Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262)

by Albracht, William; Wolf, Marvin; Galloway, Joseph L. (FRW)

(Dear boys!),

  To go and get shot and be damned.

  —Rudyard Kipling, “The Lost Legion”

  NINETEEN

  After walking for what felt like an hour or so, I called a pause to our march. I had not seen or heard further sign of friend or foe. Nor was I very sure where we were. I called for Smith, Zollner, and Pierelli to make their way to the head of the column, and in whispers told them that I wanted to go out ahead of the group, alone. I wanted to try to pinpoint our exact location on my map by using terrain features as reference points. I had to do this myself because, from all the information I had, the only other man with us who I could trust to read a map and match it to the surrounding terrain was Pierelli. I had to believe that I knew more about maps than he did. So it would be me.

  When I returned, I told the others, I would probably make just enough noise to be challenged. My reply to this challenge would be two short flashes from the red-filtered flashlight I carried.

  White light can be seen for miles in the darkness. Red light won’t carry as far.

  We had to assume that the enemy was still combing the jungle for us; that presented the distinct possibility that I could be captured. My final instruction to Dan, Maurice, and Mike was that if I approached and did not flash red twice, they were to assume that I had been compromised and start shooting.

  I went out about a hundred meters, moving quietly, but looking around as I moved. I came to the edge of a jungle clearing, hoping to find a height or some other landmark that would help me get a fix on our position. But even in the clearing, only starlight battled the darkness.

  Scanning for terrain features, I didn’t watch where I put my feet. I tripped over a tree root and fell flat on my face, brushing against tree limbs and underbrush as I toppled.

  Slowly, I climbed back to my feet, then systematically checked myself over.

  My red-filtered flashlight had been clipped to my suspenders. It was gone. I dropped to my knees and searched the ground all around with my hands.

  No flashlight.

  Still on my knees, I crawled in gradually expanding circles from the base of the tree.

  Still no flashlight.

  By my own order, I would not be allowed to return to the column without that flashlight. There was no fail-safe. No backup plan.

  Fighting the stirrings of panic, I returned to the base of the tree, and then slowly felt my way up to its limbs. Then outward until my hands touched . . . plastic. My fingers found a ribbed cylinder. Snagged on a small branch by its carry clip was my precious light.

  I had failed to locate us on the map, but it was apparent that I had exceeded my nightly quotient for solo reconnaissance.

  I eased back the way I came, used the flashlight to signal as promised, and got my troops moving again. As before, we proceeded by dead reckoning: I knew where we had started from, and now I knew the coordinates of the Mike Force’s position. But without the ability to locate ourselves on a map, I couldn’t do more than move toward what I hoped was their approximate location.

  The bug in my beer bottle: The enemy was also looking for the Mike Force. The good guys might have been forced to move.

  • • •

  ABOUT three hours after leaving Kate, a gibbous moon rose, pouring cold, bright light on the jungle clearings, enough to allow me to view terrain features and get a better feeling for our approximate location. We seemed to be close to where I had supposed we were; I altered course slightly and we moved out again, still exercising the greatest caution: Bright as the occasional clearing and small openings in the jungle canopy were, beneath the thick rain forest vegetation it was like wearing sunglasses in a coal mine.

  About 0230, or more than six hours after leaving Kate, we reached a point on my map that I judged to be close to the Mike Force perimeter. We were in thick jungle at the edge of a large open field; I put several of my men in concealed positions along the tree line. Across the field, fifty to sixty meters away, a large clump of tall trees rose above thick underbrush.

  Concealed beneath those trees, a man could see anyone approaching across the open field in the moonlight. It was exactly the kind of location where a small infantry unit could dig in and defend against a larger force.

  And that, I believed, was where the two Mike Force rifle companies sent to rescue us were waiting. While I was deciding how best to approach their position, I heard a soft but unmistakably metallic clank coming from that distant wood line.

  Somebody was there. It might be our rescuers. It might as easily be a PAVN unit.

  I just couldn’t know.

  I got back on the radio and asked the Mike Force to send a man into the clearing so we could confirm that we were in the right place.

  The Mike Force replied that we would have to send a man forward into the field.

  I could have sent Pierelli, of course, or even Smith or Zollner. Any one of them would have gone if I’d asked them. As would almost any of my strikers. But this was my job, I decided. I couldn’t risk another man’s life if I wouldn’t risk my own. I told Pierelli, Smith, and Zollner to remain with Tex and our radio while I attempted to make physical contact.

  Before I left the tree line, I radioed the Mike Force, whispering into the microphone that in a few minutes I would attempt to make contact. They rogered their understanding. I was nevertheless reluctant to step into the field, because I was still not certain that we were in the right spot. Many terrain features look similar in moonlight; we might be miles from where I thought we were. And even if my navigation was spot-on, I couldn’t be sure that the Mike Force was across that field.

  We could be right in the middle of a PAVN bivouac: If that grove was a good location for a couple of hundred Mike Force strikers to dig in and hole up at night, it was an equally good place for a PAVN unit.

  My final words to Pierelli, Smith, and Zollner were that if I walked into a PAVN position instead of the Mike Force, the enemy might not realize that I had others with me. If I was killed or captured, they were to forget about me, melt back into the jungle, and, as soon as it was safe, lead the troops quietly and quickly northwest to Bu Prang.

  Feeling naked in the moonlight, my weapon slung over my shoulder, I stepped into the field, realizing as I did so that even if I was walking straight toward the Mike Force, there could also be a thousand guns pointing at me from the jungle on either flank. I took a step forward, then another, calling as I went, in a parade-ground voice, “I am an American; are you the Mike Force?” I repeated this several times as I moved across the field.

  There was no answer.

  I kept calling and I kept walking. Finally I reached the tree line and there, to my left, a Mike Force striker stared back at me from a foxhole.

  Sergeant First Class Lowell Stevens, the Mike Force ground commander, appeared from nowhere to grab my arm.

  “Go back and get the rest of your men,” he whispered. “And keep your voice down. There’s all kinds of fucking pith helmets and AKs around here. Get your guys, and then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Feeling more naked than ever, I ran back across the open field. I got my troops moving across the field, and I’m pretty sure that at first they didn’t understand that we had found the Mike Force.

  Koon: “We were halted for a while. Then we started forward, but nobody ever told me we were linking up, and all of a sudden I slipped and fell into a hole. First thing I thought was that I’d fallen into a punji pit. It’s pretty dark, so I looked and there’s a gook on my left and a gook on my right and I was sitting there with my M16 and I said, ‘Are you guys friendly?’ And they smiled at me, and then somebody said that we’d linked up with the friendlies.

  “When I told Albracht this story, he wanted to know what I would’ve done if they said, ‘No, not friendly.’ I guess we would’ve had a shoot-out right there in that hole.”

  Bob Johnson: “We wait
ed until the captain came back and told us that it was safe to move forward. We crossed a field and into a tree line. Then somebody grabbed my boot, pushed it back, and said, ‘Don’t step on me.’ And that’s when I knew that we had linked up with the relief force.”

  Warren Geromin: “All of a sudden somebody’s hand came up and grabbed my foot. They said, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ They were the good guys; the Mike Force, down in their foxholes.”

  As soon as I had everyone inside the new perimeter, SFC Stevens told me that he had ordered his men not to acknowledge me when I approached them, because he couldn’t tell if I had been captured and compromised. And, he explained, there was a vastly superior enemy force in the area, in at least two groups. Earlier that night, he and his men had heard them moving outside their hidden perimeter. He believed—I don’t know why—that the enemy was primarily looking for my group.

  We were not yet safe. It would be daylight in a few hours; we must leave the area before we were discovered. Even our combined force would not match that of our pursuers. We realigned our formation, with a Mike Force company at either end of our column and my Kate evacuees between them.

  We assumed that the PAVN commander would know that we wanted to reach Bu Prang. It followed that they would try to intercept and ambush us. We therefore took evasive action, swinging miles out of our way, sticking to the jungle and moving at a slow and cautious pace.

  After daylight, during a break, mail was distributed to some of the Kate artillerymen.

  “Somebody had brought some mail off Kate that had come in with the last chopper,” says Koon. “I got one letter, from my sister, and in it there were three pieces of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. I was dying of thirst, but we didn’t have any water. That chewing gum quenched my thirst until we got to Bu Prang; to this day, I still thank my sister.”

  Once we resumed our march, my exhausted mind slid into autopilot. I left everything to the Special Forces noncoms that led each Mike Force company: Sergeant First Class Stevens and Sergeant First Class Don Simmons, both ten-year Army veterans. Most of the remainder of the march is a blur in memory; the only thing I recall from after the linkup and our subsequent departure was that we came out of the jungle and took a dirt road for a short distance to Camp Bu Prang, arriving there about 1130 hours on November 2.

  When the camp came into sight, I was jolted into full consciousness and then infused with a fleeting moment of pride.

  One of the artillery sergeants—one that I had seen very little of during the fight—called out, “Hold your heads high, men; be proud. We just walked off Firebase Kate!”

  We had moved through enemy territory for over sixteen hours to evade a powerful and determined enemy force. Considering all that we had been forced to overcome on this journey, it must be marked as a minor miracle.

  I am confident that Kate could not have survived, nor could our escape have been successful, without Dan Pierelli as my right hand, calm, focused, and a consummate professional. I knew that he would handle whatever came up. He thus enabled me to concentrate on whatever was in front of me at the moment, without needlessly worrying about anything else.

  Lieutenants Smith, Kerr, and Zollner, artillery officers completely out of their element when forced to serve as infantry, were individually and collectively magnificent during the siege no less than during our escape and evasion.

  Koon, Hopkins, Tiranti, and Geromin—a generator operator!—and a few other artillerymen who overcame their understandable fear of flying explosives to leave shelter and fight alongside our CIDG strikers were critical to the defense of Kate. I don’t know that any of us would have survived without their efforts as a roving infantry reserve force.

  Sergeant Tex Rogers, who volunteered to serve as my RTO during our escape, never faltered, never wavered, never lost his cool—was simply magnificent. Through our entire ordeal we were separated only twice, each time by necessity. Afterward, Tex confessed that he suffered from night blindness!

  Nor would any of us have lived to tell Kate’s tale without the pilots and crews in Spooky and Shadow, with Al Dykes, the Alabama boy, foremost among them. Likewise, their Air Force brethren flying the fast movers that had broken up one assault after another. All of us are eternally indebted to Army Captain John Strange and Air Force Major George Lattin, forward air controllers and pilots extraordinaire.

  The courage and skill displayed by countless Army aviators and crew were all that barred the door to our deaths. I commend in that particularly Major Dean Owens and his entire 155th AHC, and especially pilots John Ahearn, Les Davison, and Ken Donovan. Also, Ben Gay of the 48th AHC and Jim Matlock of the 189th AHC.

  Nolan Black, Maury Hearne, Clyde Canada, and Douglas Lott, the pilots and crew of Joker 85, gave their lives that we might live. We never met, but I will never forget you.

  • • •

  INSIDE the camp, I learned that one of the two missing artillerymen had indeed joined with a few Montagnard strikers who were separated from the group. It was so dark, he said, that at first he couldn’t tell whether he’d found a group of North Vietnamese or the CIDG! They had all hiked straight back to Bu Prang, avoided enemy contact, and arrived safely about the same time that my group was linking up with the Mike Force.

  That left only one man unaccounted for: PFC Michael R. Norton, a gunner from the 105 section from Charlie Battery, 5/27 Artillery. He was said to have departed Kate with us, but had disappeared before the linkup. An aerial search was launched around Kate and the route that we followed to the linkup.

  A chopper pilot that I met several days after we walked out told me that another chopper pilot told him that search pilots made passes over the area between Kate and Bu Prang for three days in an attempt to locate Norton.

  On one of these forays, the pilot said, a hunter-killer team saw a man waving his hands frantically in an open field. He wore green Army jungle fatigues with a boonie hat pulled low on his head. The pilot made a cautious landing approach, but as they were about to hover in for a landing, the door gunner yelled, “Gook!” As the pilot pulled up hard and fast, the surrounding jungle erupted with small-arms fire. As the chopper flew off, the man in the field ran toward the place where the fire came from.

  The man in the field, set there to bait a trap—was that Norton? Unlikely. Probably, it was an enemy soldier dressed in one of our uniforms. It’s possible that PAVN captured Norton and took his clothes, but the fatigues might just as easily have been abandoned on Kate when we left. Or were from some other source entirely.

  In addition, my coauthor has heard variations of this story from at least half a dozen people, not all of them Vietnam veterans, over the last forty years. None who told the story claimed to have firsthand knowledge. It was always something they had heard from someone else.

  As we researched this book, two of the artillerymen who served with me on Kate said that they’d been told by others that, as we were leaving, Norton went back to get something he’d forgotten. Others said that he came off the hill with the unit, but got separated in the confusion during the PAVN machine-gun attack. I have no idea if either account is true; again, no one claims firsthand knowledge. By my own observations, Norton might easily have fallen into a bomb crater or a shell hole and hit his head or broken his neck. For his family’s sake, I hope that someday, somehow, his whereabouts are accounted for.

  • • •

  FROM October 28 through our escape on the evening of November 1, my world had been a tiny hilltop in Hades where fire and steel rained from the sky, a cordite-reeking cosmos of unending perdition. As time’s river meanders onward, I have often reflected upon those days, and as I do so, my memory becomes clearer, my senses keener. At times, uninvited, I can almost hear the crash of mortars and the fiery screech of flying rockets. My nostrils are assaulted by the metallic smell of blood and the stench of violent death. I have never felt more needed than I was on Kate, nor have I ev
er felt more fear. I had come to the firebase for what amounted to a mundane purpose, but a new and far more important need arose. I was called upon to lead a hundred and fifty fighting men, many suffering from wounds or battle shock, through a gauntlet of fire—lead them to safety. I did not volunteer for this; the task was thrust upon me. Once I could comprehend exactly what I must do, I had resolved that no power on earth would prevent me from delivering these men from harm’s way—or I would die trying.

  I truly do not understand how we escaped that night; it could only have been the hand of God that guided us. Although I do not dwell on it, it comes to mind more often than I care to admit. A smell, a sound, a flash of light, even a conversational turn of phrase, and I am back on Firebase Kate, fighting for my life. The experience has battered and burned an everlasting wound on my soul.

  THE AFTERMATH

  For six days I had hardly slept, fueled by not much more than adrenaline and Army-issued uppers. Now I needed nothing more than sleep. After a quick debriefing, I tumbled into my bunk and immediately lapsed into unconsciousness.

  I was awakened about ten hours later by the sudden rude noise of incoming mortars and the ear-shattering crack! of a large-caliber recoilless rifle.

  The mighty PAVN force that had been distracted and diverted by Kate for nearly a week now fell on Bu Prang itself. Everyone on Special Forces Team A-236 had an assigned battle station; mine was behind the .50-caliber mounted on top of an elevated bunker at the apex of the camp’s defenses. Scrubbing sleep from my eyes, I took up my post and almost immediately spotted PAVN’s recoilless on a hillside more than half a mile away, barely within range of Ma Deuce, my venerable .50-caliber Browning M2. Firing short bursts, I walked my tracers toward the reckless rifle’s signature firing flash.

  That woke the gunner up. He responded with an HE round to the base of my position, blowing me backward off the bunker roof.

  I climbed back up and returned fire, a long burst.