Astonishing Vietnam War photos reveal the moment U.S. troops unleashed hell on Viet Cong sniper in hills above an Army camp
A Vietnam War veteran has released incredible night-time photographs he took of American troops opening fire on a Viet Cong sniper who had been firing on a U.S. Army camp.
For more than four decades, photographer James Speed Hensinger kept these incredible photographs to himself, not releasing them to the public until now.
Hensinger was just a 22-year-old paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in April 1970 when a Viet Cong sniper began spraying automatic rifle fire on Hensinger's base in Phu Tai, near the coastal city of Da Nang.
'We were pissed off at taking Viet Cong sniper fire from the mountain above us several nights in a row,' Hensinger, now 66 and living outside Denver, Colorado, recalls.
'The guy would stand up from behind a rock and blow off a clip from his AK47 on full-auto. The sniper was shooting at such a high angle that most of his rounds came through the sheet metal roofs of our hooches.
'We decided to use a "heavy" response the next time the sniper hit us.'
The following night, Hensinger set up his Nikon FTN camera to take long exposures to capture the firefight. Each shot includes 15 to 60 seconds of gunfire.
When the Viet Cong sniper began shooting, the Americans unleashed hell.
An M42 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun began pouring cannon and machine gun fire into the hills above the camp.
Hensinger's spectacular photos capture the streaming automatic weapons fire and corresponding explosions where the sniper was hiding out.
Each red line represents a tracer round that was fired from an M60 machine gun set up in the towers guarding the camp. The red lines show only one quarter of the machine gun rounds fired during the gun battle.
The M42 was equipped with a pair of 40mm Bofors auto-cannons, and a .50-caliber machine gun. Both weapons can be seen firing white tracers into the hills.
Hensinger says: 'We sent out patrols during the day, and found a blood trail one morning. Otherwise, we never found him.
'The rocks on the slope were as big as Volkswagens. It took a very stupid officer to put a pin in the map and say, "Build it here."'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -camp.html
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