Abandoned in Hell _The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate

by William Albracht

  After six months in that job—around the time, actually, that I had figured out what I was supposed to be doing—I became the executive officer of an “A” Team at Thailand’s extreme southern tip. Except for a resident CIA officer, there were no other Americans for many miles around.

  I had enlisted for three years. When I accepted a commission as a Reserve officer, however, this became moot: I was obligated to two years’ active duty from that date. Unless I volunteered to stay on indefinitely, with a minimum of one more year, I’d return to civilian life in late August 1969 without ever having heard a shot fired in anger.

  But the Army that needed thousands of new junior officers as it expanded into a wartime force also sought to protect its investment in these new lieutenants. It did so in several ways, most obviously by speeding promotions. If I accepted a promotion to captain, I would owe Uncle Samuel only one more year of service.

  About a month before I was due for discharge, I told our personnel officer that I’d stick around for that extra year—but only if I could serve it in a Special Forces unit in Vietnam. He gave me a funny look. I remembered that look: It was just like the one the Rock Island recruiter had flashed when Joe and I asked about enlisting for airborne infantry.

  The personnel officer smiled. “This, my friend, is your lucky day!”

  My dream had become real! I was headed for combat with the Special Forces.

  • • •

  OR maybe not.

  Most of the Army’s thousands of new first lieutenants had completed their two-year service obligation and left active duty. Before boarding a plane to Vietnam, I learned that there was an acute shortage of infantry captains—and Special Forces captains arriving without specific orders to Fifth Special Forces were usually diverted to shorthanded infantry battalions to serve as company commanders.

  That was not why I’d volunteered for an extra year in uniform.

  I had no orders for Fifth Special Forces—but I was determined to get some.

  I arrived in Vietnam on August 25, 1969. Before going through in-processing in Long Binh, I sought out the commanding officer of the 90th Replacement Battalion and pleaded my case. He very kindly heard me out, and then obligingly made sure I was on orders to the Fifth Special Forces.

  I hitched an airplane ride to Nha Trang and reported to Headquarters, Fifth Special Forces. There I had a sit-down with a light colonel, who matter-of-factly told me that I was slated for a headquarters job. I would command a desk and do hand-to-hand combat with the paperwork of war.

  That was even worse than leading a rifle company in an infantry division! There, I would at least have a good chance of seeing action. I wasn’t about to take a staff job if I could help it, so I asked for an assignment to the Mike Force. He looked at my records, and then shook his head. No combat experience. The Mike Force was out of the question.

  “What about an ‘A’ Team?” I asked, and he nodded yes. I asked for one in II Corps, where Bob had served, and again he agreed.

  But first I had to go back to school: the MACV RECONDO Combat Orientations Course (COC), staffed and run by veteran Special Forces types. This was mandatory for all members of Special Forces serving their first Vietnam tour. On the last day of August, a boat took me to Hon Tre Island in Nha Trang Bay. For the next ten days I polished my combat mojo with an intense refresher course in patrolling, jungle operations, communications, and working with forward air controllers (FACs) and artillery forward observers (FOs) to call in supporting fire and air strikes. Not a bad way to get acclimated to Vietnam while picking up very useful, hands-on experience.

  What I learned on Hon Tre would soon save my life.

  On September 11, I reported to Company B, Fifth Special Forces, in Pleiku, a dusty, backward, and distinctly unlovely provincial capital. Three days later, I was flown down to BMT, where I was assigned to A-236 in Bu Prang, reputedly the crown jewel of Central Highlands “A” Team camps. I signed in to Bu Prang on September 19 and assumed the duties of executive officer. A-236 was commanded by Captain William Palmer, a National Guard officer on active duty. He was a graduate of the Military College of South Carolina—the Citadel—which has operated a well-regarded West Point–style ROTC program going back to 1842. Palmer was due to rotate home in December, which left me with the inside track to succeed him. He was a nice enough fellow who seemed to fancy himself a Southern gentleman, not much for mingling with the unwashed masses, the sergeants who comprised most of his team. As a recent escapee from those unwashed ranks—and, more important, a small-town Midwestern working-class guy—I found the company of these vastly more experienced men in many ways more convivial and interesting than that of Captain Palmer.

  Some of the sergeants at Bu Prang had served with my brother Bob. I proudly learned that his combat exploits had made him an almost legendary figure in the Green Berets’ fighting fraternity. I hoped a little of that would rub off on me.

  The other officer at Bu Prang was Lieutenant George Tierney, a good guy. He was wired—a skinny kid seemingly brimming with nervous energy; someone nicknamed him Arc Light. He was busy electrifying various things. Palmer was busy being Olympian, and I was just plain busy, working long hours to get the camp and surrounding areas prepared to withstand a prolonged attack. Almost before I started, however, I was ordered to go to Kate.

  Now this is the Law of the Jungle

  as old and as true as the sky;

  And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,

  but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

  As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk,

  the Law runneth forward and back

  For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

  and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

  —Rudyard Kipling, The Law of the Jungle

  FOUR

  Firebase Kate, September 1969

  First Lieutenant John Kerr flew into Kate on September 20, 1969, replacing the previous FDC officer, who had been reassigned; they met only in passing as Kerr hopped off a Huey and the other lieutenant got on it and flew away. “I never got his name,” muses Kerr. “I think he became the assistant ammunition officer, or something like that.”

  Among all the others that I could find who had served on Kate, none can recall this lieutenant’s name. I mention this to make the point that while Firebase Kate was not quite as big as a football field, and while there were never as many as thirty Americans on it at the same time, such was the compartmentalization of duties that, after the passage of more than forty years, few of Kate’s survivors can recall the names of more than the handful of men with whom they worked the most closely.

  Kerr settled into Kate’s FDC, communicating with Susan and Annie and 5/22 headquarters with one of two AN/GRC-46 radios. Normally mounted in vehicles and connected to a whip antenna on a spring mount, these FM radios have a useful range, on a vehicle, of three to five miles. On Kate, however, the antenna was emplaced on a tall pole; at some 3,000 feet elevation, it had line-of-sight communication with units at far greater distances.

  That pole also told anyone who could see it exactly where the FDC was.

  FDC radios were powered by a collection of truck batteries charged by a three-kilowatt diesel generator. Two smaller generators provided light and power for the FDC and for its new FADAC computer.

  “FADAC [Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer] was a big ungainly thing,” recalls Bob Johnson. “We were not supposed to use it to actually issue [firing] instructions, but only to double-check; I think the idea was to get field confirmation that the information coming out of FADAC was reasonably consistent with the manual process.

  “FADAC required elaborate information, including temperatures and wind directions at different altitudes,” Johnson adds. Until this device came into use, however, weather data had not been provided to Kate’s FDC. “We began to get that information, but how accurate and timely it was—that was a different matter. In my experience, temperature information did not seem im
portant; generally, temperatures in the Central Highlands were in a fairly narrow band. Wind information was important, but usually the wind was not very strong; most of the time these factors were not a consideration.”

  Tall, skinny, and very well-spoken, Johnson was an unusual man to find in a Vietnam FDC. A Cornell graduate with a degree in economics, he had been an actuarial trainee for the Equitable Life Assurance Society (now called AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company), an enormous company headquartered in New York City. At 24, surrounded by men in their teens or barely beyond them, he was among the oldest GIs on Kate.

  “After my junior year at Cornell, I worked in a summer intern program for Equitable, and they offered me full-time work in the actuarial program following graduation,” Johnson explains. At that time, anyone draft-eligible and employed in an actuarial-training program like Equitable’s was eligible for a Public Health Service commission. “I expected to receive my commission during the summer following my graduation,” Johnson adds. For that reason, he elected not to apply for graduate school and a student deferment.

  After he graduated, however, but before his application was processed, Congress decreed that Public Health Service commissions would require a graduate degree. Now classified 1-A, Johnson immediately enlisted for Artillery OCS. While in advanced artillery training, however, he discovered that he could opt out of officer training and still serve only a two-year enlistment, “with the understanding that I’d be sent to Vietnam.”

  Johnson had—correctly—assumed that everyone who completed OCS would also go to Vietnam. “It was a question of whether I wanted to serve almost three years, which would be the total period if I accepted a commission and went to Vietnam, or a shorter period,” he explains. He opted out of officer training. After arriving in Vietnam in October 1968, Johnson was assigned to Charlie Battery, and he worked in the FDC on several firebases.

  Kate was established in mid-September; Johnson should have completed his combat tour at the end of that month—except that he voluntarily extended it until December 25. If he returned to the US on or after that date, he would then be less than five months from the end of his enlistment. Army policy, he had learned, was to grant early discharge to those returning from overseas duty with fewer than 150 days remaining in uniform. Johnson had gamed the system to reduce his twenty-four-month obligation to nineteen. But first he had to survive Vietnam.

  • • •

  KERR’S FDC crew worked with Smith’s gunners to register their guns on possible trouble spots—obvious avenues of approach to their hill, as well as trail and stream junctions and nearby hilltops. They did the same for targets near Susan and Annie, adjusting their own fire with reports from observers on the distant bases. Kerr then adjusted Susan’s 155 mm howitzers on preplanned targets around Kate. The idea was to have guns on all three firebases ready to fire in support of an attack on any other base.

  For the guns on Susan, however, this was risky; Kate was almost at the maximum range for a 155 mm howitzer, about 14,000 meters. Howitzers are not precision weapons, so there is always a small degree of uncertainty about exactly where any particular shell will land; as long as the impact point is within the warhead’s bursting radius, it’s considered on-target. However, as range-to-target distance increases, error probability increases with it: the greater the range, the greater the probability of error. Moreover, ballistics and hardware characteristics dictate that the greater degree of error will be in range, rather than deflection. Having one of Susan’s guns fire at a target on or near a line between the two firebases increased the chance of a shell landing shorter or longer than planned. This is to say, landing on Kate.

  Once their guns were registered, Kate’s gunners were rarely asked to fire them. “There were no US or ARVN troops in the area,” recalls Kerr. “We weren’t in direct support of an infantry division on the ground. Once or twice we shot for LRRPs, long-range recon patrols, and the LRRP guys were impressed with what we could do. But that was only once or twice. I’d been in Vietnam only a month when I got to Kate, and it was only my second firebase, so I didn’t really know why we were there, except that we were supposed to shoot for whoever asked us to shoot.”

  “We went days without firing our guns,” Smith confirms. “There was a lot of boredom. Day to day to day, we wondered what the hell we were doing there.”

  For a morale-building break in the tedium, Smith once had his guns target the ruins of a stone building. “We could see this old stone building that sort of looked like a church; according to the map, that was in Cambodia,” he says. “We shot at it just to see if we could hit it, just dinking around. We probably weren’t supposed to [fire into Cambodia], but it gave us something to do.”

  Including the three gun crews and the FDC staff, there were never more than twenty-seven artillerymen on Kate. From time to time, men came or left for R&R, to go on sick call, or for some other official reason.

  The CIDG strikers were issued their own food, while the GIs dined twice daily on C rations; once a week, a Huey brought in hot food. Some artillerymen scavenged steel ammunition boxes and turned them into makeshift stoves and cooking pots. “We’d take an ammo box, put some water and rice in it, maybe scrounge some spices or peppers from the CIDG guys,” recalls Bob Johnson.

  Artillery units stocked C-4 plastic explosive in case they had to fell trees to clear space for their guns. They’d pull the lid off a steel ammo box and lay it at right angles under their cooking box, pinch off a squib of C-4, and light it in the lower box, add the contents of whatever C ration meals were available—chopped ham and eggs, turkey loaf, tuna and noodles, ham and lima beans—then mix them into the spiced rice and cook up GI slumgullion stews on their little C-4 stoves.

  One afternoon, the pilots of a passing helicopter radioed Kate and offered to swap a freshly killed deer for a case of C rations. “Their door gunner saw something moving near the edge of a clearing and opened up on what turned out to be a deer,” Smith recalls. “They landed and threw it on the chopper. I don’t know why they wanted C’s. They were living in much greater comfort than we were; they ate in a mess hall every night, but they offered us the swap, so we took it.”

  Gerald “Tex” Rogers, a gun section chief, knew just what to do with the deer. An avid hunter, he dressed the carcass, butchered it, and distributed the meat to be cooked in ammo-box stoves. For one meal, at least, Kate’s artillerymen had fresh meat.

  • • •

  THE Montagnard infantry was a CIDG company from Special Forces Camp A-233 at Trang Phuoc under Captain Lucian “Luke” Barham, five feet nine inches and a lean, sinewy 130 pounds. Born in Riverdale, Maryland, Barham was 23, the oldest of nine children in an Air Force family. He had lived all over the world. After taking classes at a community college in Sacramento, California, he enlisted in the Army in 1965 and graduated OCS in November 1966. After jump school, he spent a year in language school learning Cambodian, then attended the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. Following a year in Okinawa, he arrived at the Special Forces camp at Duc Lap. By his account, almost every day he or Staff Sergeant Arbizo led a dozen or so “Yards,” as GIs called them, to patrol the jungle around Kate’s isolated hilltop, looking for anything that might indicate the presence of enemy troops. He recalls finding no sign of the enemy at all. “On one of the patrols we ran into an [abandoned] French plantation close to the Cambodian border,” Barham says. “It was made of concrete, and the jungle had overtaken it. I couldn’t believe it.”

  On a fine late-September day, Mike Smith joined one of these patrols, which descended Kate’s steep eastern slope through thick jungle. At the bottom of a deep ravine large enough to conceal a regiment, the patrol picked their way through dense vegetation. They crossed a stream perhaps eight inches deep, with trees growing out of it.

  Past the stream, the patrol climbed the steep, forested flank toward that long, high, narrow ridge that ran away from Kate to the southeast. They paused in a clearing well below the ridge. Smith w
as perhaps 250 meters from Kate, well within small-arms range, and just below the line of CIDG foxholes encircling the base. He could see CIDG troops clearly, as well as gun parapets, the sandbagged FDC, and the command post bunker. Early in his tour, Smith had purchased a good camera and habitually carried it almost everywhere. Now he took out this Minolta SLR and took a photo on color slide film.

  As on their other patrols, Barham’s CIDG found no sign of the PAVN. Yet we now know, from POWs, from US Army after-action reports, and from postwar PAVN unit histories, that from late September on, several thousand PAVN troops were on the Vietnam side of the border within a few kilometers, or less, of Kate. Helicopters landed on the firebase from time to time; someone in a PAVN recon unit observing these flights could easily have pulled out a compass and shot an azimuth along the aircraft’s course. The big guns were fired from time to time, and the bald hilltop offered no concealment. Every few days, the human waste from Kate’s garrison was burned with diesel fuel, sending a column of black smoke skyward for a few hours. Anyone within a mile or two could hardly have been unaware of the presence of American troops on Kate.

  The North Vietnamese, however, are masters of camouflage, tireless diggers who obsessively fashioned elaborate underground facilities and long bunkers connected by tunnels. It is easy to believe that Barham and his CIDG troops patrolled widely and diligently, yet simply failed to find a wily and elusive foe.

  Yet many others on Kate say that after a couple of weeks or so, CIDG recon expeditions from Kate became much less frequent and more often resembled hunting excursions than recon patrols. Occasionally, a few GIs from one or another gun crew accompanied the Yards on these hunts.

  Skilled trackers and stalkers, the Yards rarely failed to return without something for their stew pots: a wild pig, a small, furtive muntjac deer, a monkey of one species or another, a hare or a big snake or a lizard, a badger or a brush-tailed porcupine—it was all welcomed as fresh meat by the CIDG troops.