After two years of college, Lawrence Gillespie enlisted in the Army in 1963. His time in college and passing an Army exam allowed him to go to OCS, which he did. After basic and AIT at Fort Gordon as an enlisted infantryman, he went on to OCS at Fort Benning, got his commission, and then did jump school, followed by armor school at Fort Knox, and finally went to flight school at Fort Wolters, where he learned to fly helicopters. He deployed to Vietnam in 1965, where he served his first tour with A Company, 501st Aviation Battalion based out of Bien Hoa, initially flying slicks, then switching to gunships and flying combat assault missions. He also proudly recalls spending three or four months on that first tour with the Seawolves flying off of an LSD down in the Rung Sat special zone. On his second tour, he flew primarily in support of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade out of Long Binh. Gillespie describes the time he lost an engine and went down on his second tour, and the time he watched a helicopter explode on the ground just below him, killing three of his friends. He notes that there’s not enough time to talk about “the day that I got 25 holes in my ship … and the instrument panel was shot out,” or the time “I was showing a new pilot how to make a gun run and a bullet comes up and goes straight through between my legs,” or the time when an American adviser with South Vietnamese troops in close contact asked him to fire on his own position, which he did, and the adviser said, “Keep it coming, keep it coming,” until Puff (the AC-47) arrived and effectively put an end to the battle by destroying the enemy.