Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262)
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He fired again, almost immediately; I saw the flash, noted that the projectile’s fiery tail appeared to be headed directly at me.
I jumped to the ground first; the explosion was a near miss.
A very near miss.
Shaken but not injured, I remounted the bunker, righted my overturned .50, and poured a stream of fire directly onto the gun position. This PAVN gunner and his loader had guts—they stood their ground and managed to get off two more rounds in rapid succession. Both exploded harmlessly, several meters short. I raked the entire position until it went silent.
My gun was overheated. The barrel needed to cool, but PAVN had moved into RPG range, and his B-40 rockets were added to the incoming deluge.
Spooky and Shadow gunships appeared overhead. After a brief radio reunion with my friends in the sky, I directed their fire on the rocket positions. To get a better look, I left my bunker and moved to an exposed location. From there I pinpointed the RPG nest, and vectored the gunships’ fire on them. Spooky and Shadow unleashed their particular versions of fire and brimstone onto these positions, and in minutes all incoming ceased.
Months later, I would be awarded the Silver Star for this action.
But that night, once the threat had passed, all I wanted was a bed.
• • •
I awoke on Monday, November 3, and was greeted by a public information officer from Fifth Special Forces Group Headquarters in Nha Trang. He said that a horde of media was waiting to interview me about Kate.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t really in the mood.
Smooth and self-assured, the PIO told me that Fifth Special Forces Group Commander Colonel “Iron Mike” Healey had insisted on it.
So I girded my loins, and all that. Before I was permitted to meet the press, however, the PIO went over a list of dos and don’ts to remember when speaking about our “gallant Vietnamese allies.”
I had to ask him: Which particular gallant Vietnamese allies is he talking about? And where the hell were they when we needed them?
He had no answers to those questions.
I showered, shaved, put on clean jungle fatigues, and faced the media circus that had gathered from every corner of South Vietnam.
Apparently I got through it all right—it’s all just a blur now.
A little later that day, “Iron Mike” himself, a living legend in the flesh, flew in to personally make known his pleasure with my performance on Kate. With my entire “A” Team standing at attention, Healey extolled my accomplishments, described how proud he was of me, how I exemplified the best traditions of the Special Forces, and so on and so forth, at distressing length.
I was more than a little embarrassed. Then Iron Mike asked where I wanted to go next—to include becoming his aide. As I opened my mouth to speak, a gremlin—no doubt merely passing by on some errand of greater mischief—leapt into it. From deep within me, the gremlin summoned the spirit who had been Alleman High’s “most fun to be with” of the Class of 1966. This spirit turned off my brain and seized control of my voice. “I’d like to be the officer in charge of the Nha Trang Dairy Queen,” said this imp of Satan through my mouth.
The team loved this response. Iron Mike—not so much. His friendly smile drooped into a half snarl.
“That position is filled,” he growled.
The gremlin departed to complete his original shenanigan. The spirit within me vanished; as I regained control of my wits, I assumed that I had ruled out any chance of becoming Iron Mike’s aide. As if that was a job that I’d ever want.
“How about the II Corps Mike Force?” I said.
“You’ve got it,” he replied. Not willing to waste even one more minute on a clown, Colonel Healey performed a smart about-face, mounted his chopper, and flew off.
• • •
TWO days later, on the morning of November 5, Bu Prang received a priority message from Lieutenant General Corcoran ordering me to a ceremony at Ban Me Thuot to recognize the American defenders of Fire Support Base Kate. Alas, near-hurricane-force winds lashed the Central Highlands that day. All birds—especially those with rotor blades instead of feathers—were grounded. General Corcoran nevertheless dispatched a slick to pick me up. Apparently Pawnee Bill believed that his three stars outranked Mother Nature’s breezes.
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 D
uc 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 without 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.