Abandoned in Hell _The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate

by William Albracht

  This was, of course, careerism at its most insidious. It takes months on the job before almost any officer reaches his full potential as a battery or company commander, and during that very demanding learning curve, new commanders will make mistakes. Mistakes in combat cost lives. By giving almost every captain a shot at command, and limiting this assignment to six months, Pentagon planners ensured that few American soldiers would fight our difficult war under an experienced and capable commander. This is not to say that there were no good unit commanders, or that even the best and most experienced officers don’t make mistakes. But when the average unit commander has three months’ job experience, his troops suffer for it, and some will die.

  Captain Klaus Adam had eight years on active duty when he arrived in Vietnam. He had attended nine Army schools, and graduated with distinction from eight. He had commanded a Sergeant Missile battery in peacetime Germany. But he had no experience whatsoever with field artillery, so his first combat assignment was as assistant operations officer of the 52nd Artillery Group, a headquarters for several field artillery battalions under IFFV Artillery. “I was basically the night duty officer,” he explains. Six months after arriving in Vietnam, in August 1969, he took command of Charlie Battery, 1/92 Artillery.

  In late September he flew into Kate for a look-see. “I met the CIDG force commander [Special Forces Captain Lucian Barham],” recalls Adam. “I surveyed the defensive positions and made sure that my guys were adequately defended, because artillerymen can’t fire their guns and take care of themselves at the same time. You either shoot or you duck; you can’t do both. At the time, I still had the stupid idea that they were out there to support the Mike Force and the South Vietnamese forces that were supposedly out there; artillery is never told the plan of action for the ground forces. There was no need to brief us, because all the ground forces need do is call for fire. It didn’t matter why they called it in; we just sent the fire where and when they wanted it. So, my assumption was that there were combat teams out there doing sweeps, and patrols, and going after the bad guys, and we were there to support them.”

  In fact, there were almost no US or ARVN forces in the area at all. Adam was later told by an IFFV Artillery colonel that his men had been positioned as bait, designed to lure the North Vietnamese across the border, where they could be destroyed.

  Nobody on Kate was ever told about that.

  After looking around for some twenty minutes and finding nothing to complain about, Adam got back in his chopper and flew away.

  When you heard your country calling, Illinois, Illinois,

  Where the shot and shell were falling, Illinois, Illinois,

  When the Southern host withdrew,

  Pitting Gray against the Blue, There were none more brave than

  you, Illinois, Illinois,

  There were none more brave than you, Illinois.

  —Illinois State Song

  THREE

  Rock Island, Illinois

  The first train to link Chicago with the Mississippi River arrived at the sleepy river town of Rock Island, Illinois, in February 1854 on the tracks of the just-completed Chicago & Rock Island Railroad. Building across the river’s largest isle to save construction costs, the rail company thrust two bridges over to what is now Davenport, Iowa, opening Chicago’s slaughterhouses, grain mills, and rail network to the farmers of the Great Plains. Rock Island boomed. In 1880 the US Army opened the Rock Island Arsenal, today the nation’s largest federal armaments manufacturer, and the Quad Cities—Rock Island and neighbors Moline, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa—became a manufacturing center. (Even after East Moline was incorporated in 1903, these five tough river towns with closely connected economies remained known as the Quad Cities.) Dominated by the United Auto Workers, they were a union bastion whose blue-collar members swore allegiance to FDR and the New Deal and could be counted on to vote Democratic in every election.

  I was born in Rock Island in August 1948, the third of five children of second-generation German American farmers. I am certain that my father, Leander, a welder at John Deere, the giant manufacturer of tractors and farm implements, loved me and all his children. But he rarely showed this affection; taciturn and emotionally closed, a compact, muscular, and short-fused man, he punched like a prizefighter and relied mostly on his fists to communicate his displeasure with me. As I entered puberty, my beloved mother, Germaine, a sensitive and intelligent woman, was diagnosed with depression and hypertension. Like many depressed women of that era, she was severely overmedicated. She was soon bedridden, and rarely left her room for days on end. Mom died of a stroke in 1965. My relations with Dad, which had never been good, chilled to an icy truce.

  I am the middle child: Sister Nancy and brother Bob were the oldest, while Don and Mary Beth followed me in birth order. We had always looked out for one another; after our mother died, we became even closer. When Bob finished high school, he escaped the limited horizons of small-town life and enlisted in the Air Force.

  Our family wasn’t poor in the classic sense. We had enough to eat, a safe roof over our heads, decent clothes to wear, and we all went to Catholic schools. But there was no money for anything else, period. When it was time for me to start high school, we didn’t have enough for tuition at the diocese school, Alleman High, where all my elementary school friends were enrolled. I found an after-school job in a grocery store to help pay my tuition.

  Alleman was coed; most of our teachers were nuns or priests. Student discipline was strict, and most teachers enforced school policies and their own classroom rules with corporal punishment. I soon learned not to complain to my father about being spanked or slapped or having an ear twisted: That always triggered a second beating, from him.

  At this time in my life, academics didn’t much interest me; studying was not my thing at all. Instead, I devoted my high school years to enjoying myself. Soon the nuns had labeled me: I was the boy who would never live up to my potential. Held to such low expectations, I did my best not to disappoint anyone: I was happy to earn a C and believed that my parents should also have been happy. I was a classic underachiever—but I was voted “Most Fun to Be With” by my senior classmates.

  I was big and strong but, in the grand scheme of things, only an average athlete. I was desperate to make the varsity football squad, to become a prince of the campus. In my junior year, however, my job conflicted with football practice. I deferred varsity dreams until my senior year; by then, I had enough work seniority to demand a schedule that allowed for after-school practice. With much help from my coaches—and I mean they gave me every possible break and spent hours and hours with me—I made up for my lack of native ability and playing experience with sheer desire. I never started a game, but I played often enough and well enough to earn the respect of my coaches and teammates—and a prized varsity letter.

  This became tremendously important to me for reasons I had no way to predict: Being part of a team, as I saw and experienced, was a powerful force multiplier. Earning that letter was the turning point in my young life, my first glimmer of the power of my own possibilities.

  But only a glimmer. As I approached graduation, the future I envisioned for myself was much like the one most of my classmates imagined: I would get obligatory military service out of the way, return to the Quad Cities, and find an apprenticeship in the building trades.

  Yet I was anxious to put the humdrum ordinariness and rigidity of small-town life aside, if only for a few years. I wanted adventure. I wanted to break out of the Quad Cities cycle of going nowhere in record time.

  With my best friend, Joe Murphy, I spent a few weeks considering service options. I could enlist for three years in the Army, or four in the Marines, Air Force, or Navy. I could volunteer for the draft, or wait to be drafted, which meant only two years.

  Joe and I decided that the Marines offered the biggest challenge and the most possibilities for adventure.

  I idolized my brother Bob—and he wouldn�
��t hear of me joining the Marines. After completing a four-year Air Force hitch, instead of returning to Rock Island, he re-upped! Reenlisted in the Army, spent eight weeks in advanced infantry training, then went to jump school and volunteered for Special Forces.

  Bob was a paratrooper! In the entire eighteen years of my life, I had never even met a paratrooper! So when Bob said, “Forget about the Marines,” I listened. In the Gospel According to Brother Bob, Special Forces was where the action was. He laid it out for us: Enlist in the Army, volunteer for airborne infantry, then ask for Vietnam.

  This was the summer of 1966. Nearly half a million American men had already been drafted for Vietnam service; by the end of that year, some 385,000 US troops would be serving in Vietnam or its waters. Twice that many were in various stages of training for deployment to the war zone. Across America, millions of young men about my age were going to extraordinary lengths to get into perennially understrength National Guard and Reserve units that almost overnight had filled up and grown waiting lists. Men with family, business, or political connections, or with relatives serving in Guard units, proved far more successful in their quest for an honorable, or at least legal, way to avoid the draft and the hazards of combat.

  Those lacking such connections—tens of millions of them—began applying for student draft deferments, enrolling in divinity schools or other graduate programs where they would find shelter from the monsoon of draft notices falling on America’s youth. Thousands more had fled the country or faced prison by declaring themselves conscientious objectors. Navy and Air Force recruiters were swamped by a flood of highly qualified applicants that allowed them to pick and choose, while their opposite numbers in the Army and Marines struggled to meet monthly quotas.

  Many, perhaps most, of those who approached Army recruiters were seeking to do better for themselves than simply waiting to be drafted. Often accompanied by a parent or older brother, potential enlistees came prepared with pointed questions and lists of Army schools. They demanded a written guarantee of training as a dental technician, electronics repairman, military policeman, radar operator, aircraft mechanic, chaplain’s assistant, finance clerk—schooling in any military occupational specialty that might offer safety from the danger and privation of a wartime combat unit.

  But Joe and I lived in Rock Island. Our parents, our uncles, our older brothers, had all served in the military. As bored as I was with life along the Mississippi, I knew that I lived in the greatest country on earth. I was proud to be American. That we were at war in Vietnam meant that I needed to join up, get trained to fight and get to the war zone before it was over. I was almost desperate to do my part for America.

  Right after graduation, Joe and I found Rock Island’s Army recruiting office and asked about signing up for airborne infantry. The sergeant questioned us for a long time, until he was convinced of our sincerity. Then he smiled.

  “This is your lucky day,” he drawled. “I’ve got exactly two quota slots left for airborne infantry. If you’re truly interested in a life of adventure, in joining a military elite, so prized that most who volunteer are turned away or wash out of training, you’ll have to sign up right away. Today. Right now.”

  Before some friend or relative could talk us into changing our minds.

  On October 2, 1966, Joe and I took the train to Chicago, where we reported to the Armed Forces Induction Center. After a physical and a battery of tests, we were sworn in to the United States Army. A little before midnight, just like the lyrics of the Monkees hit song, we “caught the last train to Clarksville,” Tennessee, gateway to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

  Joe and I were assigned to the same basic training company. A day or so later, we took another battery of exams, including the OCS test. OCS might have stood for Oklahoma Cooking School, for all I knew—I had never heard the term “Officer Candidate School.” I had no idea that such a place existed, any more than I had the merest inkling that there was something called the Reserve Officer Training Corps for college students. I thought that every Army officer came from West Point.

  Becoming an officer was not part of my escape-boring-Rock-Island-adventure dream. Officers, I supposed, must have a lot more responsibility than the men in the ranks. They had to be pretty smart, I guessed, because officers would have to know a lot of stuff. They would have to set an example for everyone else. That felt a lot like getting an “A” in every class and being on the student council. It felt like it was going to be an awful lot of work. A lot of responsibility. Not much fun.

  It didn’t feel like me at all.

  Joe, who’d earned better high school grades than I did, wanted that kind of responsibility. His score on the officer candidate exam missed the cutoff by one point.

  I passed by one point.

  • • •

  GROUND war is particularly hard on junior infantry officers and noncoms. They’re the sharpened tip of the spear; in combat, platoon and squad leaders are killed or wounded far more often than almost any other infantrymen, and the better they are at leading their men against fire, the more likely it is that they will become a casualty. By the autumn of 1966, when I enlisted and, coincidentally, when my coauthor was commissioned as an infantry second lieutenant at An Khe, Vietnam, the Army was so desperate for infantry platoon leaders that the Secretary of the Army, the authority who, with congressional approval, appointed individuals to the officer ranks—until then, virtually without exception, they were physicians, dentists, nurses, clergy, attorneys, and other professionals—delegated this power of direct commissioning to the commanding general of US Army, Vietnam, for the purpose of awarding direct appointments to outstanding sergeants and warrant officers. The Army also opened six new Officer Candidate Schools geared to turning out armor, engineer, ordnance, transportation, signal, and quartermaster officers, respectively.

  When my OCS test results were published, I was summoned to my company commander’s office, along with everyone else who had passed. It’s rare for a basic training company commander to have direct contact with trainees: He has a first sergeant and a cadre of drill instructors for that. When my coauthor went through Army basic training at Fort Ord, California, in 1959, when he was himself a Fort Jackson, South Carolina, drill instructor in 1961, and when he spent a month reporting on a basic training company at Fort Benning, Georgia, for a national magazine in 1979, he never saw a company commander address a group of trainees smaller than a platoon, and then only to scold them.

  But it isn’t every day that a young captain gets a chance to talk to future officers, an opportunity to impart his wisdom and insight and perhaps influence both their immediate futures and their entire lives. Even as my CO outlined what was ahead for us, he made it clear that some of us would not get into OCS, and that fewer still would graduate. But once we did, he explained, once we were appointed Reserve officers, our lives would be far different from those of the enlisted men we left behind.

  When he finished talking, the captain asked if we had any questions.

  I raised my hand and he nodded at me—permission to speak.

  I took a deep breath and said, “What if I don’t want to go to OCS?”

  “Private, let me explain how the Army works,” he replied. “I have a levy to fill, and with everyone in this room, I’ll just make my OCS quota. You will be going to OCS. Any more questions?”

  There were none.

  Now that I’d made the OCS cut, I noticed that my drill instructors paid a bit more attention to me. At the time, I didn’t understand just how much more. I didn’t know that achieving a satisfactory grade on a multiple-choice test wasn’t enough to show that an individual has the ability to learn critical leadership skills. My DIs were obliged to take note of my progress, my successes, and my failures. They looked for evidence of personal initiative as well as obedience to discipline, and they made subjective evaluations of my leadership ability, my capacity to learn and adapt to changing situations, my physical conditioning, and my progress in learning the
soldierly skills. If I failed to meet their expectations, I would never have been allowed to start OCS.

  Looking back, I realize it’s a good thing I didn’t know any of that.

  While Fort Campbell is the home of the 101st Airborne Division, for some reason most of my company’s drill instructors were tankers—what the Army calls the armor branch. These men seemed to assume that those of us headed for OCS would go to nearby Fort Knox, the Armor Center and School.

  I did not want Armor. No steel coffin for me! Bob had made it clear that the action was in the infantry. But by then, I’d been in uniform long enough to know better than to argue with a drill instructor. Or to voice an unsolicited opinion.

  Following the eight-week basic course, where I learned the rudiments of soldiering—how to march, how to wear the uniform, how to care for and shoot a rifle, how to throw a hand grenade, make proper use of a gas mask, live in the field while practicing good hygiene, use a map and a compass and, most of all, get into good physical shape, I was shipped to Fort Knox for a two-week leadership preparation school. Then I started the eight-week Advanced Individual Training Course in Armor.

  In February 1967, as I approached the midpoint in my Armor training, those of us bound for OCS were called together to hear that the Fort Knox program was at maximum capacity. We would attend Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia.