What you just read are actual radio transmissions as recorded on cassette tape by  Major Peter St. Jean on a Stinger combat mission out of DaNang on May 15, 1971.
 

All Seemed Routine

It all started out as a routine mission for this "seasoned combat crew" into the Hotel Route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, searching for North Vietnamese trucks headed south.

Triple-A (AAA) was especially intense as was the truck traffic that night. We were glad to already be "acclimated" to the combat environment, as by now the scanners called only close breaks, and the two sensors coordinated smoothly in locating and verifying valid targets before giving the pilot "consent" to blow them away!

We did not appreciate the sizeable moon and haze in the air that night, as it silhouetted our AC-119K gunship to the enemy AAA gunners on the ground, especially while flying in firing orbits over targets.



Even the moon was your enemy! During a full moon or full lunar illumination, gunships were silhouetted in the night sky and became easy targets for the enemy gunners below.

The Enemy Zeros In

All of a sudden BOTH scanners called, “break right” and “break left,” and at the same instant enemy anti-aircraft artillery rounds were streaking up under Stinger 03. We puckered, because we knew the ‘you-know-what’ was about to hit the fan!
  
Lead Gunner Bob La Rosa and Aerial Gunner J.D. Hughes were both seated on empty ammo cans behind the forward-most number one (#1) twenty millimeter (.20mm) Vulcan cannon, insuring the cannon fired properly. The aircraft commander/pilot, Captain John Bielstein had Stinger 03 banked in a left turn firing orbit. The 20mm gun was blazing away at the target on the ground when it suddenly jammed. Gunners La Rosa and Hughes feverously worked at clearing the jammed weapon while the aircraft did a deadly dance through waves of AAA ground fire coming up at Stinger 03.

La Rosa informed Captain Bielstein over the intercom that the #1, 20mm, cannon could not be fixed and that he was shutting the gun down and replacing it online with the rear 20mm cannon, gun #6. La Rosa & Hughes immediately picked up the empty ammo cans they had been sitting on and carefully walked to the rear of the plane and checked the cannon. La Rosa then turned on the arming switch for the #6 gun and informed Captain Bielstein that the gun was armed and ready to fire.

In this photo you are looking aft at the #6 gun and ammunition drum. Gunners La Rosa and Hughes were seated just about where the person taking this photo was standing.

Belly Hit

Approximately, twenty Five seconds later…. and exactly where Gunners La Rosa and Hughes had been sitting behind the # 1 cannon, two rounds of AAA fire burst through the belly of Stinger 03. The first round of AAA ripped open the belly of the gunship just below where gunners La Rosa and Hughes had been seated. The round exploded as it passed through the aircraft’s fuselage, sending pieces of shrapnel flying everywhere in the gun compartment. Shrapnel tore into a nearby, fully loaded, twenty millimeter ammo storage can called the “609 can”; so named because it held six hundred nine rounds of spare twenty millimeter ammunition.

A side view of aircraft 850 shows the peeled open skin of the gunship where enemy antiaircraft fire tore into its underside.

The two antiaircraft rounds were later determined to be Soviet made /supplied .57 mm shells that smashed through the outer skin and detonated in the gun compartment before exiting through the top of the fuselage.

The enemy rounds took out the co-pilots rudder control cables; a primary hydraulic line that all but emptied the main reservoir; and a Fuel Cross-Feed Line that started spraying 115/145 octane aviation fuel all over the lower crew (gun) compartment and its occupants...first, one tank, then another. Miraculously, with 10 crewmembers aboard, not one crew member was hit by the flying shrapnel!

Note: PANAMA Control came up on “Guard” to warn us that our escort “Gunfighter 44, an F-4 Phantom fighter/bomber jet flying out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand was circling high above us, watching the ever-growing white cloud of fuel vapor trailing behind us, just looking for any spark to ignite it!
    
The onboard APU (auxiliary power unit) was shut down by the crew to reduce the chance of an electrical spark igniting the fuel that was now pouring down on crewmembers in the cargo/gun compartment. Gunners La Rosa, Hughes, and Alvarez started dumping all live ammunition and spent brass cartridges overboard to lighten the aircraft. Every thing that wasn’t needed, or tied down, was thrown overboard from the severely damaged Stinger Gunship.

Can We Make it Back to Base?

By this time, all of the crewmembers in the cargo compartment had strapped-on their chest parachutes and were readying themselves for what looked like a good chance of having to bailout! Up in the cockpit, on the flight deck, Captain Bielstein and his co-pilot, Captain McCartney, were hard at work attempting to keep the badly damaged gunship in the air while flying the wounded aircraft out of hostile enemy territory toward home base.
The 45 minute dash for DaNang seemed like 45 hours. Worried about the loss of fuel with continuing fuel leaks and the danger of a fuel explosion, the flight back to DaNang did give Captain Bielstein and the crew time to formulate plans for approach and landing if we actually made good on our "RTB" (return to base).

At about 12 miles out of DaNang, Flight Engineer (FE) Scoggin and Gunner La Rosa started manually hand-pumping the left main landing wheel and the nose gear down because of hydraulic pressure loss. We would have to do without Landing Flaps for the same reason. It would be a no-flaps landing!

The nose gear and left main indicated “Down and Locked” with two green lights on the pilot’s panel; but no amount of pumping could do the same for the right main landing gear. A bailout into the South China Sea started to look like a better alternative than landing with a collapsed gear, showering sparks on a fuel trailing slide down the runway!

Flight Engineer, Technical Sergeant Tommy Scoggin was sure we were all convinced that our efforts for landing were in vain, and he had our full attention when suddenly he called out, “Hey! We've got 3 in the green. Let's land," Bielstein said, as we turned final for 27.

One Final Hurdle

Stopping the aircraft was the one final hurdle remaining, as the brake disks grew white hot from one continuous application of emergency air bottle brake pressure. Emergency vehicles zoomed in around us and the fireman considered hitting the brake disks with cold water! Thank goodness, the fireman didn’t as hot brakes are known to explode. We taxied off the runway and stopped with ten guys setting a new world record for aircraft egress with no step-down ladder, no lights, nothing but adrenaline!

Although Maintenance was glad to get the aircraft back, it was soon determined that our warbird was no longer flyable as field repairs for that much damage were impossible. It was decided that our Stinger gunship would be cannibalized to repair and replace parts on the operational AC-119 gunships in the Squadron.

 
Damage to the underbelly and top of the fusalage was so severe that AC-119K gunship 850 was permanently grounded. The aircraft was cannibalized, meaning the aircraft was now used for parts to support the operational gunships left in the squadron.
    

Safe Again

Our crew had survived another mission over the "Blood Road" a nickname for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Our aircraft commander, Captain John Bielstein, was most deservedly put in for the Air Force Cross while the rest of the crewmembers were nominated for Distinguished Flying Crosses. For Major Peter St. Jean, May 15, 1971 was the first day of his 20th and final year in the United States Air Force. St. Jean only hopes that all his fellow crewmembers realized that their safe recovery and landing was living proof that God had something else for each of them to do in the furtherance of His Kingdom, and that each of them stay as close to Him as they did on that Bad Night on the Trail.

(Pete St. Jean 9/11/06)

Following are the crewmembers of Stinger 03 (zero-three) that moonlit night:
AC (Aircraft Commander) - Captain John Bielstein
CP (Co-pilot) - Captain John McCartney
FE (Flight Engineer) – T/Sgt Tommy Scoggin (deceased)
FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red operator)- Major Peter St. Jean
NOS (Night Observation Scope operator) - Major Jack Deal
NAV (Navigator) - Lt. Col. Brubaker
Lead Gunner (aerial) - S/Sgt  Bob La Rosa
Gunner (aerial) - A/1C  J.D. Hughes
Gunner (aerial) -A/1C Joe Alvarez
IO (Illuminator Operator/Scanner) - unknown