Serving with HMM 263

I volunteered to serve with HMM 263, as a door gunner, during September, 1970. I was about half way through my second tour when I volunteered. After the briefest orientation and a rudimentary physical I was temporarily transferred to Marble Mountain (Da Nang). We were assigned to a "hootch" and began working almost immediately. The first thing in the morning we needed to check in at the operations center to find out what bird we had been assigned to and what our mission would be for the day. The most common missions were: resupply, recon insertions, large troop movements and day and night medevacs.