Mike Jordan – Duster Platoon Leader – Part Three

Duster Details

I had eight Dusters under my command. Four of them were at LZ Betty, two down on the airfield and two at the 105 battery up on the hill that we called the OP (outpost). And I had my platoon command post and support units at Betty.

1st Lieutenant Mike Jordan
Sporting an M-79 grenade launcher in front of twin 40 mm Duster canons

I had my other four Dusters up at LZ Sandy, the 8 inch and 175 mm battery. At Sandy I had an E-7 platoon sergeant, Tanker Smith, in charge as my primary second in command. He was an armor guy from Europe so he had the nickname Tanker. We covered all four sides of the firebase perimeter. When someone tried to get into the place it was up to the Dusters to saturate all four sides of the perimeter with the 40 mm and keep them out. I had an arrangement with the various artillery battery commanders at Sandy that as soon as we started taking any kind of incoming my four guns would open up and saturate the perimeter. And since the crews on the howitzers couldn’t do anything, because they didn’t have beehive rounds, they ran to the nearest Duster and started breaking open ammo cans to feed ammo into the track. The ammo came in four-round clips, four clips in a can. The cans were safety wired shut and it took a hammer to unlock the lid, and then they tossed the clips up to the guys on the back of the track.

Sergeant Joe Belardo with 40 mm ammo clip
From his book Dusterman: Vietnam

I always laugh, you pick up any kind of history and you read specs on the Duster and it says 240 rounds a minute when firing full automatic with both guns. Well I never did encounter a crew that could do that. The Duster had two automatic loaders, one for each gun.

Twin automatic loaders
From Dusterman: Vietnam

A cannoneer would take a clip of those rounds and push it down into that loader, and once the first round got picked up in the loader it sucked up the other three automatically. Very few PFCs and Spec 4s that were slotted as cannoneers that could keep up with the gun.

The Daily Mundane

The roads around my battery headquarters up at Tuy Hoa were such that they were rarely able to use a piece of equipment called the M-578 Vehicle, Tracked Recovery (VTR). It was a light crane mounted on the same chassis and track as the 8 inch howitzer. The old man asked me, “You got a use for it down there?”

“Hell Yeah.”

I did depot level maintenance at the platoon level, which was unique. We would pull the Dusters in with the VRT, or haul them in on lowboys.

M-578 Vehicle, Tracked Recovery (VTR)
Duster on a lowboy

When we had to put in a new engine, which we did frequently, I’d go up to the maintenance company with the paperwork. The company commander or maintenance officer would sign the requisition which I had already filled out. I was not authorized to make the requisition, but they were. When the engines came in they were in these big sealed steel boxes, and they’d call me and say, “Hey Mike, we got your Duster engine in.” I’d send my deuce and a half truck, alone with the VTR with the crane on it, and they’d pick it up, put it in the truck, bring it back. Then we’d use the VTR crane to lift the old engine out and put the new one in. We did all that ourselves.

The other thing we did, our ammo was so unique and not used by anybody else that I got the ammo supply point there at Betty to requisition it and stock it for us, and whenever they needed it out at Sandy I had this one old deuce and a half that had no canvas on it, no windshield, it was just a flat bed. We’d load up those pallets of ammo in air sling cargo nets, drive that truck out into the middle of the helipad and the Chinooks would come in and hover and we’d hook up the sling and they’d fly it out to Sandy.

So I got to know the Chinook guys pretty well. Whenever I needed to go up to the battery headquarters at Tuy Hoa, I’d call the guys from the Chinook company up at Cam Ranh to find out what they had coming down to Betty. At the end of the day before they left to go back to Cam Ranh I’d meet them at the chopper pad and we’d drive my jeep up the loading ramp into the Chinook and they’d fly me as far as Cam Ranh. I’d spend the night in the transient BOQ there (Bachelor Officer Quarters) and then drive into Tuy Hoa the next day.