Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (11 page)

After talking to the men, I ate something and turned in early, confident that the wheels were in motion. I was pretty sure that in a few days, a week tops, Kate would be in good shape, prepared to resist almost anything the enemy could throw at us.

I could not have been more
wrong.

I have fought with gun and cutlass

On the red and slippery deck

With all Hell aflame within me

And a rope around my neck.

—George S. Patton, Jr., “Through a Glass Darkly”

H
alf an hour before midnight, I was jarred awake by the rattle and pop of small-arms fire. I opened my eyes, struggling to comprehend, to orient myself in time and space. In the field, we usually slept in our clothes, but on a good night we could take off our boots. That was the last night that any of us slept without boots on.

I rolled out of my tiny hooch and as I hurriedly laced up my footgear, I could see flashes of gunfire around the forested peak on the far side of the saddle to the north called Ambush Hill. I listened for the explosions that could mean RPGs, hand grenades, or mortars, but heard only M16s and AK-47s, each firing with a distinctive sound. I moved across the blacked-out firebase until I found Pierelli and some of the artillerymen.

Pierelli said, “It's Ambush Hill. We put a listening post out there at night.”

Meanwhile, the gun crews had leapt to their howitzers and were firing off illumination rounds—big flares, swaying as they descended beneath parachutes, throwing orange, almost otherworldly light, flickering and shifting. A few minutes later, I heard the outpost strikers coming, six or seven men beating feet as fast as their legs could carry them, down steep
Ambush Hill to the nearly flat saddle between the peaks, then up and into Kate—more than a football field expanse in all. At Kate's end, a thick band of dense jungle vegetation ran across the whole saddle; near the middle, someone or something had cut or worn a gap, more than wide enough to drive a deuce-and-a-half truck through.

Gasping for breath, our strikers charged through that gap and up through a narrow opening in our concertina wire and back inside to Kate's relative safety.

They came in yelling, “Beaucoup VC, beaucoup VC!”

They spoke a few words of French, our strikers. And to them there was no difference between the Viet Cong and the PAVN.

“Many enemy soldiers.” That was what they were saying.

If this was an enemy probe to determine the disposition of our forces, and what we had available to shoot, it was a roaring success. Not knowing whether “beaucoup” meant an enemy platoon or a regiment, I got on my AN/PRC 25 radio and called Bu Prang Special Forces Camp to request air support. Meanwhile, Kate's artillery began laying high-explosive hell on nearby preplanned targets—avenues of approach, trail and stream junctions, and local landmarks that might be used for nighttime navigation or patrol rallying points. The smaller, 105 mm howitzer began to fire on Ambush Hill and approaches to its flanks.

“We were sitting around in our hooch, just shooting the breeze and listening to the radio,” recalls Nelson Koon. “Then we heard small-arms fire, and we got a call to turn our howitzer around and fire illumination, so the patrol could find their way back.

“The Montagnards came running back in yelling, ‘Beaucoup VC!' but we sat around the gun acting real cocky. We figured it might have been a squad or a platoon of NVA or something. ‘We'll get their asses tomorrow,' we said, and bragged about how we'd take our unit crest and stomp it into some [PAVN soldier's] forehead. We'd sew our unit patch on their ass—all sorts of crazy stuff.”

The first AC-47 Spooky aircraft arrived overhead about forty minutes after I made the call, and began laying curtains of fire all around Kate. Kate's artillery had to shut down, lest they hit the orbiting aircraft.

At 0300, with no further sign of the enemy, Spooky departed for its base and I slipped back into my fart sack for a few winks. A good thing, because it was the last uninterrupted sleep I would enjoy for days to come.

•   •   •

WEDNESDAY,
October 29, 1969, dawned cool and clear along the Vietnam coast. The highlands had low cloud cover, intermittent high-explosive showers, and flying shrapnel, heavy at times, along the Cambodian border.

Although the PAVN was a modern force, equipped with excellent Soviet-style infantry weapons, it had no air support—by 1969, US Air Force and Navy pilots had shot down most of Hanoi's combat aircraft and forced the rest to hide in underground shelters. So while we and our allies hauled huge howitzers around the battlefield with helicopters and trucks, the PAVN, when it operated in South Vietnam, had so far in this war left its big guns, its captured French 105 mm howitzers and its Chinese- or Soviet-made 130 mm field guns, at home. Instead, it improvised artillery from what could be carried on soldiers' backs. That was why it was so dependent on mortars and rockets—and so damn well versed in their usage.

PAVN also turned the recoilless rifle, developed and deployed in Western armies as an anti-tank gun and bunker-buster, and copied by the Chinese, into a fair substitute for true artillery: Connected to a forward observer or with an unobstructed view of the target, the PAVN had more than once demonstrated that it could fire 57 mm and 75 mm recoilless rifles at ranges up to 8,000 meters—4.6 miles—with surprising effectiveness.

While I slept through the hours before dawn on October 29, PAVN troops hauled recoilless rifles up the heights to Kate's east. Mounted on a light machine-gun tripod, once he had the range, from that distance any half-assed PAVN gunner could put a recoilless rifle's high-explosive warhead into a water bucket with one eye closed.

•   •   •

SOMETHING
loud and close jarred me awake at dawn. I opened my eyes. It had to be Mike Smith's gun bunnies firing. Nothing to worry about, I told myself.

Kenn Hopkins was asleep in an underground hooch next to the protective parapet around his 155 mm howitzer when the same blast woke him.
“I thought it was the 105, down at the other end,” he says. “That usually didn't wake me up, because it was outgoing. This was similar, but it felt like it had a different sound to it. And then it came again, it was BAM! . . . BAM! . . . BAM! One after another. What they were doing—they didn't know the range, and they'd fire a round, watch where it hit, and adjust their sights. They were walking reckless rifle rounds up the side of our hill until they hit our gun.”

Twenty-year-old PFC Bernie Tiranti, blue-eyed, slim, and dark-haired, had immigrated to Chicago with his parents from Germany when he was a baby. An enlistee who was trained as a howitzer crewman, when he arrived in Vietnam, he was offered a rear-area job. Bernie turned it down. Awakened on this morning by the noise of incoming fire, he sat up on the cot in his bunker. Just as he did so, a B-40 rocket punched through the sandbagged wall and struck his lower back. By some miracle, the warhead was a dud, although the force of its impact crunched Tirani's back so hard that he would suffer the effects of this injury for the rest of his life. He refused evacuation because he had not suffered a wound, and felt well enough to continue.

Nearby, the blasts awakened Nelson Koon, who bunked with Sergeant McFarland, a tall, heavyset man who wore glasses. “We were both asleep in our hooch,” says Koon. “Neither of us had experienced incoming before, so we thought the blasts were
our
guns shooting—that it was
out
going fire. But then I said to myself,
Who's doing the shooting? And what am I doing in here—I should be out there on the gun!
And then we heard a guy yelling for a medic. McFarland looked at me and said, ‘Go out there and get that guy,' and I said. ‘
You
go get him.' So we
both
went out and the guy was yelling and screaming that he'd lost his legs. He was a blond-haired kid, real cocky the night before, but now he wasn't cocky. We dragged him into our hooch, still screaming that he'd lost his legs. We pulled down his pants, and he didn't have a scratch on him.”

Not so Sergeant Tex Rogers's big howitzer, its shiny stainless-steel barrel pierced by a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round from a recoilless rifle and rendered inoperative.

From the hooch I shared with Pierelli, the second explosion felt much closer. And the third even closer. Once I was awake, I realized that it wasn't
our
guns firing.

After the first explosion, Lieutenant John Kerr jumped out of his sleeping bag in the sandbagged CONEX container that had formerly been the FDC. He
knew
that Kate's guns weren't firing, if only because
he
hadn't told them what to shoot at. He pulled on his boots and ran to the new underground FDC, grateful for its good overhead cover.

“Spec 4 Bob Johnson was on radio duty,” Kerr recalls. “He looked at me and I looked at him, and he said, ‘Better go get your rifle!' I turned around and ran back to get my M16. The rifle was fine, but my sleeping bag was a pile of feathers; a recoilless rifle or mortar round had come through the CONEX roof and landed on my cot.”

By the time Pierelli and I were up and out of the sack, it was a drummer's symphony of explosions,
BOOM! BOOOOOM! . . . BOOOM!
Shells from recoilless rifles and mortars and rockets landing everywhere. A muscular black gunner named Rudy Childs burst into our hooch, screaming, “We're taking incoming! I'm hit! I'm hit!”

I called for the medic, and we put Childs on our floor. He was in shock, really freaking out, and his back was peppered with shrapnel and bleeding badly. Dan and I pulled out our field dressings and started to patch him up; as bad as he looked, we tried to reassure him, to calm him down. “Hey, you're going to be okay,” I said, repeating it a couple of times. “It's not that bad; you're just bleeding a lot. You'll be fine.”

“Oh, am I?” he said, and we both nodded yes, and this had an almost immediate effect. Childs calmed down a lot, allowing us to bandage him. Meanwhile, I'm thinking,
Holy shit! This guy is really shot to pieces.

Like almost everyone else on Kate that dawn, Lieutenant Mike Smith was asleep in his bunker when the barrage began. A veteran of several previous firebases that had survived extensive mortar and rocket attacks, he'd built a sandbag “blast wall” in front of his bunker entrance. “About 7:00 a.m., I awoke to this
KAWOOMP!—
which, it turned out, was a HEAT round going through the sandbags to get the first gun,” he recalls. “We
realized that it must be incoming, so I grabbed my [steel] pot, my rifle, and all that business to head out and see what's going on. My radio operator was right behind me.

“I came out of my bunker looking around, and in that little clearing across the valley [from which, a few weeks earlier, he had taken a photo of Kate], I saw movement—men, a flash! And then, all in the space of a second or so, an explosion and I'm back inside the bunker. Later, I wrote my wife that I'd seen the guys who shot me.”

Smith believes that
he
was never the target. “The old FDC was at the very top of the hill, set up high, a well-protected box with a helluva bunch of sandbags around it. My bunker was slightly to the left and sort of low-slung. I think they just missed the FDC and hit between that, my bunker, and the pit where we put all the generators.”

Smith was blown back into his bunker along with his radio operator. The RTO was unscathed, but a jagged piece of shrapnel more than an inch long buried itself in Smith's head, just above the hairline. “It didn't go all the way through my skull. I guess the angle it came at wasn't enough to do me in, but I was bleeding like a stuck hog,” he recalls. “All I remember after that was taking the radio over to the FDC to get more [antenna] height,” so he could report Kate's status.

In the FDC, the unit medic rendered first aid. “I was all bandaged up and looked kind of wild,” Smith recalls. “I had the sense—and the medic shared this—that the wound was more serious than it would later turn out to be. I also believed that this wasn't [a prelude to] a major attack. I don't think that I would've left Kate if I had known the magnitude of the situation.”

•   •   •

THE
barrage lasted only ten or fifteen minutes. Before it was over, I was on my radio calling for air support, but by the time the shelling stopped, there was nothing overhead. I did a damage assessment, and checked on the strikers. None had been killed, but a few had shrapnel wounds.

As I mentioned earlier, below the northern tip of Firebase Kate was a flat, grassy gap in the jungle big enough to drive a deuce-and-a-half through. A footpath led through that gap and into the open, grassy saddle leading to Ambush Hill. In hindsight, I now realize that had the enemy waited until
Spooky departed, then climbed back up Ambush Hill and slipped fifty or sixty well-armed men into that band of jungle, they could have moved into position while we were pinned down by the dawn barrage. When the artillery stopped, they could have assaulted right into the firebase, rolled up the strikers on both flanks, and thrown grenades into our bunkers. In other words, they could have wiped us out in ten minutes.

The reason they didn't, I think, is that the previous night's probe was the leading edge, the recon element, of a much larger force moving through our area toward Bu Prang. Since the arrival of US combat troops in 1965, the PAVN had been outnumbered and outgunned by US and Allied forces. Their salvation was Cambodian and Laotian sanctuaries, and their demonstrated expertise in moving unseen through very difficult terrain. They were definitely in South Vietnam to fight, but they always wanted to choose the time and place of an encounter, usually at a moment when, even briefly, they had numerical superiority. PAVN company and battalion commanders operated with minimal tactical autonomy: Instead of allowing, say, a company commander to seize and exploit an unexpected opportunity, PAVN commanders preferred to plan and rehearse every attack. On that late October night, they didn't have time to scout the terrain and then organize a ground attack. Instead, they laid hot steel on us, seeking to neutralize our big guns.

And that they did: One of Kate's howitzers was permanently out of action and the other two were damaged.

•   •   •