounded needed to get out. You need to understand what the door gunner’s physical position actually was to understand what that meant.
He stood in an open doorway, not sat, stood or crouched or leaned depending on what the aircraft was doing. Below him, when the helicopter banked into a descent, was 300 ft of air and then jungle. He wore a monkey harness, a simple strap around the waist clipped to the inside of the aircraft. That was not rated to hold him in if the pilot threw a hard evasive maneuver.
He wore his body armor on the floor under his feet, not on his body, because the rounds coming up through the thin aluminum floor were the real threat. AK-47 fire punching upward from directly below. He could not dive for cover. He could not take a knee. He stood in that door and he worked the gun and he watched everything coming at him, and he trusted that his hands and his gun and whatever God he believed in would sort the rest of it out.
Some of them carried good luck charms, family photographs tucked into their helmets, letters from home folded into flight suit pockets. Veterans describe a fierce particular loyalty that developed between door gunners and the infantry they were protecting. Not the abstract loyalty of shared service, but something personal and urgent.
You had seen those men on the ground. You had watched them run through your fire and make it to the tree line. When the radio crackled and a unit called for extraction from a hot landing zone >> [music] >> and the pilots were deciding whether the aircraft could take the risk, it was the door gunners who were already leaning out and looking at the smoke and thinking about those specific men they had put in there.
Larry Colburn understood that kind of loyalty and extended it in a direction nobody expected. Colburn was a door gunner flying with Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson on March 16th, 1968 over a village in Quang Ngai province called My Lai. What Thompson and Colburn saw from the air that morning was not a firefight.
It was a massacre. American soldiers moving through the village killing unarmed civilians, women, children, elderly men without any resistance to justify it. Thompson landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the remaining survivors. He told Colburn to cover him. Colburn swung his M60 toward the American infantry, not at the enemy, at his own side.
“If they fire on these people, you fire on them.” There was a standoff. Nobody fired. The civilians were evacuated. Colburn held his gun on American soldiers for as long as it took to get those people out. For that, he and Thompson eventually received the Soldier’s Medal in 1998, 30 years after the fact. Colburn died in November 2016.
He never stopped talking about what happened that day because he believed the whole truth of it needed to stay visible. [music] That was the humanity inside the job, not the aggression, not the fearlessness, but the loyalty carried to [music] its furthest point. The willingness to point your gun at the wrong thing because the right thing required it.
Now, here is the chapter that most people telling this story leave out entirely. [music] While Dr. Gunners were standing in those open doorways over the jungle, something else was happening to their bodies. Something that would not show up for 20 years. The United States military sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of herbicides over Vietnam between 1962 and 1971.
The most widely used mixture was Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant designed to strip the jungle of the canopy that concealed enemy movement. At least 100 helicopter spray units were operating in South Vietnam. [music] UH-1 Hueys, the exact aircraft door gunners flew in, were used to deliver herbicide to smaller targets, local base perimeters, ambush sites along roads and canals.
Some door gunners, like Ernest Garcia of the 9th Infantry Division, literally kicked the canisters out of the helicopter during spray runs, coating their hands, their flight suits, >> [music] >> and their lungs with the chemical in concentrated form. But, even the door gunners who never touched a canister [music] were breathing it.
The Huey’s open door design, the exact feature that allowed door gunners to do their job, also meant there was no filter between them and the air they were flying through. Defoliated areas released dioxin [music] into the atmosphere. Herbicide residue settled on helicopter surfaces and equipment.
A door gunner who spent a year flying at low altitude over sprayed jungle was breathing dioxin every single working day. He didn’t know it. Nobody told him. The chemical had no smell at lethal concentrations. There was nothing to warn him that anything was wrong. Dioxin, the toxic byproduct in Agent Orange, is among the most persistent organic pollutants known to science.
It binds to body tissue and stays there. It does not flush out. It accumulates and it is a carcinogen, meaning it does not simply make you sick in the weeks after exposure. It plants something in the cellular architecture of the body that waits. It can wait 10 years, it can wait 20, it can wait 30. And then it announces itself as Parkinson’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma or prostate cancer or ischemic heart disease or soft tissue sarcoma or type 2 diabetes.
Conditions that look to anyone who doesn’t know the history like ordinary aging. Conditions that the VA spent most of the 1970s and 1980s denying [music] had anything to do with military service. Veterans began filing claims in 1977. The VA denied almost all of them. By 1993, despite receiving disability claims from nearly 40,000 veterans citing Agent Orange exposure, the VA had compensated exactly 486 of them.
A class action lawsuit against the chemical manufacturers was settled in 1984 for $180 million. That’s >> [music] >> roughly $12,000 per claimant for a lifetime of cancer and neurological disease. The Agent Orange Act was finally passed in 1991 allowing the VA to establish presumptive service connection for [music] a list of conditions.
But the fight for recognition went on for decades after that condition by condition, veteran by veteran, widow by widow. The door gunners who made it home from Vietnam in one piece came home to a country that did not know what to do with them. They came back to airports where they changed out of uniform before leaving the terminal.
They came back to silence about what they had done and where they had been. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not a recognized diagnosis until 1980. The men who were having nightmares and flashbacks and could not hold a conversation without flinching at a car backfiring in 1972 had no clinical name for what was happening to them.
Some turned to alcohol. Some couldn’t stay in relationships. Some kept moving, couldn’t settle, couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t been there what the year in the doorway had actually cost them. And then, 10 or 15 or 20 years later, the other war [music] started. The diagnosis came back with an unfamiliar name, Parkinson’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the veteran, older now, calmer than he had been, had maybe found some peace.
Had to go back to the VA and start explaining himself again. Had to prove that the cancer was connected to the service. Had to find paperwork from 50 years ago and locate witnesses and file forms. Had to fight a bureaucratic system that had been designed, functionally, to exhaust the people pursuing it into giving up.
Some of them gave up. Some of them won. Many of them died before the question was resolved either way. Over 40,000 helicopter pilots served in Vietnam. Their crew members, the door gunners and crew chiefs who stood in the open doors in the numbered in similar ranges. Of those, 2,712 non-pilot crew members were killed in action.
More than 5,000 helicopters of all types were destroyed. The Hueys alone logged over 10 million flight hours in Army service during the war. Inside every one of those hours, in the open door, in the wind, in the noise, in the incoming fire, in the chemical air, was a young man who had volunteered for the job.
They did not volunteer because they didn’t understand the risk. They volunteered because the men on the ground needed someone in that door. Because that was the job that needed doing and nobody was going to do it for them. Because some combination of loyalty and stubbornness and something that doesn’t reduce to a simple word made them climb in, clip the harness, charge the M60, and lean into the wind.
They came back totally different people. Some heard voices, some had violent outbursts. Some carried it quietly and died of it quietly 20 years later in a hospital room. Their family sitting beside them filling out VA paperwork that was still being processed when the funeral happened. The ones who are still alive are in their 70s and 80s now.
They remember the sound of the rotors. They remember specific faces in specific landing zones. They remember what the gun felt like after a long burst, the heat of it, the smell of the brass bouncing off the floor. They remember being young and afraid and doing the job anyway. And they remember coming home to a country that for a long time would rather have forgotten what it asked of them.
We should not forget. Was your father or grandfather a door gunner in Vietnam? Tell us in the comments below. And if you want more stories like this one, the ones that don’t get told anywhere else, subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don’t miss what’s coming next. Thank you for watching.
