Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262)
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“Except, now and then, a stray picket
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
’Tis nothing—a private or two, now and then,
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost—only one of the men
Moaning out, all alone, his death-rattle.”
—Ethelinda Beers, “The Picket-Guard”
SIXTEEN
In the dark hours of the early morning of November 1, I received a coded message from A-236: Detachment B-20 of the II Corps Mobile Strike Force (Mike Force), headquartered in Pleiku but then at Bu Prang, would mount the operation to come to our assistance. My drooping spirits soared: My Special Forces brothers were coming to help us in our time of dire need.
Then PAVN dropped the other shoe: A little after daybreak, heavy shelling from Cambodia resumed. Apparently they had more guns than our fast movers had knocked out, or they had managed to repair some of the damaged ones. And there was a new wrinkle: artillery airbursts that drove everyone to cover. Our defenses were fast disintegrating, and I soon understood that we could not survive very long against this kind of shelling. Another day of artillery airbursts would be the end of us.
Hardly had the last echoes of the explosions died when PAVN turned on the rock and roll and came dancing up our hill, firing everything they had at us.
A little after midday, during a brief pause in the mortars and rockets, a minor miracle: A Huey slick flew low and fast through the ground fire, then very slowly hovered across to the generator pit. First Lieutenant Mike Smith, sporting a bandage on his head but otherwise looking good, leapt out, followed by a big package.
“When I jumped out, not only did I have the six feet or so to jump [to the hilltop], I also had another few feet down into the pit, so it kind of hurt my legs,” says Smith.
The chopper flew off, and Smith climbed out of the pit and limped over to the FDC. I was glad to see him—but he was the last man I’d expected to see back on Kate.
Down in the FDC, one of the guys asked Smith, “What’s the situation?”
“You guys are in big trouble,” replied Smith, for our first good laugh in way too long.
“When I got back to the field hospital at BMT, the doctor took something out of my head, sewed me up, and said that I should stay there for a couple of days and get better,” Smith explains. “So I kind of hung out in the Provisional Artillery Group headquarters. Information about the battle began to trickle in. I was hearing that all kinds of forces were building up around Kate. And I’d listen [to radio traffic] and learn what was going on with the 5/22d, because Lieutenant Colonel Delaune had command and control of [Kate] and that whole situation.
“Then I learned that Ross had been killed,” Smith recalls. “At that point, it was the sort of deal where, if your unit is in a situation, and you know everybody there, and you kind of know what’s happening, it just doesn’t make sense to send some brand-new guy in to replace you. They were my guys, and I felt kind of stupid, because I was not there with them, and they sent in some other guy to get killed. It’s my outfit and my people, so I should go back. So I went to see Colonel [Francis] Bowers [commander of the Provisional Artillery Group], and said that if he didn’t have a problem with it, I wanted to go back out to Kate.”
Bowers approved the move.
The package he brought was a Ma Deuce—an M2 .50-caliber machine gun. In that place and at that time, it was a white elephant. “Nobody knew how to set the head space and timing,” explains Koon. “So we never used it.”
Actually, Pierelli knew how to set head space and timing. “If a .50 came in, and they had also brought a head space and timing device with it, I could’ve done it; that wouldn’t have been a problem.”
Every US Army M2 .50-caliber machine gun that I’ve ever seen had a timing and head space tool attached to it. But such were the conditions on Kate—not much socializing of any kind, and merely visiting the guys on the other end of the hill could cost your life—and the insular culture of the very different units occupying it, that Koon didn’t even know Pierelli’s name, much less that he was a Special Forces–trained light- and heavy-infantry weapons specialist. In fact, Hopkins didn’t know Koon’s first name until years after he got out of the Army.
I would have loved to have had that gun on Kate even a day earlier, when we could have put it to good use. But on that day, it didn’t make a bit of difference: We had no .50-caliber ammo.
Nevertheless, I was very glad that Smith was back. I had begun to plan, in my head, an escape and evasion operation. In the short while that he had been on Kate, Zollner had been a tremendous help to me. But even with the two of us and Pierelli, riding herd on about 145 men, many of them wounded, as we tried to extricate ourselves from a hilltop surrounded by thousands of enemy soldiers would be very chancy. Having along Mike, a hard-charging guy with plenty of courage, an officer that all of Kate’s artillerymen knew and respected, would improve our chances of survival.
But at the moment, Smith’s arrival was just in time to catch PAVN’s daily flying explosives festival and the USAF air show.
“We artillery guys were pretty much in our bunkers, letting the Air Force do their thing. All I remember from that afternoon was lots and lots of fast movers, and whatever big-ass bomb it is that makes one helluva noise when it blows up,” he recalls.
• • •
IN early evening I got word that the Mike Force rescue would entail a reinforced battalion consisting of three rifle companies from the 1st Battalion and two rifle companies from the 5th Battalion.
I asked Pleiku to actually land the Mike Force companies on Kate if possible. If not, I told them, I wanted them to land close enough to fight their way in to us through the enemy lines, to buttress our defenses. They were to be our reinforcements, our redemption.
I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly at that point.
Word came back that they needed an alternate plan: First, there wasn’t enough open space on or close to Kate to land enough helicopters to carry even one rifle company. And there was an overwhelming number of NVA troops entrenched around the base of our hill and on nearby heights.
A third message clarified the earlier one: A primary force of two companies would air-assault into our immediate area and secure a position within a few hundred meters of Kate’s perimeter to cover the withdrawal of everyone on Kate. Three more companies would then be inserted with orders to block the enemy and provide direct security once our withdrawal began.
We waited. Twice an hour or so, the incoming mortar and rocket fire resumed, punctuated from time to time by still more artillery. And more ground attacks.
In late afternoon, I saw the swarm of dots that represented a dozen or more Huey slicks, escorted by several gunships, approaching from the northwest. Enough lift ships, I judged, to carry one Mike Force company. They dipped down out of sight at a distance that I judged to be maybe two kilometers or so. The choppers rose, empty, and hurried away. A little later, they returned to insert a second company. But before the last of those choppers were down, the wind brought the faint rattle and chatter of small-arms fire, along with the louder echo and crash of mortar impacts and the sharp crack of RPGs. I tuned my PRC-25 radio to the Mike Force frequency and heard their advisers—Australian Special Air Service, by their accents—talking to Mike Force headquarters. I understood from this that two rifle companies were boots on the ground, but they had been surrounded almost immediately by PAVN infantry and were taking mortar fire.
Worse, the intensity of ground fire was such that, with darkness approaching, the remaining three companies of the rescue force were forced to abort their landing. Opposed by elements of the PAVN 66th and 28th Regiments, the two Mike Force companies were heavily outnumbered and terrifically outgunned.
Wisely, they broke contact and wit
hdrew a few kilometers away from Kate, where they dug in and assumed defensive positions.
It became painfully clear that Kate was cut off, surrounded, and dependent for survival on whatever decisions I made next. There would be neither rescue nor reinforcements anytime soon.
For the first time since I arrived on Kate, I began to consider abandoning the hill. Do not misunderstand me: I had come here to fight. My Montagnard strikers had come to fight and had done so, individually and collectively, with great distinction. Some of the artillerymen had joined them, and had acquitted themselves well, inspiring one another with their valor no less than they inspired the strikers. No matter how tough things got, I had never considered anything except finding a way to hang on. With each attack, I had concentrated on what we needed to survive it, and did the same for the next one. We regrouped, redistributed our ammo, moved our machine guns, shifted a squad here and there, and schemed to get more supplies and ammo. Once we had learned the rules of PAVN’s game, after we had hunkered in and dug deeper, our casualties were fewer, mostly flesh wounds that were not life-threatening; my wounded strikers stayed and fought on until we could get a medevac in. More often, we’d get them out on a chopper that dropped in to bring ammunition. Even so, I now had more than a dozen dead strikers in body bags.
I would never surrender. I never even considered it.
But now our artillery pieces had taken so many direct hits that they were little more than scrap metal. We were defending an impact area, and nothing more. Again, ammo was dangerously low. The Buffalo had been emptied; our water supply had dwindled to what remained in our canteens. Any chopper pilot bold enough to try resupplying us stood a better-than-even chance of being blown out of the sky. I had to begin thinking about if and how we could safely abandon Kate.
Right on cue, the leaders of the CIDG force came to tell me that they were leaving. They had discussed this among themselves, and agreed that Kate could no longer be defended. And that we would very soon be overrun.
“Captain Albracht came [into the FDC] and said, ‘We’ve got a really serious problem,’” recalls Bob Johnson. “I was there, along with Lieutenants Smith and Zollner. Albracht said, ‘The Yards have told us that they’re leaving . . . They’re going to boogie out. They said that there are too many NVA out there, and they’ll have much better odds leaving on their own terms and fighting their way out than staying here and getting overrun.’ I knew that once they’ve cracked your defensive line, everyone gets slaughtered; the Yards wanted no part of that. Albracht said that he would ask the Yard commander not to leave until nightfall, and as soon as it was dark enough, we would all leave together.
“I knew then that our ass was grass,” Johnson continues. “It was very peculiar. When I learned that I was going to Vietnam, I realized that my life was fated to be what it was going to be. Before I left for Vietnam, I decided not to worry about it, not to deal with it. I’ll do my job. Whatever happens, happens; if I come back, I come back and resume my life. Going into that ordeal with that mind-set made it much easier for me to get through whatever happened. I felt almost like I was an observer of my own life during that period of time. But I was also very well aware of how untenable our situation was if we stayed there.”
After talking to Smith and Zollner, I went to see the Montagnard leaders. Through an interpreter, fighting though the language barrier, I told them that they were right. That it was time to leave. But we should leave with air cover. We should wait until full darkness. We should all leave together.
They discussed this, right in front of me but in their own language, and after a few minutes their spokesman replied: They would wait. We would all leave together.
Through Bu Prang, I communicated with Major Brydon, and he agreed that his force would send a small element, perhaps a platoon, to infiltrate the area near the north end of the base of Ambush Hill. They would guide us back to the main force, dug in several kilometers away.
Even then, I didn’t want to leave Kate. But I had to consider the facts: Our howitzers were useless. The enemy was zeroed in on every one of our bunkers; many had taken multiple hits. Some had collapsed or were partly so—our physical defenses were crumbling. Fifteen of the original twenty-seven artillerymen on Kate had been wounded, and one of their replacements, Ross, was dead. About a third of my original 156 CIDG strikers, which included the platoon of reinforcements, had been killed or wounded. We had ceased to be a fire support base. A few more artillery shells, and our cratered hilltop would look like the surface of the moon, with about the same population.
I saw no choice but to send an encrypted message to Special Forces Command declaring the situation untenable and requesting permission to abandon Kate.
Their reply was swift and directly to the point:
“Permission to abandon denied.”
PART
THREE
Shoe the steed with silver
That bore him to the fray,
When he heard the guns at dawning—
Miles away;
When he heard them calling, calling—
Mount! nor stay:
Quick, or all is lost;
They’ve surprised and stormed the post,
They push your routed host—
Gallop! retrieve the day!
—Herman Melville, “Sheridan at Cedar Creek”
SEVENTEEN
The message was a shocker. What the hell? For a moment I felt more alone than I had ever been.
But we couldn’t stay on Kate. I grew up idolizing men like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis. They stood their ground at the Alamo, sacrificed their lives, because they knew it would buy Sam Houston time to raise the army that eventually won Texas its independence. If holding Kate had meant saving others’ lives or advancing America’s cause, I would have died there. But Kate no longer served any purpose. So it came down to a simple choice: Do we stay and die in place, or do we attempt to escape and evade the enemy? It was clear to me that it was better to leave, better for my men, better for their families and loved ones, and better for my country if at least some of us lived to fight another day.
I took a few deep breaths and composed a somewhat longer message. Choosing my words for maximum impact, I explained in greater detail the condition of our hilltop impact area, our lack of resources with which to mount an active defense, the inoperative condition of our howitzers and therefore the loss of our raison d’être, and finally an educated guess at how many thousands of enemy troops were in the surrounding hills and valleys. But this second message was not a request. I concluded by saying that we were leaving. I didn’t ask permission, but I added that a little air support on our way out the door would be very helpful. Then I encoded what I’d written with a CAC code—a group of randomly generated letters and numbers substituting for each character in my message. I read the encrypted message over the radio to Rocco DeNote at Bu Prang.
With his radio operator, SP4 Billy Weaver, to spell him only long enough to take a leak, for five days DeNote had faithfully relayed our support, ammo, and supply requests to B-23 at BMT. He had done everything but hold my hand over the radio since the shooting started. He had secure voice and secure teletype circuits to B-23; after decoding my message, he sent it to the “B” Team commander, who passed it up the line. While I waited for an answer, I began making preparations for leaving.
• • •
“ACCORDING to the plan, we would march through triple-canopy jungle in the dark until we linked up with a relief force at least a couple of miles away,” recalls Bob Johnson. “Captain Albracht had the grid coordinates for the linkup. The relief force was [composed of] Special Forces leading Montagnard troops. Until that time—all through the siege—I had assumed that the US Army would come to the rescue of Americans who were stranded, as we were. I thought the relief force was at least a couple of US Army companies. I did not know that there were no
American troops involved in any way in relieving the siege of Kate,” adds Johnson.
I, of course, was by then well aware that no American unit was coming. What I didn’t know until many years later was that while I awaited a response to my last message, high above Kate, at an altitude beyond the range of even PAVN’s spiffy new 37 mm ack-ack guns, the three-star commander of I Field Force Vietnam and his aide were circling in a Huey fitted out as a command and control bird. Lieutenant General Charles A. Corcoran, who answered only to General Creighton Abrams, boss of all US forces in Vietnam and its waters, had received my classified message.
Like virtually every senior officer in Vietnam, he had chosen his own call sign, a reflection of his self-image. A call sign so different and unique that anyone who might hear it on the air would know at once that they were talking to the boss.
For all I knew, Corcoran was a warrior genius, Alexander the Great reincarnated. Even if he was merely a run-of-the-mill American three-star general, however, he should have known that as ego-gratifying as that might have felt, his choice of call sign was dangerously stupid. Just a year earlier, Major General Keith Ware, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient and the first OCS graduate to pin on the silver stars of a general officer, had been lured into a Viet Cong ambush by a bogus radio call. And this was Ware’s own fault: As commander of the First Infantry Division, nicknamed “the Big Red One,” Ware chose the call sign “Firefly One.” Ignoring advice from his own division signal officer on the advisability of keeping any call sign longer than a month, much less for his entire tour of duty, he had “Firefly 1” painted on the underside of his command Huey’s fuselage.
By 1966, US intelligence was well aware that the Viet Cong had an active and effective signals intelligence organization, roughly the equivalent of the US Army Security Agency. The Viet Cong systematically monitored and decoded US, ARVN, and Allied forces radio transmissions on hundreds of frequencies, including those used by aircraft and ground forces. They maintained what we would now call a database of call signs and frequencies, from which they had identified the commanders of virtually every Army, Marines, and Air Force unit of battalion size or larger in South Vietnam. From repeated sightings of Ware’s aircraft, they had matched it to his call sign. When some of his troops were operating near the Cambodian border, the VC set up an ambush on what was meant to look like an active landing zone; when Firefly 1 was spotted in the area, a Viet Cong impersonating an American soldier called on a captured radio to ask Ware for help in evacuating a critically wounded GI. When Ware landed, his aircraft was riddled with machine-gun fire and everyone on it was killed.