The TERRIFYING Job of Manning the Bow Gun on a Vietnam River Boat

#VietnamWar #BrownWaterNavy #VietnamVeterans The TERRIFYING Job of Manning the Bow Gun on a Vietnam River Boat Every patrol, one man climbed down into an open fiberglass tub at the very tip of a PBR, wrapped his hands around twin .50 caliber machine guns, and sat there for twelve hours with his head and shoulders above the waterline. He was the bow gunner. He was closer to the jungle than anyone else on the boat, and he knew that if a rocket came out of the tree line, it was coming for him first. In the spring of 1966 the Navy sent a new kind of warship into the Mekong Delta: a 31-foot fiberglass Patrol Boat, River, with water jets instead of propellers. Under Operation Game Warden and Task Force 116, pairs of PBRs patrolled the rivers and canals for twelve hours at a time to take the water away from the Viet Cong. Their ambushes were decided in the first few seconds, and the heart of the boat's firepower sat in the bow. This is the story of the PBR and its twin M2 Browning gun mount, what little armor protected the man behind it, the one rule of the tub (watch the bank), the ambushes on the Bassac and the Mekong, Radarman Terrence Freund's last stand on PBR-40, the Medal of Honor won on the river, and the men who carried the job home with them. A few PBRs survive in museums today, restored by the men who rode them, the twin fifties still mounted in the bow and the tub still there for children to climb into. And on the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the names of the forward gunners are still there if you look. #PBR #RiverPatrolForce #GameWarden #MekongDelta #VietnamWarHistory #NavyHistory #Riverine #BowGunner SOURCES Naval History and Heritage Command — River Patrol Force, Operation Game Warden National Archives — Medal of Honor citation, Boatswain's Mate First Class James Elliott Williams Naval Institute Proceedings — Oral history of Ivan Travnicek, River Section 531 Robert L. Burkhart — Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam (1988) Shelby L. Stanton — Vietnam Order of Battle (1985)