Door Gunner

Door Gunner

The year was nineteen hundred and sixty-eight
And I didn’t want to be left behind or too late.
It was my generation’s world stage show
And I desperately wanted to sign up and to go.
But the army had tricked me and played a cruel joke,
Spiraling my war-movie dreams up in black smoke.
For three years they stationed me in West Germany,
Not the place I had imagined I wanted to be,
For I was a Hell’s Kitchen street-fightin’ villain
And yearned to be close to the action and killin’.
I served my time in Europe and went back to my home;
Took a job at Grumman and became a factory drone.
While I was working, the war over in Vietnam
Continued to rage on, rage on, rage on and on.
One day I walked up and told my ole boss,
“See ya later; I just joined the U.S. Air Force.”
This time I had made extra damn good and sure
That Vietnam-bound would be on my front door.
I said I’d be a gunner on a helicopter ship.
I wanted airborne battle, the ultimate far-out trip.
They were more than obliging, taught me how to fly
And sent me someplace where I could be a gung-ho dead guy.
Finally, I had arrived at the Pacific’s combat side
In the gunship New Yorker I would fight and ride.
We soared way above green canopy tops,
The American Air Force’s deadliest cops.
From far up above in the Southeast Asian sky,
We made our enemy run for cover, get blasted, or die.
The bullets and rockets at which our craft did excel
Turned highland skirmish fields into a tropical hell.
But at night when the chopper blades stopped rotating and spinning,
We would talk about reasons why it seemed we were not winning.
It was impossible to understand how this ever could be
When there were so many bad-asses there just like me.
So to stop all of this useless and negative thinking,
We dulled our emotions with plenty of drinking.
There was never a shortage of Johnny Walker Black Label or Red
Nor of Vietnamese soldiers or American dead.
One thing that in ’Nam it took no trouble to find
Was a source of drugs for numbing the mind.
At the end of the day, I always laid back
With booze, hookers, pot, or even some smack.
We were psychedelic gunslingers and lived by no book.
Killers by day, at night we did whatever it took.
Near the middle of my thirteen-month tour,
The situation wasn’t promising, to be sure.
We were never told by superiors on which of the days
We’d be flying secret missions for Special Ops or Green Berets.
From faceless, nameless powers always came down the order
To fly this day covertly o’er the treacherous Cambodian border.
In case we got shot down, we carried no paper.
Officially, lost choppers blew up and turned into vapor.
From the clothes we wore, no one could tell who was in charge.
For officers captured, punishment would be ever so large.
Our job was to find the Greenies a soft LZ—
Get those gutsy men down and give us time to flee.
Most landing missions went smoothly and we took no VC fire.
Other times it got hairy and circumstances turned dire.
On the worst of all days, we set down in the jungle’s gap,
Never seeing the enemy’s well-planned, nightmarish trap.
The skids of the New Yorker had barely touched ground
When all about our cabin echoed the most dreadful sound:
Bullets tearing through metal and into men’s flesh,
Our once-gallant chopper being shredded to mesh.
The Green Berets shot their way into the open to battle.
If left in the chopper, they’d have been slaughtered like cattle.
I had broken my bones and a bullet into me had drilled.
For my crew, far worse: they’d been shot up and killed.
A second helo was radioed to attempt a daring rescue,
To save their fellow countrymen from war’s final curfew.
The Green Berets heroically drove the VC back to the trees
While our birds up above circled anxiously like bees.
Brave pilots dared death to seize those whom they cherished
As they risked their young lives so that comrades were not perished.
The Berets dragged me from our chopper crumpled and burning,
While bullets kept flying and chopper blades kept on churning.
Once we were far up above and out of harm’s way,
The other bees’ awesome fire rained down on the fray.
The jungle lit up like a thousand Fourths of July,
Friends in the chopper and VC fighters left there to lie.
From the crash and the battle, my body was twisted and rended.
The docs put me together, my body’s wounds mended.
But never a day passes after all these long years
When I don’t catch myself reliving the worst of those fears.
Most days I’m all right and move past that horrific tour,
Though at times, I swear I’m back on a Cambodian jungle floor.