---
title: "This Retro Army Training Video For Vietnam-Era Door Gunners Is Scarily Adorable"
date: "2018-03-12"
modified: "2018-03-12"
authors:
  - name: "Jared Keller"
    job_title: "Former Managing Editor"
    link: "https://taskandpurpose.com/authors/jaredkeller/"
url: "https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-training-video-door-gunner/"
categories:
  - "Aircraft"
  - "Culture"
  - "Helicopters"
  - "Mandatory Fun"
  - "Tactics"
  - "Tech & Tactics"
  - "Training"
tags:
  - "video"
---

# This Retro Army Training Video For Vietnam-Era Door Gunners Is Scarily Adorable

![](<https://taskandpurpose.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/02/18987357-1.png>)

If there’s one combat billet that gets crapped all over by Hollywood, it’s the modern helicopter door gunner.

Armed with a muscular M60 7.62mm machine gun and perched high above the kill zone, the door gunner doles out and destruction as though it were a casual neighborhood drive-by. Which is why all those “Hey man, whoa, that’s enough!” scenes in war movies from *Full Metal Jacket* to *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* (lol) usually involve an overzealous aircrew corporal mowing down scads of innocents below. If the Bell UH-1 Huey was the pale horse of Revelations, then the M60-toting door gunner was the death that follows.

How did the military ward off that bad stereotype? With another bad stereotype! Door-gunning is more like fighting off bandits on the stagecoaches of old, according to this jarringly upbeat 1966 Army training film, [unearthed](<https://www.guns.com/2018/03/12/riding-shotgun-on-a-huey-1966-army-training-film-on-door-gunners-video/>) by Guns.com, on “shotgunners,” the “tough, skilled Soldiers trained to protect the sky-coaches flying over South Vietnam."

As a little four-minute morsel of history, this training video is positively adorable. We get some nice shots of clean-cut young soldiers at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii — likely from the 25th “Tropic Lightning” Infantry Division — just a few years after the Department of Defense began arming helicopters with machine guns like the M1919A4 Browning. (The 25th *shoulda* been called “[Tropic Thunder](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder>),” but whatever, fuck you.)

Of course, the coming years would bring all-new murdergear to Army helos, from rocket pods to the ubiquitous M60, shown rolling deep in the clip above. The Army training video offers a nice little vision of the modern door gunner as an earnest protector (“Gee whiz, gotta keep my battle buddies safe!”), while the reality may be a little more “Get some get some GET SOME!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI

You know what they say about hindsight: It’s the only weapons system the Pentagon will never invest in.

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## Author
Jared Keller is the former managing editor of Task & Purpose. His writing has appeared in Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

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