The chopper’s arrival was, of course, delayed by weather. As it finally came into sight, I was approached by one of the Mike Force commanders. Several of his strikers had been seriously wounded in the previous night’s attack. Their wounds were much more than Bu Prang’s medics were equipped or trained to handle, and they would probably die without surgery in a well-equipped hospital. He’d been trying to get them out, but even the wonderful lunatics who flew medevac birds were grounded.
Only my special slick was flying. The Mike Force commander asked if I would get his wounded to the BMT field hospital.
I asked the pilot if he could do the medevac, and he replied that he’d fly me wherever I wanted to go. We loaded the wounded and took off. At the hospital I helped get them to the emergency room before heading for the general’s ceremony a few miles away.
We landed and I started for the building where I had been told to report to General Corcoran. On the way, I ran into Mike Smith and several of the troops from Kate.
A Silver Star was pinned to Smith’s fatigue jacket.
“Where the hell were you?” he asked.
“Unavoidably detained.”
Smith said that Corcoran had waited for a few minutes, and then became irritated at my tardiness. Time waits for no man. Nor do lieutenant generals. Corcoran conducted the awards ceremony without me, and left.
In truth, this was my first indication that I had been invited to an awards ceremony. Or to accept a medal. According to the men from Kate, I was slated to receive a Silver Star as an “impact award”—a medal given shortly after an action and before the paperwork goes in. In my case, I would learn, once statements could be taken from witnesses, the Silver Star would probably be upgraded.
I had missed the ceremony, but I was back in the rear with a bunch of guys that I had shared a lot with. We discussed it among ourselves, and agreed that we were all due an in-country R&R.
So we took one, then and there.
And while I was in BMT, I made it a point to go to B-23 headquarters and find Captain Richard Whiteside. I laid into him for cutting my ammo request in half, and I got a little carried away. Okay, it was more than a little. When I tried to get my hands on him, he ran, calling for help. I chased him around his desk a few times before two senior noncoms grabbed me. (They later told me that they were hoping that I’d catch him before they had to step in.)
• • •
I later heard, thirdhand, that the awards guy at Fifth Special Forces understood that IFFV Artillery would write me up for a decoration. His opposite number in IFFV Artillery, however, probably believed that my write-up was a Fifth Special Forces responsibility. I seem to recall that Fifth Special Forces was then and for some time to come ramrodded by my friend and admirer Colonel Iron Mike Healey.
Neither full colonels nor lieutenant generals trouble themselves with the minutiae of paperwork. They have rooms full of aides and staff officers for that purpose, allowing them to stay focused on the big picture.
If there was ever any paperwork for a medal with my name on it, it disappeared.
If I had a do-over, would I have let wounded strikers die so that I could get a medal? Of course not. No medal could compare with the lessons that we learned about ourselves on Kate. The experiences that we shared, and the unbreakable bonds forged in the heat of battle—these will live within us till our last breath.
VIEWS FROM HIGHER UP
On November 6, 1969, B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., the highly regarded correspondent of the New York Times, filed a seven-hundred-word cable on the fighting in and around Bu Prang and Duc Lap. Datelined “BANMETHOUT, South Vietnam,” the opening paragraph summed up what must have been stunning news to New Yorkers:
“United States military officials said today that they had decided not to commit any ground troops to the fighting taking place southwest of here between South Vietnamese and enemy forces.”
A little later in his dispatch, Drummond quoted “a headquarters officer” as saying that “our intent is to force the South Vietnamese to fight a big one on their own. The name of the game these days is ‘Vietnamization.’”
Had Mr. Drummond cared to interview me for his report, I would have been delighted to describe some of the exciting, crowd-pleasing moments in this “game.” But I was not “a headquarters officer.”
• • •
ABOUT the time that Drummond filed his report, Ken Donovan, the pilot who had brought in our last big load of small-arms ammo, was coming out of the 155th AHC mess hall after a long day of flying.
“At the time, I was the unit’s senior aircraft commander, and as I came out of the mess hall, Major Owen grabbed me and said, ‘Donovan, how’s it going out there?’
“I said, ‘Sir, this thing’s probably going to drag on for a while longer, but I want you to remember what a 21-year-old warrant officer told you in November of 1969: The war is over.’
“And that was because we had been putting South Vietnamese infantry battalions into LZs and a few days later we’d pull out what was left, a company or two at the most. They just didn’t have the small-unit leadership necessary to conduct warfare at a platoon level,” explains Donovan. “I had a lot of respect for the North Vietnamese, who were some hard-core dudes. We killed them at every available opportunity, because they’d stand there and fight.
“I could never understand why the South Vietnamese weren’t willing to do the same thing.”
• • •
GENERAL Corcoran completed his Vietnam service on February 23, 1970. As was customary and proper, he submitted a lengthy, classified end-of-tour report. The narrative portion ran to 21 pages, single-spaced, and discussed in considerable detail every aspect of combat operations, logistics, pacification, and Vietnamization efforts that had been on Corcoran’s plate for his year as IFFV commander. It was well written, concise despite its length, and described a far-flung organization that was imperfect but nevertheless effective and steadily improving.
The report was widely disseminated throughout the US Army, including all major commands and training organizations; it has since been declassified.
Two sections stand out in my mind:
Artillery: “. . . Limited resources result in split battery configuration being the norm rather than the exception. While efforts are made to maintain unit integrity, demands have at times required a 105 mm battery to be split four ways. While Vietnam has long been considered as a battery commander’s war, all too often we find the brunt of conducting operations resting on the shoulders of the junior officers.”
Vietnamization: “. . . The two most significant battles fought in South Vietnam in 1969 were fought in II Corps as a test of Vietnamization in the Highlands. The battle of Ben Het convinced II Corps that they could do the job. The battle of Bu Prang and Duc Lap convinced Saigon. The final test will be the conviction of the people.”
FINIS
A few days after we walked out, I was in B-23’s club in BMT putting away a few beers, and I saw Danny Pierelli. I went over and sat down, and we caught up for the first time since we got back to Bu Prang. Then I told him that I was going to the Mike Force in Pleiku. I was very happy about it, and it showed.
Dan didn’t get it. He sort of blinked. “What?” he said.
“I’m going to the Mike Force. I couldn’t get in it when I first arrived in-country, because I had no combat experience. Now I do, and the group commander says he’ll approve my transfer.”
Dan kind of blinked again.
I plowed ahead. “I’m sure that I can get you in too.”
Now I had his full attention. Dan stared at me as if my face were green with purple polka dots.
“You’re absolutely insane,” he said—and that caught me off guard.
“What? We’re Special Forces! This is what we do!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to be in the most elite unit of an elite force?” I asked, and he shook his head as though I were a child withou
t a brain in my tiny noggin.
“No,” replied Dan. “I am going to get a job back here at the ‘B’ Team. I am going to send radio transmissions. From here, in Ban Me Thuot. And when my tour is up, I’m going to go home.”
It was my turn to stare. He shook his head yet again.
“Bill. I’m done,” he said. “And you! The Mike Force? You’re absolutely insane.”
Maybe so.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
EPILOGUE
I have stayed in touch with some of the men with whom I served on Kate. Among these, a few maintained contact with still other Kate alumni. When we began to assemble research for this book, we were able to find a few others. Nevertheless, we were able to speak with less than half of the Americans who actually served on Firebase Kate. What follows is a brief description of what became of those with whom I could reconnect, and a few of those with whom I could not. I greatly regret that we were not able to speak with every single American soldier who served under enemy fire on Kate.
Klaus Adam
Klaus flew back to Kate a few days after we escaped; by then it was a smoking ruin. He stayed just long enough to do a bomb damage assessment so that he could submit paperwork supporting combat loss reports for the howitzers and other Charlie Battery equipment that he was responsible for as commanding officer. While acknowledging that Kate had borne the brunt of the fighting, Adam also wanted to be sure that we knew that “the guys at Annie and Susan all busted their nut to support Kate. Unfortunately, we were too far in range, and that was where the tactical error was made.”
Adam rotated home in early 1970, transitioned from the Army Reserve to the Regular Army, transferred to the Signal Corps, and served twenty-seven years before retiring as a major. He lives near Killeen, Texas, where he is highly respected for his community and church work.
John Ahearn
After bringing Lieutenant Maurice Zollner to Kate, Ahearn flew back to his base at BMT. It was dark when he landed; he parked his Huey, then reported in to operations. “The next morning I’m having breakfast,” Ahearn recalls, “and our assistant maintenance officer gets me out of the mess hall and chews my ass up one side and down the other. There were holes in my aircraft tail boom. The gunship pilots thought it could have been shrapnel from rockets because they were putting them right under me as I approached. Shrapnel or bullet holes, who knew? It was bad form on my part not to have found the holes, but it was dark and we weren’t going to stand out there with a flashlight—there were always North Vietnamese lurking around the perimeter.”
Less than a month later, Ahearn flew a resupply mission to a microwave radio relay station on the lip of a dormant volcano south of Dak Lak. This was hands down the most dangerous spot in all South Vietnam for a helicopter. “The site was very actively under attack,” he recalls. “North Vietnamese were outside and inside the volcano. I did a fast approach and dropped off supplies, picked up wounded, and on the way out I got hit in the legs with a couple of AK-47 rounds.”
His copilot, Larry Pluhar, flew him and the other wounded to safety.
“Forty years later, I found out that the mission was actually a check ride to qualify me to become the province adviser’s aircraft commander,” he says with a sigh.
Ahearn left Vietnam in an Air Force ambulance plane on December 8, his 24th birthday. “I went to Camp Zama in Tokyo,” he recalls. “I was very fortunate that they saved my left leg—it was touch-and-go about losing it.”
Ahearn was then evacuated to St. Albans Naval Hospital, near his home in New York City. A few months later, while recovering from one in a series of reconstructive surgeries, he received word that his friend Marlin Johnson, copilot on his only mission to Kate, was killed in action on April 20, 1970.
Ahearn remained at St. Albans until the following August. “The Navy orthopedic surgeon told me very directly that I wouldn’t pass a flight physical again and I should start thinking about a new career,” he recalls. “I had a wife and an infant son, and a lot of time to sit in a hospital bed thinking about how I was going to make a living. I realized that if I couldn’t fly, I didn’t want to be an engineer.”
Before he was wounded, Ahearn had been assigned the additional duty of unit property book officer—essentially a bookkeeper charged with maintaining records of all accountable property in the company, from helicopters and spare parts to machine guns and the mess hall coffeemaker. “I was successful at that job, and that led me to go back to school and get a degree in accounting. Then I got an MBA in finance, and became a CPA. I joined an accounting firm and had a very successful corporate career.”
Now retired, Ahearn lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Lucian “Luke” Barham
Barham’s recollections of his time on Kate are, by his own description, hazy and incomplete. He recalls relieving another Special Forces officer soon after Kate was established, but cannot recall his name or rank. He also recalls having two Special Forces noncoms with him during his weeks on Kate, but cannot recall their names. He does, however, insist that he went on daily recon patrols and saw no sign of the enemy. He was replaced on Kate by an officer whom he recalls only as a “Lieutenant Silver,” in order that he could take command of Team A-234 at An Lac.
“Maybe that wasn’t his name—I heard that he got a Silver Star, so maybe that’s why I remember him as Lieutenant Silver,” Barham says.
Barham returned to Vietnam in 1972 for about three months on a classified mission called Project Friday Gap. This was a Military Intelligence operation to instruct men from Cambodia’s short-lived Khmer Republic in Special Forces staff procedures. (Recall that Barham speaks Cambodian.) These students returned to Cambodia to become the staff for Khmer Special Forces. The Khmer Republic was swept away by the genocidal Khmer Rouge in 1975.
Barham left the Army in 1973 as a captain. In 1975 he was hired as a civilian contractor to train Saudi Arabia’s National Guard, an elite palace guard. In 1980 he switched employers to work on the Saudi Naval Expansion Program. When he returned to the States in 1985, Barham went into construction; he owned a construction company in Utah. In 2005 he was employed as a contractor in support of FEMA for the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. In 2012 he went to New York for FEMA in support of the Hurricane Sandy recovery effort. His home is in Summerdale, Alabama.
Francis “Butch” Barnes
Butch, who served on Firebase Susan and whose gun was taken out of service just when Kate needed it the most, now lives in Antioch, California, and is an engine maintenance supervisor for Delta Airlines.
Nolan Black
Shortly after Kate was abandoned, the remains of Nolan Black and his crew were recovered by elements of the 7/17th Cavalry. The stunning Washington, DC, memorial wall listing the names of America’s fallen in the Vietnam War has spawned several adjuncts, including a searchable database of the names on the wall. Comments are allowed, and what follows here was taken from the public comments on Black’s page. They are in many ways typical of comments for all who were lost in this war.
From Black’s Widow, Carol:
Nolan, I miss you as though you left us yesterday, and here it is 30-plus years later . . . I feel your presence at times, as if you’ve never left. Laura is a beautiful woman, you would be so proud of her. She is kind, loving and strong. She was married a month ago. Dad gave her away and it was beautiful! I felt as if you and Mom were there, looking down on her. Others have written about knowing you while in Vietnam . . . While it is painful, it is also beautiful to know that you are being remembered an
d held close to their hearts, too. I love you, miss you and am proud of you.
Carol, Later:
Happy 60th Birthday. I have been thinking of you a lot lately. Wondering what you would look like as a 60-year-old. Somehow, all I can picture is the way you were the last time I saw you. Laura and I were talking about you last evening. We played a little “I wonder, what would have happened, if you came back.” I pictured you having retired from the Army as a jet pilot [sic] and now working for UPS, doing their flights. We would have been able to take some of those trips we talked about. Maybe even bought the house on the ocean we dreamed of. I saw a happy family, with you enjoying Laura’s daughters, your granddaughters Sarah and Ashley. I know you would have been every bit the loving grandpa, as you were the loving daddy. You would have been the strong dad for Laura as she went through her painful divorce. We would have continued to grow in our love for one another, and in our faith in God. Happy birthday, keep flying high and wait for me. Someday, we will fly together, forever.
From His Daughter, Laura:
I was born in 8/68, so I never really got to know my father “in person,” but through my mother, Carol, and my grandparents, I have come to know him. I know he loved to fly and was proud to serve his country, so I know that his death was not in vain. I was brought up to be proud of him and all others who have fought. A Purple Heart Chapter in Wisconsin bears his name. He lives on, through us and all others. I am very proud, of him and all the other heroes, alive, or gone, but not forgotten.
I wanted to thank all the guys who have written me letters about my dad. They mean more to me than you could ever know. Please continue.
From Steven Parker, a Roommate in Vietnam
I think of you often. I remember the late-night conversations about your family, your dreams, fears, your dedication. I also remember the day you died, in support of Firebase Kate. It still wakes me at night. From all the Blue Stars and Jokers. God Speed, Nolan, keep watch for us, we’re right there on your wing. Catch the wind.
Abandoned in Hell _The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate Page 26