The Most TERRIFYING River Boat Of The Vietnam War You’ve Never Heard Of

#VietnamWar #Hovercraft #VietnamVeterans The Most TERRIFYING River Boat Of The Vietnam War You’ve Never Heard Of When the monster came, the Viet Cong ran. In the Plain of Reeds, guerrillas who had owned that flooded country for years would hear a rising turbine howl across miles of open marsh and then see a craft come over the horizon at sixty miles an hour, flattening the grass with no wake and no channel. Some paddled for their lives, some hid under the water, some surrendered, and the ones who ran shouted the same two words: quai vat, monster. It was a hovercraft, a British invention barely seven years old that floats on a cushion of its own air: a gas turbine, a seven-foot lift fan, twin .50 caliber machine guns in a turret, an M60 out of each side, and a radar that could see 24 miles in the dark. It had no draft at all, and it ran over mud, marsh and rice paddies where no boat could float and no tank could drive. The Navy and Army called it the PACV, or Pac Vee, and only six were ever sent to Vietnam, three Navy and three Army. This is the story of those six craft: the delta problem that called for them, what they cost and who crewed them, the Navy’s arrival, the Army evaluation of the 39th Cavalry Platoon, the men who never came home from Ben Luc, and why the program ended even though the enemy feared them. The Pac Vee was a magnificent idea that arrived too early and in far too small a number. Three were destroyed and two survive, and their grandchild, the Landing Craft Air Cushion, now lands Marines on hostile shores. The men who rode them are the only ones who truly know how terrifying that sound was rolling across the Plain of Reeds. #VietnamWarHistory #PlainOfReeds #PACV #BrownWaterNavy #MekongDelta #NavyHistory #ArmyHistory #LCAC SOURCES Christopher Cockerell — Hovercraft (1955) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christo... Saunders-Roe — SR.N5 hovercraft U.S. Army Transportation Museum — Fort Eustis Yanks Air Museum — Chino, California — https://www.yanksair.org/ David G. Moore — After Action Report, July 1968, 39th Cavalry Platoon