So, those guys…as soldiers were they happiest when they were engaged in combat?
-Joe
Unh…you’re asking a non-weapons person to remember, 40 years later, the details of the guns I saw on my chopper rides where my main worry was staying alive? If I was that observant and rememberant, I would be in the category of the Roswell recallers. :dubious:
I am afraid I cannot distinguish the kind of gun that was used, but I can tell you that a large, automatic weapon mounted on a pole/swivel was quite common on Hueys in the late 60’s, and it was manually controlled as opposed to remotely. The mounts on the trucks were a large diameter pipe attached to the gun, which slid over a slightly smaller diameter pole on the truck. The chopper mounting might have been similar, but I can only speculate.
It was common wisdom that they were 50 cals, but this could be wrong. All I know for sure is they were guns.
A single person would heft the gun, mount and a belt onto the truck mount behind the cab. A heavy mother, but not impossible for one person. Once mounted, it swivelled in all directions and up & down thru a limited range very easily. A second person to handle the belt feed was invaluable if it actually had to be fired for more than a single burst.
UncleRojelio seems to have better information.
If you want to continue this discussion, why not open a new thread on the topic? I feel we are hijacking this one. 
Ocean’s Eleven: cheerfully implausible plan to heist the casino, but what the hell? It was fun.
Ocean’s Twelve: hydraulically jacking up a house three inches to position a laser? A break-dancing French aristocrat who calls himself “The Night Fox”, burgles out of boredom, and leaves signature figurines behind to taunt the police of four continents? A thieving competition with said larcenous Frog? Julia Roberts playing Julia Roberts? - unconvincingly, I might add. Bruce Willis? Oh, wait, it was all a set-up: they had the egg all along! Hahahahaha! And I bet you can’t guess who Catherine Zeta-Jones’ long-lost father turns out to be! Oh, wait, you can.
Next time, try not to hire out-of-work screen-writers who were fired from Scooby Doo for smoking crack on the job, OK?
Thank you!. I’ve been wanting to mention these but couldn’t find a place to start.
Hard to tell. Not a one of them was HAPPY about his war time, not one would go back and do it again, a lot of it they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about… but they did come back to it a lot as a topic. There’s a nearly sexual thrill in being exposed to danger and living to tell about it that’s like junk to some people. Sometimes it gets too good–most of these guys were bikers and heavily into crime and drug trade. Not a few of them died violently. One guy ended up dead from “playing Russian roulette.” Only handgun he owned was the .45 auto that blew his brains out. :rolleyes: Well, that’s what the autopsy said, and who are we to argue?
The most at peace one I ever knew had been a tunnel rat and got mixed up with a landmine. He was a mass of scar tissue, his dick didn’t work any more and he was a low key but determined alcoholic–but he was also a kind and quiet man and a hell of a lover. He was just waiting to die the rest of the way, though–and much too at peace with it.
Whoa, bummer alert! Any rate, the buddy who’d been a door gunner told me it wasn’t unusual for the barrels to melt out of true during serious use and they’d have to change out the barrel so they didn’t blow themselves up. That always sounded pretty scary to me… That and the time he was sitting out in the boonies smoking some weed with a bunch of guys and he looks next to him–leaned against the tree next to his M16 is an AK47… the owner of which stands up, waves, collects his rifle and trots off into the bush. Guy always wondered if he shot the guy that passed him a joint–there’s some wartime philosophy for ya!
If you explain what difference it makes that he saw an AK47 leaning against a tree, I’ll be more confident I understand this story.
-Kris
I believe, though I’m no expert, that AK-47s (Soviet rifles) were the weapons used by the Viet Cong (the US forces used M16s).
This is true- although US soldiers were apparently known to “lose” their M-16s and use captured AK-47s.
Of course, the AK-47 makes a fairly distinctive noise when fired, and if you’ve got a patrol of jumpy US soldiers nearby…
That’s what I thought, but I was just making sure.
But… so am I to understand… this guy bought pot from a vietnamese person… and didn’t notice he was doing so at the time…?
-Kris
The South Vietnamese were (ostensibly) on our side, so having dealings with a Vietnamese person per se wouldn’t be unusual enough to note. It wasn’t that he was toking with a Vietnamese person. It was that he was toking with a North Vietnamese person.
I figure if you’re drafted and you don’t like it, there’s no better way to get back at the country which started the world’s drug insanity trend and then made you go put your life on the line in a sweaty jungle, than by defying all that it holds sacred in both areas. (Meaning, toke it up with Charlie and don’t shoot him.)
Any chance that this thread could be un-digressed back to what it was originally about? I was really enjoying the ‘suspension of disbelief’ stuff.
Nothing wrong with the lengthy chat about battle helicopters, guns, Vietnam, behaviour of 'Nam vets etc., v interesting in its own way but… maybe a separate thread?
Sure. I’ve got one from the pilot of Lost which kept me from getting into the series, even though I tried. It wasn’t the plane deliberately being off course or the monster or the others or the other myriad mysteries I’ve read about in the threads on the series. It came down to one simple thing a few minutes into the pilot. No way do I believe a jet engine which was separated from the rest of the plane was running fast enough to produce enough suction to suck a rather large person into it. I saw the set up, figured out what was coming and thought, “They couldn’t possibly!” but they did. What was worse, as far as I could tell, it didn’t further the plot or establish characters; it’s only purpose was to show a gross scene of a fat guy getting sucked into a jet engine.
There’s a similar issue in the movie Poseidon which I’ll put into a spoiler box since it’s still in theaters. While I realize that, for a movie like that you check your knowledge of logic and physics at the door, or better yet, leave them in the car, one scene still makes me raise an eyebrow even though I’d read a spoiler and knew it was coming.
The bow thrusters are still turning with enough force to suck objects into them several hours after the ship has overturned and lost power. I’m assuming they were designed and built by the same firm which built the jet engine I mentioned in Lost.
Actually, if I think too much about the scene, I start to think about the movie, and my Belief-O-Meter threatens to overload. Maybe I should find a nice, concrete GD thread.
I saw the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith the other day. It’s still a new release at BlockBuster, so I’m going to put my problem in a spoiler box–even though if you know as much about the movie as I did going in, the problem is late in the movie, but not really a spoiler, plotwise. For the most part the movie is a not too serious look at the inside of a marriage in which both halves of the couple are involved in secret organizations whose activities include assassinating people.
My problem comes when most of the way through the movie, the title characters have been shot at hundreds of times–maybe slight exaggeration, and hit dozens of times --also probably an exagerration–and then they strip of their shirts, and they have on these bullet proof vests. OK, no problem with the vests (though I’m not sure when they put them on). The problem is–if someone gets hit by bullets as many times as it appears these characters did-what are the odds that all the bullets hit the bulletproof vests, and none of them create flesh wounds?
Even dumber: why not just send an adult, who (1) knows the secret, (2) knows how to conduct themselves in the outside world, and, yes, (3) isn’t fucking blind?
It was Macduff, not Macbeth, and the point isn’t that the prophecy was correct, but that Macbeth allowed himself to be defeated by this interpretation of the prophecy.
IIRC, the paper-thin rationale was that WE ALL TOOK A VOW NEVER TO RETURN!
I’m reading Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower”, part 1. Now this is a surrealistic future fantasy with a whole lot of eyebrow raising stuff in it. (The anti-hero gunslinger is walking across a nearly infinite desert in pursuit of a black magician.) So what stretched my disbelief? In preparation for leaving a small town, the gunslinger loads his backpack with cornmeal and hamburger. * Hamburger *? In an uncooled backpack in a desert? Ewwww.
A few minutes later, the gunslinger survives an attack by the entire population of the town. But why bother? The hamburger is gonna kill him in a day or so.He probably means 7.62mms on the Hueys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UH-1_Iroquois
Now, that’s being a bit nit-pickery, man.
A decent point. But what can’t be replicated is human time of involvement. I’m not sure why the Enterprise can’t be fully automated (except no one wants to watch a show about a bunch of holodata cubes exploring the universe), but the if we accept that humans need to be involved on that scale, how do you convince them to go? There must be some kind of reward system going, or no one would go.
“Would you like to leave almost everyone you know for five years and never get out of this small metal town, or would you like to hang out with your buddies and replicate yourselves alcohol and drugs for a pittance and live the life of Riley?”
In fact, what really strains my suspension of disbelief is that almost anything gets done if humans can just order up food and clothing and shelter and pharmecuticals. What’s left to strive for? Why should I go to work and break a sweat?
I am not an anthropologist, and I don’t need to be jumped on if I’m skipping something in my point, just corrected:
My assessment of these pre-agrarian societies is that there simply isn’t much to be greedy about. Also, if you’re only getting meat sporadically, there’s enormous societal pressure to share, as you will be the one asking for a handout next time.
My buddy went to Tanzania for the Peace Corps, and was living in a pre-agrarain village, from what I could gather from his stories, and believe me, there was plenty of selfishness to go around, now that there were enough desirable things that couldn’t be shared equally. Another problem they had there was the active opposition to entrepreneurship, because it meant unequal having. Fish-farm ponds were poisoned because of the resentment.