This one is for BBUK. I don't listen to much music, but the wife was listening to some today. A Bobby Bare song called Detroit City came on. When I was a baby, we moved to Detroit so dad could get a job making cars. We only stayed for one year till my folks got homesick, so I don't remember much about it. The song brought back memories.
Most of the time at DaNang, I had enough rank that I worked the ECP as head man at the bomb dump. It was on a hill a ways off the main base. Sometimes at night, a few hills away, Charlie would start lobbing rockets at the main base. They would call Puff and he would come out with his mini guns. Puff was a gunship with 3 mini guns. Each was capable of firing 6,000 rounds a minute. Sometimes even 2 or 3 would come out. With tracer rounds, it looked like streams of fire coming out of the sky. The Vietnamese thought it looked like fire breathing dragons. The Peter, Paul and Mary song called Puff The Magic Dragon was popular at the time, thus the name Puff.
Someone left a radio at the ECP and we kept it on Armed Forces Radio. I'd sit there watching Puff work out and think about the enemy on the receiving end. It seemed like they always played Detroit city while it was going on and I'd think about all those things and how nice it would be to be home.