[bright string music] - James Overman: The first day of pilot training, we were standing at attention, and this guy walks up and he said, "What the hell are you?"

I said, "My dad is from Germany and my mother is 100% Native American."

"I wanna tell you something, Indian, there are no Indians who are gonna ever fly my airplanes."

Wow.

My dream was to take anything to be a pilot.

And this guy's insulting me and... Once in my lifetime, I knew enough to keep quiet because the goal was bigger than this dummy.

My dad and my mother, they came to my graduation.

I'm very proud of that moment, and I think about it all the time.

- Ray Boland: There were two units in Vietnam called aerial rocket artillery.

Cobra gunships.

We were flying helicopters.

But everything we did was managed by the field artillery fire control system.

So typically when we took off, it was in response to a forward observer on the ground with the infantry calling for a fire mission, where the enemy was so close they could no longer use cannon fire.

Typically, we were firing within 25 meters of the friendlies, both day and night.

- Dave Van Dyke: You had the forward air controller.

The FAC was in charge of the air war.

There wasn't a bomb dropped in country that didn't have a FAC in control of it.

And the FAC was in contact with the ground and had got clearance politically.

We knew what the situation was, and we reacted with it.

Being the FAC there was, I think, the best job I ever had.

The meaningfulness of what your decisions and what your skill produced could be really important.

- Gene Hunter: The AC-130 was pretty secret.

Really didn't want people to know the platform existed.

It was called Spectre.

If you notice the way Spectre's spelled, what it is, it's a skeleton that rides a horse at night and swings the sword of death.

And that's what gunships do.

They ride at night and they swing the sword of death.

No way would I wanna be on the ground.

It's just so dead accurate, and just a short burst with the 20s, I mean, you're looking at 3,000 to 6,000 rounds a minute coming out of those things.

And it just... [imitates explosion] No; I would not wanna be on the ground.

- I called out to military assignments, classified assignments.

I said, "What do you have?

I wanna get back over there."

And they said, "Well, have you ever heard of the AC-130?"

I said, "Oh, we got a gunship?

Yeah, that's what I want!"

Our assignment was to destroy trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trail.

When you're flying over enemy territory, the sensors, low light television, infrared, Black Crow, were immediately looking for trucks.

The Black Crow was the most magic of all, and they never figured it out.

The Vietnamese, the Chinese, or the Russians.

We would fly in a thunderstorm or complete overcast, where we couldn't see the ground and they couldn't see up to shoot at us.

And zap a truck right through the clouds.

You get that red flash, yes!

- The pilot in the back seat was typically the pilot in command and firing the rockets.

We had four rocket pods on our aircraft, each with 19 firing tubes.

So a total of 76 rockets if you were fully loaded.

We would fire the rockets,