Menu
A Witness' account
“Puff the Magic Dragon” Unleashed
Dorothy Weller, a civilian aid worker the Quang Ngai City watched from her rooftop in 1969 as a US air force gunship responded to a Vietcong incursion into the city.
February 23, 1969
Quang Ngai
South Vietnam
From her Journal:
The Americans unleashed the terrifying “Puff the Magic Dragon” (DC3 that spews 5,000 rounds of machine gun bullets per minute). It’s a horrible, horrible weapon and just the hideous sound it makes as it belches forth solid streams of red tracers makes my blood run cold. As I watched it circle overhead last night, silhouetted against the low clouds in the light of the flares, flinging indiscriminate bolts of death earthward, I could vividly visualize the scene below.
Men, women, children and animals, caught like rats in a flood. No place to hide, no way to plead their case of innocence to the machine in the sky, no time to prepare for death. The beating the civilians are taking in this war is beyond adequate description….
The cold, mechanical, compassionless way that monster circled around and around and around, ruthlessly pursuing an unseen “enemy,” stabbing viciously earthward again and again, probing, searching, killing and maiming all in its path. The pilot and the gunners, American boys who could just as easily be my brothers or sons, “doing their job.”
…the Emergency Room was filled. I’ve seen all this before! Five times, ten times. It seems like a thousand times. I’ve seen too much, and heard too much and smelled too much, but yet each time is like the first time. Why can’t I get used to it?! Each lifeless form, every scream of anguish, each blank stare of those who have suffered too much strikes pain in the pit of my stomach. My emotional strength is a sham. Are there really those who can look at a scene like this and not suffer with the people?