The life expectancy of a door gunner might be a little less than the pilot and co-pilot, only because he's visible and the pilot and co-pilot are normally not that visible; coupled with the fact that the enemy may want to kill the door gunner because he's shooting the machine gun. His survival time will be rated upon the amount of time his aircraft is hovering within enemy gunfire range. If the chopper is staying within ground fire range, and is receiving ground fire, for one or two minutes, then he may only have one or two minutes left to live. The pilot and co-pilot may have 3 or 4 minutes left of life remaining; as they are hidden from view, and if not hit by fire, and the bird crashes, they may become casualties from the crash itself. Which gave them more time to live than the dead door gunner. Time is relevant. If it's an intense fight and there's no cover (protection) then life expectancy is shorter. If it's an intense fight and there IS cover then life will last longer. If it's NOT a serious firefight (sporadic) then life may last even longer still. Then there's always those accidents...
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Communist snipers had a lower life expectancy than US snipers, because US snipers didn't have to worry about an air strike being called in on them.
In over half the cases, US forces would call in an air strike on an enemy position, snipers included. US jets dropping napalm or 250, 500, 750, or 1000 pound general purpose high explosive bombs, plus firing 2.75" rockets and 20mm cannon fire was quite effective compared to countering with just small arms fire. US snipers; USMC or USA nearly always survived their tours; they specialized in relatively long range shooting (excessive of 100 yds), most unit contacts were grenade range, about 40 yds maximum. Only one US sniper was Kia from one US brigade, in one military region in 1971; contrasted with nearly four hundred US KIA from the same region during the same time period.
Some may, but being a former Vietnam POW does not automatically mean that one has a shorter, or longer, than normal life expectancy.
The life expectancy of the servicemen depended on the job position the service person had. For instance if you were a ball turret gunner your life expectancy was three hours. If you were a General you were expected to live to see the end of the war or at least get close to the end of the war. If you were a nurse or doctor you could expect to live through most of the war but if you were a "medic" or rather an army corpsman you had a life expectancy of 3 hours too.
I have read many world war 1 books and there exspected to live 4-5 days
Approximately 3,403,100 US servicemen served in Southeast Asia (2,594,000 of those men served in country); nearly 60,000 didn't make it back. Those are your "life expectancy" figures.
Nearly 12,000 US helicopters & approximately 40,000 US helicopter pilots served in the Vietnam War. Over 5,000 US helicopters were destroyed and nearly 5,000 US helicopter crewmen were killed in Vietnam. Of those 5000 dead crewmen, about 2,000 were helicopter pilots.