Abandoned in Hell _The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate

by William Albracht

  “We were looking to make contact,” explains Pierelli. “Sometimes we’d get intelligence telling us to go into a particular area because the NVA were coming down. A lot of times they had come down through Cambodia, and they had [something] in mind that they wanted to do.”

  Special Forces strategy along the border was to make contact with the enemy and force them to either withdraw across the border or to assume a defensive posture inside Vietnam. This would allow us to use our enormous firepower to destroy the invaders.

  Most of the enemy formations that Dan’s patrols encountered were Viet Cong, rather than the better-equipped and more rigorously trained PAVN. Between March and October, Pierelli went on dozens of patrols, occasionally getting into firefights, and in the process learning how to work with other US and ARVN units. When a patrol needed artillery support, Pierelli could call it in from guns at A-233. He could also make radio contact with an Army pilot flying a 185th Recon Company Birddog. Based in BMT and colloquially known as the Pterodactyls, these pilots called in and adjusted artillery or radioed Air Force forward air controllers to request support from fast movers, the jet-propelled fighter-bombers or attack planes that moved at near-supersonic speeds and carried bombs, napalm, or rockets—whatever was needed.

  By October 27, the day he arrived on Kate, Dan Pierelli was comfortable with combat, a solid young Green Beret sergeant who knew what to do when the shooting started. Like me, however, he had never been on the receiving end of PAVN artillery.

  “That night, the 27th, we got a radio message from 5/22’s operational headquarters in BMT,” John Kerr recalls. “They said that there was a lot of enemy activity in our area and that 50 percent of us should be awake all night with our guns. And they said that we’d probably be attacked that night.”

  Kerr was shocked. “We’d been sitting around here for a month and a half, not hardly shooting anything, and all of a sudden they say we’re going to be attacked!”

  Kerr told Mike Smith about the message, and word was disseminated throughout the artillery detachment. There is no record of any such warning coming through Special Forces or CIDG channels, and neither Kerr nor Smith recalls telling Luke Barham or Dan Pierelli about the alert message.

  The night passed uneventfully.

  For several weeks after the new FDC was built, helicopter resupply had been reduced to a minimum, probably to reduce the chance that Kate would attract unwanted enemy attention. “For the most part they just didn’t resupply us,” recalls Forrest Scott. “We were starving and doing without.” Until the 27th, when a giant Chinook landed. “It had ammo, C rations, batteries, all kinds of stuff that had been requested, and they brought in a sling load of water,” Scott explains. “They set the chopper down—never stopped the blades—and we unloaded it. I’d been in-country and was scheduled for R&R, so when everything was off-loaded, I jumped on that Chinook.”

  Scott was flown to BMT, where he caught a plane to Saigon, and from there flew on a commercial charter to Bangkok.

  • • •

  ON the morning of October 28, 1969, the CIDG company on Kate, which had come from A-233 and was based there, was replaced by a fresh company from A-233.

  With the hindsight afforded by forty-six years, the timing of this troop rotation strikes me as odd. Staff Sergeant Rocco DeNote, my teammate in A-236 and then the communications NCO at Camp Bu Prang, confirms that at this time “there was a significant enemy presence in the northern part of the area of operations. Units such as the 66th PAVN had been identified, and alert was high at all sites preparing for an anticipated attack.”

  If an attack was imminent and everyone in Kate’s chain of command knew it, why replace men familiar with the terrain and Kate’s defenses with a new unit that knew nothing about the setup? Was there a breakdown in communications? Did the honchos at B-23, our higher headquarters, fail to tell A-233 of the expected attack? After all these years, I could find no one who knew or who now recalls the answers to such questions.

  For a few hours on the morning of October 28, one Huey after another landed on Kate. Fresh strikers took over the fighting positions of those they replaced. After the last of the newcomers had arrived, however, the flights were interrupted. Sixteen men from the old CIDG unit were left on Kate, along with the replacement company.

  In midafternoon, I left Bu Prang for Kate, a flight of less than ten minutes.

  PART

  TWO

  I hear the irregular snap! snap!

  I hear the sounds of the different missiles—the short t-h-t! t-h-t! of the rifle balls;

  I see the shells exploding, leaving small white clouds—

  I hear the great shells shrieking as they pass;

  The grape, like the hum and whirr of wind through the trees,

  (quick, tumultuous, now the contest rages!)

  All the scenes at the batteries themselves rise in detail before me again;

  The crashing and smoking—the pride of the men in their pieces;

  The chief gunner ranges and sights his piece, and selects a fuse of the right time;

  After firing, I see him lean aside, and look eagerly off to note the effect;

  —Elsewhere I hear the cry of a regiment charging—

  —Walt Whitman, “The Artilleryman’s Vision,” Leaves of Grass

  FIVE

  From high above, Firebase Kate was a mottled red football with dark laces on a bed of green felt. The pilot put the nose down, and as we descended the felt became jungle, the football resolved itself into sandbagged gun pits and bunkers carved out of red dirt, and the laces turned into curving lines of foxholes.

  Although I wasn’t expecting to see any action, I had prepared myself for it. I carried the Colt Automatic Rifle, or CAR-15, the rare, short-

  barreled version of the standard M16. Instead of the Army’s standard “load-bearing vest” of suspenders, a fanny pack on a web belt, and small ammo pouches for the M16 magazines, I had a World War II vintage ammo belt made for those who carried the big, heavy M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle. I could put two or three magazines of 5.56 ammo in its big pouches, which were intended to hold much larger, 20-round, 30-06-caliber magazines

  In the back left pouch of my BAR belt I carried a “baseball” hand grenade, a “goofy grape” grenade, the purple smoke used by Special Forces in only the most dire situations to tell a rescue chopper that an American was in deep trouble.

  The grenade was for when I was out of ammo, escape was impossible, and the enemy was closing in. It was to be my last gasp at taking as many foes with me as possible. I would not be taken alive.

  We settled down in a dust cloud, and the crew chief began tossing out boxes of ammo and C rations. I grabbed my CAR-15 assault rifle and rucksack, and as I hopped off, a slender, compact man hopped on from the other side—Captain Lucian “Luke” Barham. “Hey, how ya doing, have a good time,” he said, barely audible over the roar of the Huey’s engines. Barham gave a little wave and the Huey rose, supported by a cushion of hurricane-force air, rotated to the right, then plunged over the side into the deep valley below, gathering airspeed; in seconds it reappeared, climbing into a high, overcast sky until the sound of its engines faded and the bird disappeared. It was about 1500 local time on the afternoon of October 28, 1969.

  I looked around, unhappily noting the high, forested ridge to the southeast. Why in God’s name did they put a firebase here? I thought. From that ridge, the enemy could shoot down at us with flat trajectory weapons—small arms, rockets, recoilless rifles. It felt like we were in a punch bowl; I flashed on what I’d read of the Dien Bien Phu fiasco, where the French sited their guns in a valley surrounded by big hills, convinced that the Viet Minh could never haul artillery to those heights.

  I put those thoughts aside as Sergeant Dan Pierelli came to meet me. As we moved toward the command post, I looked around, noting the two big 155 mm howitzers and the smaller 105 mm, which was pointed north toward Ambush Hill. Not understanding until years later that artiller
y in Vietnam operated in a 360-degree world, I wondered why the big guns had no overhead cover, only chest-high sandbags. Then I turned my head to take another look at that thickly forested, sharply defined ridge to the southeast. I knew that we were less than four kilometers from the poorly defined border, positioned within a bulge that my map showed jutting into Cambodia, a disputed zone claimed by both countries. It was a reminder that Cambodia was to the north, east, and west, and that even if PAVN troops were not on that forested ridge, Kate was still well within the range of their 82 mm mortars, their 75 mm and 57 mm recoilless rifles, their B-40 rocket-propelled grenades, and of course their big 122 mm rockets.

  I shook hands with Lieutenants Smith and Kerr, dropped my gear in the little sleeping hooch that I would share with Pierelli—and got a wake-up call: The roof was a row of sandbags on a sheet of plastic. It would keep the sun and rain out, but it wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet, let alone a mortar. The front side, facing away from the hill, was exposed. In short, it was a half-assed attempt at best.

  Together we started a slow, thorough inspection of the defensive perimeter. Let’s call north 12 o’clock, and south 6 o’clock. Then Kate’s 12 o’clock was a gentle slope leading down to a grassy saddle that rose at the far end to Ambush Hill. Between 12 and 1 o’clock it became slightly steeper and grew ever steeper as it progressed to 3 o’clock. By that point, I judged it to be a difficult task to climb, but still traversable. The hill fell down through grass that was two to three feet high and low brush into the valley at the foot of the hill. That was covered with very thick jungle with a small stream at the bottom—all in all, terrain very typical of the region, which was rolling hills and very dense jungle.

  From 3 through 6 o’clock the slope was much the same, but grew steeper as it went. The vegetation was about the same, but the slope became extreme through about 10 o’clock and then gentled again as it came back toward 12 o’clock.

  With Pierelli, I walked the perimeter defenses, meeting the CIDG strikers and their leaders as we made our way from one foxhole to the next. But here’s the thing about CIDG leaders: The guy who presents himself as, for example, a company commander was chosen by a US Special Forces officer, probably because, all things being equal, he spoke the best English—he was the guy we could talk to. But the Montagnards are a tribal society that relies on a high degree of consensus. It was likely that this guy wasn’t a top leader, but even if he was, anything of importance, any order that I gave a company or platoon commander that might have severe consequences, would be discussed and confirmed by all the leaders—and often I didn’t know who most of them were.

  The life of an infantryman in war—any infantryman, any army, any war—is a showcase for privation: little sleep, poor food and never enough of it, less water, an absence of cleanliness and sanitation that turns the human body into a feast for bacteria and fungi that manifest as skin infections, and a total lack of privacy. My strikers had grown up in a preliterate society. Most of their siblings hadn’t survived childhood. Western concepts of personal hygiene and labor-saving devices were entirely absent from their upbringing. So they were tough, inured to hardship, and anything but lazy—but like every soldier in every army, they didn’t go looking for extra work. CIDG strikers were pragmatists. They prepared for battle in accordance with what they believed was needed. The prolonged absence of enemy contact meant that their predecessors on Kate had been comfortable with foxholes maybe two feet wide by about two and a half feet deep. When in contact with the enemy, however, the well-trained Montagnard striker would continue to dig and improve his position, a little at a time, until his fighting hole was chest-high. Until there was a two-foot-deep grenade sump in the bottom that could double as a piss tube during times when leaving the foxhole was suicide. Until he had overhead cover, built of whatever he could get his hands on, and the more of it the better.

  That was not what I found on Kate. I found two-man fighting positions with no overhead cover, nothing to protect the men inside from mortars or grazing fire from, say, a nearby high ridge. A single roll of concertina wire, maybe a hundred meters long, was overgrown with weeds in several places. In strategic locations I saw a few trip flares. Attached to a thin, almost invisible wire concealed at ankle height in the tall grass, they could be triggered by an approaching enemy to shoot a parachute flare a few hundred feet straight up. The flare would burn for half a minute or so as it floated down, allowing us to see who to shoot at. I thought that we could put more of those out on the line and farther down the hillside.

  There were also a few claymores, deadly devices that, properly emplaced and maintained, can blow back any approaching skirmish line or night infiltration. One look from above told me that nobody had checked the claymores for weeks. On closer inspection, I found that someone—undoubtedly the previous company of CIDG strikers—had “borrowed” some of the C-4 explosives from inside the mine. C-4 is great for starting fires, as almost every infantryman learns. Removing it from the mine is not so good. Not good for a properly functioning anti-personnel mine. Not good for stopping an attacking wave of enemy soldiers.

  Below the foxholes were fifty to a hundred meters of grass-covered slopes, and below that, thick jungle. Kate had been occupied for six weeks, but nobody had gone down to cut fields of fire—avenues to see and shoot through the knee-high grass, or below that in the thickest spots in the jungle. The enemy could hide in that jungle, virtually invisible, and shoot at us. I just couldn’t comprehend how this could have been allowed by an infantry officer, much less by one that was Special Forces trained. I still can’t believe it.

  I understood, however, that Kate had never experienced enemy contact, that there had been no sign of the enemy in the area. They thought they were safe. But I knew that PAVN was coming—to Bu Prang. I’d read the daily intelligence reports, and they told me that nothing was going on at the three firebases ringing Bu Prang Camp. The enemy would hit Bu Prang, but there was no indication that the firebases were even on the PAVN radar. Barham got the same reports; maybe he believed that PAVN would attack Bu Prang from only one direction, from across the border in Cambodia.

  Long before completing my inspection of the perimeter defenses, I realized that I had been totally wrong: I had not been sent to Kate to sit on my ass. There was a lot of work to do, and I was just the man to see that it got done.

  I conferred with Pierelli, who had arrived only the previous day, and learned that he too had been disturbed and distressed at the condition of the perimeter defenses. Aware that an officer was coming to replace Barham, Dan had wisely decided not to confront Barham or Arbizo. As we made the rounds now, though, he pointed out most of the shortcomings and deficiencies even as I noticed them myself. He also informed me that until our arrival, while the CIDG troops hadn’t found much time for digging, Barham had allowed them time to play cards or bat a volleyball back and forth over a net.

  Infantry doctrine calls for patrolling in a four-leaf-clover pattern all around the base. That is to say, taking different routes on different days, patrols explore the area around their perimeter in all four directions by taking a circular route each time.

  According to Pierelli, however, and several others on Kate, when it came to patrolling, Barham had pretty much let his Montagnard strikers decide how much and what kind, perhaps on the theory that if there were enemy forces nearby, they would somehow know it, and their patrolling mojo would in some fashion reflect that. Otherwise, all we knew from their frequent hunting expeditions was that there were plenty of game animals in the nearby jungle.

  I couldn’t, of course, be certain that the enemy knew Kate’s location and purpose. But military prudence in a war zone demanded that I assume that they would. The strikers who had departed the previous day, however, had apparently been allowed to behave as if their stay on Kate was some kind of vacation. Rest and recreation on a remote jungle hilltop that was just spitting distance from the PAVN sanctuaries in Cambodia.

  Barham’s strikers had hunted f
or game regularly. But hunting translates to avoiding the very dense jungle and steep, treacherous terrain that a PAVN unit would probably use to hide their whereabouts during the days of their approach to Bu Prang. They would move mostly at night, and they would have security or recon units on their flanks and both ahead and behind their main force.

  I looked around, trying to see Kate as an enemy commander might. If I had, say, a PAVN battalion, how would I attack this hilltop? What approach would I take? Dan and I discussed this, and agreed that, to a determined enemy, this firebase was low-hanging fruit, to be plucked and eaten at his pleasure. To call Kate’s defenses inadequate was to give more credit than was due.

  And the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that an attack was coming. Maybe no enemy soldier had yet seen the dark clouds of burning diesel that rose over Kate every few days when they burned shit. Maybe they hadn’t yet seen the helicopters coming and going. Perhaps they had no idea that Kate’s guns had fired into Cambodia and registered their fire on possible targets near Bu Prang.

  But they would.

  When the attack on Bu Prang began, Kate’s guns would go into operation. We would then become a target. And at the moment, we would be a vulnerable target.

  By the time I completed my circuit of Kate’s defenses, the sun was low; I expected that the troops were getting hungry. I assembled the striker leaders, such as they were. “First thing tomorrow morning, let’s get these guys working on fortifying the bunkers,” I told them. “And let’s get this concertina area cleaned out.”

  These strikers were new to Kate. Through the language barrier, I sensed that they shared my concerns, my assessment of the situation. And they agreed: First thing tomorrow, lots of digging. Overhead cover. Cut fields of fire. Clean up the concertina wire and check the claymores. Get ready for a big fight.