Every Seat Inside Puff the Magic Dragon on a Night Mission

Three miniguns pointed out of the left side of an old C-47 transport, and the man who fired them was the pilot, flying the airplane in a slow left-hand circle over a fight he could barely see. This is one night inside the AC-47 gunship its crews called Spooky and the men on the ground called Puff the Magic Dragon, told seat by seat: the pilot in the left seat, the navigator who had to find one small fight in the dark, the Vietnamese observer on the radio, the gunners clearing jammed miniguns on a tilting floor, the flight engineer with two engines and no armor, the copilot watching the limits, and the loadmaster in the open cargo door with the flares. Along the way: Capt. Ronald Terry teaching the first gunship pilots over open water; Maj. Daniel Rehm and Spooky 41 over the camp at Duc Lap in August 1968; a single flashlight beam marking two platoons of the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry in August 1966; the little fort at Thanh Anh that the pilots said had its own private air force; Capt. Willard Collins and 1st Lt. Delbert Peterson at A Shau in March 1966; and on 24 February 1969, over Long Binh, A1C John Levitow of Spooky 71, 23 years old, who threw his body on an armed flare and dragged it to the cargo door. Most of it comes from the Air Force's own history of the gunships and a 1969 Project CHECO report. The fort on the canal at the start and the end, and the night in the gunner's seat ("you"), are composites. The men, the units, the dates and the numbers are not. "Okay. Enemy go away now" is from the tapes the first test crews recorded. Did you fly on a Spooky? Which seat, which flight, which base, which year? Did you throw flares out of that door, or reload those guns in the dark? And if you were on the ground, at a firebase, a camp or a little fort on a canal, tell us about the night you looked up and saw that red line coming down. Tell us your unit, your aircraft and your year. Chapters: 0:00 Three miniguns, fired by the man flying the plane 0:36 1967: a fort on a canal in the Delta, after midnight 0:55 Seat 1. The left seat 3:48 Seat 2. The navigator's table 6:24 Seat 3. The observer 8:22 Seat 4. Yours, for one night 10:33 Seat 5. The gun line 12:41 Seat 6. The flight engineer 14:30 Seat 7. The right seat 16:57 Seat 8. The cargo door 21:24 Back to the fort on the canal 21:59 The last mission, December 1969 22:32 Your turn: which seat did you fly? Sources: Jack S. Ballard, Development and Employment of Fixed-Wing Gunships 1962-1972, Office of Air Force History, 1982. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA1... Maj. Richard F. Kott, The Role of USAF Gunships in SEAsia, Project CHECO, HQ PACAF, 30 August 1969. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA5... Medal of Honor citation, A1C John L. Levitow, U.S. Air Force. https://www.af.mil/Medal-of-Honor/Lev... "20 Seconds Over Long Binh," Air Force Magazine, April 2005. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/art... "Valor in Two Dimensions," Air Force Magazine (A Shau, 9 March 1966). https://www.airandspaceforces.com/art... H. E. Halvorsen, "John Levitow and Spooky 71," Tinker Air Force Base, 2017. https://www.tinker.af.mil/News/Articl... National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, "Gunship I: Spooky." https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Vis... Walter J. Boyne, "The Awesome Power of USAF Gunships," Air Force Magazine, April 1999. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/art... Capt. Gary A. Guimond, "Hot Flare! Hot Flare!", Airman, June 1970 (as cited by Ballard). Film and photographs: U.S. National Archives (NARA), the Department of Defense and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, public domain as works of the U.S. government, except: 0:17, 10:33 and 20:25: "Douglas AC-47D Spooky firing its miniguns, circa in 1968" by Fly-by-Owen, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - reframed with motion. Short excerpts, each under 6 seconds: "Wings Over Vietnam," episode 5 of 8, "Spookies, Spectres and Shadows," television documentary series (Discovery Wings Channel). All rights remain with their owners. No movie clips. #VietnamWar #AC47 #PuffTheMagicDragon A companion channel to Grunt's Field Notes.