"Not My Machine Gun"

​"Not My Machine Gun"
Submitted by - Charley Barnes, Cpt, Headhunter 36, Pleiku May '67-May'68

During my year with the Headhunters I replaced one set of rocket tubes on my O-1 Birddog with a machinegun on several occasions.  The Air Force would get wind of it before long and an edict would come down from on high to remove all machineguns.  Seems they were worried we were encroaching on their close air support role. 

In early 1968 the third platoon of the 219th was formed to support the 52nd Artillery Group in Pleiku.  I was assigned as platoon leader and began to develop a close relationship with the S-3 Section.  They always sent forward observers and assistant S-3 on missions as backseaters.  Finally one day the S-3 himself, a major, went on a mission with me in the back seat.  This was during a period when I had removed the machinegun.   We did the usual registrations and then began some visual recon in the mountains to the northwest of Pleiku.  The area had patches of open fields where the Montagnards had exercised their slash-and-burn agriculture and there were craters and old antiaircraft positions here and there. 

Having been in the area recently, my attention was drawn to a field on the crest of the mountain.  There had previously been digging along the edge of the jungle that I thought had been fresh.  Now it was nowhere to be seen.  So I made a low pass down the edge of the woods, all the while just seeming to wander around.  Sure enough, there was a camouflaged antiaircraft position there, fully manned and ready to shoot. 

I informed the S-3, we alerted the artillery, and I decided to surprise them first with a few HE rockets.  The approach was low level, this time over the length of the field.  After I dipped my nose and fired two rockets, a machinegun opened up on me from the other side of the field.  (Memory lapse dummy, they always operate in pairs.)  Being on the crest of the mountain, I did a diving wing over to the left, masking the fire.  All the while, the S-3 was cheering me on about giving it to them with my machinegun.  When I said that it wasn’t my machinegun but theirs making all that noise, I thought he was going to pee in his pants.  Subsequently we plastered the area with 155mm artillery, but I don’t think that S-3 ever took another ride in the back seat of a Birddog.