A Huey’s Wild Duel with a .50-cal Gunner During Tet

By Brig. Gen. Stanley Cherrie, U.S. Army (Ret.)   Here's an excerpt.  Click on link below for the entire story... 

By February 1968, the 2l4th Combat Aviation Battalion had been in combat for nine months. We didn't realize exactly what had started in Vietnam, but as we awoke on the morning of February 2 at Bearcat, our base camp at Long Thanh 17 miles east of Saigon, we knew that something was different from other mornings. As I shook off the mantle of sleep and made my way to the shaving troughs, I couldn't help but notice a hell of a lot of aerial activity, both helicopter and fast mover, for that early in the morning. Someone at the shaving trough told me that there had been attacks by the Viet Cong all over the country at precisely the same time. We knew that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army troops were good soldiers who fought exceptionally well, but most of us didn't believe the actions of the VC were coordinated at a very high level—certainly not at the national level. The radios were alive with traffic. Normally there were two or more pairs of gun drivers on each of the five VHF channels at any given time. Even on a quiet day there was plenty of chatter on the nets, but on this day they were busier than I had ever heard in my nine months of combat flying. I knew something big was up when I heard that helicopters attempting to resupply the U.S. Embassy with additional small-arms ammunition had taken fire and were driven off after repeated attempts to land on the roof. We proceeded to Nui Dat, landed and received our mission brief, which was to insert an SAS patrol. We accomplished the mission in the rural hinterlands, but it was agonizing to know that the locus of the fight that day seemed to be around the cities of Saigon, Bien Hoa, Da Nang and Hue, and not where we were operating. Upon returning home we were met on the flight line by several of the crews that had been in the fight for most of the day. They all were dripping wet and extremely fatigued. I learned that Major Stack had been shot down twice that day and had just flown his third helo home.

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