HomeMy WebLinkAboutBrian Parker Radio Transcription #1City of College Station
Heritage Programs Oral History
Interviewee:
Interviewer: Tom Turbiville
Place: College Station, Texas
Project: Veterans of the Valley
Transcriber: Brooke Linsenbardt
00:00: Tom Turbiville (TT): Lieutenant Colonel Brian Parker of the Brazos Valley was a member of the Air Force Academy’s first graduating class. He got out, had a plan to be a navigator
on B-57s. Did for four years, but when we got his assignment to Vietnam, well a snafu of sorts, put him in AC-47s. A far different aircraft. The AC-47 was the plane that fired from
on high, giving cover to ground troops just trying to stay alive in Vietnam. AC-47 crews were quite popular as you can imagine.
00:30: Brian Parker (BP): If we went into one of the bars where the Army troops were, they would of course find out that we were Air Force and say, “What’s your call sign?” And we’d
say, “Spooky 42 or whatever.” And they say, “You can’t buy a drink here.” And we go, “Why not?” “Because we’re buying.” And it was very rewarding. Even locally, when we were bringing
some troops up from the Brook Army Hospital, to view a Aggie game. We had a transportation problem and called around and Mr. Ed Cravey, offered to provide a limo and a town car to show
the wounded around town and take them to the game. Turns out Ed, was in Vietnam the same time that I was. And he said I probably saved his life. That’s very rewarding to know.
TT: In a recent episode of Veterans of the Valley on KAMU T.V. , I had the honor to visit with Lieutenant Colonel Brian Parker more about the AC-47. What an airplane. Wanna let you in
on that conversation. The, the numbers are really amazing. I, I found this on the internet about the AC-47s, under the record. From 1964-1969 the AC-47 successfully defended 3926 hamlets,
outposts, or forts. They fired over 97 million rounds. Killed over 5300 enemy soldiers. No outpost or village under gunship protection was ever lost to the enemy. That’s a pretty, fascinating
record.
02:01: BP: That’s what made it so rewarding. When you talk to the guys on the radio going in, it was like they were bowing down to you and saying, “Thank goodness you’re here.” We fired
on the camps themselves. They said, “We’re under cover, have at ‘em.” And we hosed it down, they say, “They’re, they’re going. They’re leaving.”
TT: And, and when they said that they were under cover, they really better mean itt because.
02:22: BP: Yes.
TT: We were talking about the statistical nature of this aircraft, the, the AC-47, and talk more about that about how many rounds you carried, how many rounds it would fire
under, out of three guns and, and sort of its coverage is mindboggling really. Talk about that.
02:37: BP: Oh we carried normally a load of 15,000 rounds, 15,500 something like that. And 40-some flares depending on whether we thought we were gonna have a lighting mission or, or
a gunning mission. Or a combination. A normal load was about 40 and 15,000. The guns fired 6,000 rounds a minute, per gun. That, that’s a hundred rounds a second per gun. If you put
all three guns on, a three second burst will fill every square yard of a football field.
TT: Wow in three seconds.
03:10: BP: Yeah. And, and you run out of ammo real quick if you do it that way so we normally only put one gun on until we were sure we had the right spot and the, the bad guys.
TT: Lieutenant Colonel Parker won two distinguished Flying Crosses and survived a B-52 drop at his time in Vietnam. And tomorrow he’ll talk more about that. I’m Tom Turbiville, this
is Bravo Brazos Valley.