Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262)
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Flying out of Pleiku and BMT, Guthrie experienced the war as distant; he looked forward to getting some easy stick time: “I thought that this would be a good mission for me; we would be flying long days and seeing a lot of our company’s area of operation,” he wrote. “I would get an opportunity to do hover-down landings through a hundred feet–plus of triple canopy mountaintop jungle terrain. [Matlock] was reputed to be great at these kinds of landings. He had the smooth control touch and confidence to safely perform any kind of difficult landing. He was also a patient teacher and had the nerve to let a new guy put the rotor blades so near the trees and hover there with little to no extra power available in the event of trouble.”
The first few days of their temporary duty were mundane: hauling the wives and children of Montagnard strikers in CIDG units to a BMT hospital or back to their villages. “We flew dogs, hogs, and kids,” wrote Guthrie. “[Matlock] was in the habit of taking a small kid in his lap and [letting] them play with the flight controls, get a thrill out of ‘flying’ a helicopter.”
There were no kids, dogs, or hogs aboard on October 30. On the 45-minute flight from BMT to Bu Prang, they listened to three radios—VHF for communicating with other aircraft in their platoon, UHF for an assortment of common aviation channels monitored countrywide by all aircraft, and Fox Mike (FM) to contact ground units. All three radios sprang to life with the sounds of aircraft in heavy combat. “It sounded like there was a hell of [a] war going on somewhere,” Guthrie wrote.
Upon learning that Bu Prang was under attack, Matlock diverted to Gia Nghia to refuel in safety. While JP-4 was being hand-pumped into his bird, Guthrie and Matlock chatted with Gay and Black and their crews, who told them that Kate was under heavy attack and that all available air support had been summoned.
With full tanks, Matlock and Guthrie took off and headed for Bu Prang. From altitude they saw a swarm of aircraft buzzing around Kate a few miles away, filling the airwaves with essential chatter. “I could never explain what it sounds like listening to three radios at once and everyone is yelling and talking simultaneously, men under heavy fire trying to give instructions and duck bullets at the same time,” Guthrie wrote. “We heard aircraft call that they were taking hits from all directions . . . I could not help but give thanks that this was not our fight, that we were only taking a radio operator to his camp, then going back—a simple little mission, thank God.”
Matlock set the Huey down on Bu Prang’s airstrip and Olsen jumped out and ran for the gate. As the aviators were ready to leave, “a helicopter from the 155th out of BMT landed, shot all to hell and back,” Guthrie wrote. “They had been trying to take water and ammo in to the troops on Kate. [The pilot] said that nobody could make it through that kind of fire. After assessing the damage to their aircraft, they aborted the mission to return home for repairs,” wrote Guthrie. “Do not misunderstand me. These were brave men and they had tried their best to deliver the ammo. But the fire was too intense and they had sustained a lot of damage and some casualties. We could hear the radio operator on Kate, call sign ‘Chicken Wolf,’ begging for water and ammo. They were almost out of everything, and with night coming on, they were sure to be overrun.”
(I worked with the Air Force FACs running the fast movers, and with helicopter gunships. Kerr had another radio on the same frequency; he worked with slicks, using my Chicken Wolf call sign instead of the artillery call sign he would use in the FDC.)
Watching the fighting from three miles away, Guthrie recalled that he had never seen so many gunships in the air in one place, and they “didn’t seem to be making a dent in the effort to drive the enemy away.”
That’s pretty much what it looked like from Kate too. I spent much of the day dodging from one foxhole or bunker to another, drawing heavy fire each time I moved around the perimeter. I had to position myself to see specific enemy positions that required a gunship’s rockets and guns or Air Force bombs and napalm. I began using tracer ammunition to precisely direct the FAC. I would lay down a stream of tracer fire from my CAR-15 to the exact enemy position that I wanted hit. I had my radio, and when the FAC knew where I wanted it, he radioed, “Got it!” and dropped down, using my tracer stream to aim a marking rocket. Then the fast movers would roll in and bomb on his smoke marker. I did this the first time without incident, but the enemy quickly figured out what I was doing. I was thereafter a marked man. I was out in the open a minute to maybe two, two and a half minutes at a time, and then I had to dodge whatever rockets or mortars were coming and get to cover. To me, the benefits of pinpoint bombing outweighed the risks—but remember, I still thought that I was bulletproof.
Back at Bu Prang, to Guthrie’s shock and horror, Matlock casually volunteered to brave the tempest of flying lead and steel around Kate and bring our ammo and water in.
Meanwhile, Joker 73 and Joker 85—Ben Gay and Nolan Black, respectively—had reloaded their rocket pods and miniguns at Gia Nghia and were headed back to Kate.
Considering it unwise to set down on Kate, Matlock had the ammo and water loaded in two rows in each cargo doorway, and got two volunteers from the camp to kick the stuff out as he slowly overflew our hilltop at six feet off the deck.
It didn’t quite work out that way. When Matlock’s aircraft came into sight, Kerr radioed to ask him if he’d take some of our wounded out. Matlock agreed.
Black and Nolan arrived over Kate in their gunships at almost the same time as Matlock and Guthrie in their slick. The Jokers’ guns gave them cover on their approach. Then our FAC directed Gay’s fire team to find and finish a suspected PAVN anti-aircraft site with at least one 12.7 mm heavy machine gun.
“I located the area of the AA site and began an attack run at about 150 feet above the jungle, followed by Blackie and Hearne in the second aircraft,” Gay wrote in his after-action report.
Matlock and Guthrie in Ghostrider 12 were just then hovering into Kate. “As we passed over the wire and bunkers, the men in the cargo compartment kicked out the water and ammo,” wrote Guthrie. “[Matlock] flared the Huey and stood it on its tail to stop it.”
“The medevac helicopters came in like a shot,” recalls the slightly built Geromin. “They were so amazing. They came in at full speed just above the treetops, and as soon as they got to the base of our hill they would gun it to get up the slope and then circle around at what seemed like full power. Then they’d stop and hover just a little above the ground so that they didn’t have to build up the momentum to lift off; it seemed like it took just a couple of minutes to come in, reload, and take off because the enemy was constantly shooting at them.”
“I landed on the H, for ‘helipad’—it should have been an R for ‘[mortar] registration point,’” says Matlock.
Geromin manhandled a wounded striker toward the landing Huey—neither the first nor the last time that he would do so on Kate. “He was shot up so bad that when I lifted him he could barely hold his head up, and he was so bloody that I had to put my arms under his armpits and grab my [other] hand or he would have just slipped right out of my grasp,” Geromin says.
Covered with the wounded man’s blood, he put the striker on the Huey’s cargo floor. The crew chief beckoned Geromin to come aboard, but he shook his head. “I’m not hurt! It’s not my blood!” he yelled over the engines.
A beat behind Geromin, more than a dozen strikers mobbed the aircraft. “A Yard, unharmed and carrying his weapon, jumped on. The gunner yelled to us, ‘Is he supposed to be going?’” says Geromin. “If he isn’t wounded, he’s not supposed to go,” Geromin yelled. “The gunner aimed an M60 at the Yard and told him to get off or he would blow him away. So he jumped off, another Yard grabbed and disarmed him, two more Yards took him away, and a few seconds later, I heard one shot, and then the two Yards walked away without the guy they’d pulled off the chopper.”
Geromin believes the striker was executed for desertion.
Matlock now tried
to hover off the helipad, but the overloaded ship, with wounded men standing on the skids and clinging to the side, couldn’t rise. “We shooed the excess away, and lifted off just as an 82 mm mortar round landed under us, right on the H,” Matlock recalls. “The blast wave blew [the helicopter] off the LZ, doing some structural and sheet-metal damage to the bird. We also took a few rifle rounds coming out.”
In fact, the mortar’s steel tail fins were driven almost completely through the aircraft’s hardened aluminum fuselage.
Working to Kate’s north, Gay had made several passes, each time followed by Black and Hearne, all firing rockets at the PAVN machine gun. “[As] I turned in behind Blackie, I observed AA ground fire from a second 12.7 mm gun hidden about ninety degrees from the first one,” Gay recalls.
It was a flak trap—the second gun had remained silent and hidden until the first had lured a gunship into range. “I saw [Black’s] ship getting hit,” says Gay. “The bottom of the aircraft was struck in the fuel cell by 12.7 mm rounds and immediately burst into flames. I called immediately: 8-5, this is 7-3. You’re on fire; you need to put it down.”
Both aircraft were so low that they couldn’t see very far. Black replied, “Where’s a field?” Before Gay could respond, the stricken Huey’s tail boom separated from its fuselage, and the ship flipped upside down, plunging fifty feet into the jungle and exploding on contact with the ground.
The aircraft was so close that I felt the blast’s intense heat on my face and arms—a spectacle that haunts me to this day. As the reality of what I had just witnessed sunk in, I felt hollow. Fighting nausea, I struggled to focus my attention on the multitude of other urgent issues confronting me: Where would the next ground attack come from? Did I have enough men to hold that flank? Enough ammo?
Meanwhile Matlock and Guthrie were fighting gravity and blast damage, nursing their overloaded Huey up from the trees and out of small-arms range. To them, and to many on Kate, it appeared that Joker 85 had been hit by an RPG. “We were taking off to the west and they crashed just to the north of our flight path,” Matlock recalls. “As we passed over the wreckage, I saw [PAVN] troops shooting into the cockpit.”
Gay began to circle the flaming wreckage, but immediately came under heavy fire; the FAC ordered him to leave the area.
I thought about mounting a rescue for any survivors; after a few seconds, I realized that no one could have lived through that explosion. And that it would have been suicide to venture among the hostiles swarming around the crash site.
Every man on Kate who witnessed this horrific event was damaged in some way for the rest of his life. None of us had met those aviators—Black, Hearne, Canada, and Lot—didn’t, then, even know their names. But they were our brothers, American soldiers who had repeatedly risked their lives for us, and now they were dead. The thought was overwhelming. Even now, thinking about it is painful.
Later, making my rounds of the perimeter, I spotted a lone PAVN soldier about 450 meters away, moving through a relatively open area below the ridge. I went prone and began firing at him. I’m a good shot, but this guy was a little past my carbine’s effective range. Never mind: After my fourth or fifth tracer, the 105 crew took their turn. First shot: a direct hit. The PAVN flew straight up at least forty feet.
Despite that tiny triumph, our situation was deteriorating. Two more gunships, several slicks, and a Chinook were hit by small-arms fire around Kate. By nightfall, the powers that be would decide that sending gunships on close support missions into and through relentless PAVN ground fire from every direction was suicidal. While Air Force fast movers could still work in close proximity to our hilltop impact zone during daylight, after that day Kate could no longer expect close support from helicopter gunships.
When I had time for an accounting of the rifle and machine-gun ammunition that Matlock, Guthrie, and their crew had risked their lives to bring us, I was furious: Some moron—as it happened, Captain Whiteside, an operations officer at B-23—had cut my requisition in half. “No one needs that much ammo,” he said. All that blood and fire, all that fear and angst getting it in to us—and if PAVN attacked again in force, I wasn’t sure that we’d have enough ammo to stop him. I got back on the radio and demanded more.
I have known the call to battle
In each changeless changing shape
From the high souled voice of conscience
To the beastly lust for rape.
I have sinned and I have suffered,
Played the hero and the knave;
Fought for belly, shame, or country,
And for each have found a grave.
I cannot name my battles,
For the visions are not clear,
Yet, I see the twisted faces
And I feel the rending spear.
—George S. Patton, Jr.
ELEVEN
Handsome and fair, First Lieutenant Ronald A. Ross was 23. Very short and slender, he was an almost elfin man, with surprising agility and upper-body strength. He grew up in Muskego, a Milwaukee exurb, lettered on his high school wrestling team, and after graduation spent two years studying marine biology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He earned good grades, would almost certainly have graduated, then probably would have gone on to grad school, but in 1966 he decided that his nation’s needs outweighed his own ambitions. He enlisted in the Army, and upon completing basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, was awarded the Outstanding Trainee Trophy. He was then trained in signals intelligence and posted to Vint Hill Farms Station in rural Virginia, the Army Security Agency’s oldest base. He graduated from Artillery OCS at Fort Sill in December 1967. A year later, after completing jungle warfare school in Panama and troop duty at dusty Fort Irwin, California, he was assigned to the 5/22 Artillery, near BMT. Like most lieutenants in wartime, he served in a variety of roles within the battalion and made several good friends, among them First Lieutenant Reginald Brockwell. “Everybody liked Ron. He was a funny guy, personable, a wonderful human being,” Brockwell recalls.
When Ross came due for R&R, he requested Hawaii, and let it be known that he would meet his wife and newborn son there. When Lieutenant Colonel Elton Delaune, the 5/22’s ambitious new battalion commander, learned that only a few months earlier Ross had taken emergency leave to marry his pregnant fiancée, he apparently decided that Ross was morally unfit for the officer’s uniform he wore. Delaune seemed to develop an abiding dislike for Ross; some battalion officers recall that Delaune thought that Ross was a screwup.
“I got along well with Delaune,” recalls Brockwell. “I liked him. He was a nice man, but I think he was there for his six-month [command] tour and he was going to do the most he could do to promote his career.”
I have no direct knowledge of the internal politics of the 5/22 Artillery, or of Ross’s activities in that battalion, so it’s possible that Ross in fact was a screwup. On the other hand, during my brief Army career, I more than once observed how easy it was for a noncom to allow personal prejudices to fuel a strong dislike for a particular soldier under his control, and then to ride him, looking for any excuse to harass or punish him. It also sometimes happens that a senior officer will decide to lean on a junior one, criticizing his every misstep. It might have been that Delaune was something of a bluestocking who frowned on premarital pregnancy. Whatever it was that drew Delaune’s ire, it is a fact that young men make mistakes. Lieutenants make mistakes: I certainly did, as did pretty much every lieutenant I ever met. For that matter, I’m sure that lieutenant colonels also make mistakes. Not everyone who’s tagged a screwup deserves that label.
On October 30, with Mike Smith in a field hospital, First Lieutenant Tom Klein, a 5/22 battery XO then at Duc Lap, was told to prepare to go in to Kate to replace Smith. Brockwell was told to be prepared to replace Klein at Duc Lap. Instead, despite Ross’s scheduled R&R in Hawaii, Delaune ordered Ross to Kate. I find it strange that
Delaune sent an officer that he had labeled a loser to an embattled firebase that was then functioning as not much more than a PAVN impact area.
Ross landed under fire on a resupply chopper in midafternoon. Officially, he was Mike Smith’s replacement; the first men he met were Koon, Hopkins, Tiranti, and McFarland; the gun crew welcomed Ross to Kate, and they chatted for a few minutes. “He said that he was supposed to be on his way for R&R to see his wife,” recalls Hopkins. “He told us that he’d pissed off some colonel, that’s why he was sent to Kate,” he said. “But then he said, ‘Hey, you guys need help, I’m here.’”
When the mortar barrage resumed, the men took cover inside a gun revetment. With little understanding of what life had been like on Kate during the preceding days, or of how long these men had been in combat, Ross decided to use the incoming fire to teach his new troops about dealing with mortars.
“He said, ‘Gentlemen, if you hear the round leaving the tube and then hear it coming in and explode—that’s mortar fire,’” recalls Nelson Koon. Ross went on to explain that this meant that after the mortar was fired, there were a few seconds in which to take cover.
“We’d been taking incoming for two or three days,” says Koon. “We knew what the hell mortar fire was.”
Our medic showed Ross to the FDC, where he met John Kerr. “Ross reported to me, and he asked, ‘What should I do?’” recalls Kerr. “I said that I pretty much had the FDC under control, and that our guns were no longer operational. I told him to find Captain Albracht and see if he needed some help.”