Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (27 page)

“I have a couple of
Stars and Stripes
articles that basically talked about how the Vietnamese, who were nowhere in sight, were pounding the NVA at Bu Prang and these firebases,” he says, throwing up his hands, as if to say he can't believe it.

Brockwell and his wife still live in Houston.

William J. Brydon

For his role in our escape and evasion, Australian Army Major Brydon was “mentioned in dispatches,” which entitled him to use the initials M.I.D. after his name forever thereafter. His citation read, in part: “During this operation, Major Brydon controlled his companies with outstanding ability. When a fire support base in the area was threatened by the enemy and the decision had been made to vacate it, he planned and controlled the successful withdrawal of the Allied garrison using his own companies as a screen. The calm and professional manner in which Major Brydon executed this withdrawal averted a potentially serious situation, Major Brydon's professional ability and his untiring efforts to improve the effectiveness of those under his command have set a fine example to United States, Vietnamese and Australian Commanders involved in the Special Forces program and reflect great credit on himself, the Australian Army Training Team and the Australian Army.”

Brydon retired as a lieutenant colonel and died of a heart attack at age 74 at his home in Beenleigh, Queensland, Australia, in 2006.

Mike Caldwell

Mike recovered fully from his shrapnel wounds. Following his discharge from active duty, he returned to his home in West Sacramento, California, and for several years worked at McClellan Air Force Base. After qualifying for a small business loan program for wounded veterans, he started a trucking business. Today his six trucks haul industrial waste to a variety of disposal sites.

Les Davison

John “Les” Davison left the Army in October 1970 and returned to Illinois to earn a BA and an MA. When his GI Bill benefits ran out, he pushed paper for several US government agencies. While working, he attended law school night classes and became an attorney in 1987. Davison took early retirement in 2001 and works summers in various national parks. He is also a substitute teacher in Arlington, Virginia.

Les provided the table below, listing the names of all the aviators who participated in resupplying us on the night of October 31.

According to Davison, each of the eighteen pilots who flew that mission, including Colonel Wright, the 17th Aviation Group commander, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The eighteen enlisted crew chiefs and door gunners were each awarded the Air Medal, with “V” device, indicating the award was for valor.

This strikes me as unfair to the enlisted crewmen, who were exposed to the same dangers as their pilots. It should also be noted that pilots flew in armored seats with a front flak vest. Crewmen had only flak vests.

Elton J. Delaune

Every officer learns early in his career that he is responsible for everything that his men do, and for everything that they fail to do. Because Lieutenant Colonel Delaune had operational control of Firebase Kate, our successful E&E accrued to his credit. Soon after leaving Vietnam, he was promoted to full colonel. The Army paid his full salary and allowances, as well as tuition and books, to enroll in an MBA program at Syracuse University.
Later he attended the Army War College. Promoted twice more, he became the very model of a modern major general. Delaune served as deputy chief of staff for resource management for US Army Europe in 1977 and 1978, and retired soon afterward. He died in 2006.

Rocco DeNote

Rocco was
always
there when I called from Kate. He slept on the floor, took his meals there, and left only for brief toilet breaks. He knew everything that was happening and was absolutely invaluable. I put him in for a Bronze Star for Meritorious Service, and he told me that it meant more to him than anything else he received in Vietnam.

After returning to civilian life, Rocco went to college on the GI Bill, then settled in the Cape May area at the southern tip of New Jersey, married, and started a family. He found work with the local police force. In his tenth year as a cop, Rocco was shot in the head by an elderly man wielding a shotgun. His road back to fully functional was long and slow; eventually he made an almost complete recovery. Parts of his memory are gone, especially those relating to playing musical instruments. He became a grandfather in 2013 and now works as a substitute schoolteacher.

Ken Donovan

“Being older now, my attitude has changed from when I was younger,” he says. “I think this applies to all the guys who were there: The meaning of our Vietnam experience lies within
us.
Not with the politicians. Not with the commanders
.
We were willing to step forward to serve our country when that wasn't necessarily the fashionable thing to do. I kept faith with my fellow soldiers, and I was courageous when I had to be, and I think that applied to all of us. I lost about twenty-six friends—flight school classmates and guys in my unit. Forty-some years after the fact, I feel bad because we lost their capability. These men were courageous, intelligent, aggressive, all the good things that we want in our citizens, and we lost that. If we look at most of the guys [that I knew] who survived, we had some doctors, a lot of
attorneys, many successful businessmen. Contributing members of society. We lost all that. My overriding emotion is a sense of loss.

“Dick Pugh, one of my flight school classmates, was killed the day after Christmas, 1968. So every Christmas, when I sit down with my family, I toast Dick. I think as long as you're alive in somebody's memory, you're still alive.”

About 40,000 American helicopter pilots served in Vietnam. Of those men, 2,002, along with 2,704 crewmen, were killed in Vietnam.

Donovan left active duty in 1971 and earned a degree from Michigan State University. He also joined the Michigan Army National Guard. In 1979, he was offered the opportunity to join the Active Guard Reserve Program, and served as an instructor pilot. Soon after, he accepted a direct commission to second lieutenant.

He flew for twenty-five years. “I did everything that Ken Donovan can do in a Huey,” he says. “I had a great time in Vietnam; we lived in the aircraft. During the LZ Kate/Bu Prang deal, on Thanksgiving Day I flew from 0300 hours until dusk the next day, my longest day in a slick.”

Donovan's last five years in the Michigan Guard were in a non-aviation assignment as a battalion and then brigade operations and training officer. Donovan retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1985 after twenty-eight years of service. Following that, he worked in the defense industry and retired as VP of sales and marketing for an engineering firm in 2008. Still tall and trim, he lives in retirement near Tampa, Florida.

Al Dykes

Dykes spent his entire Air Force career as a navigator. After Vietnam he served on several different classified programs until he retired from active duty with more than twenty years of service. He then continued to work for the Air Force as an adviser and consultant on a variety of classified programs. Dykes continued to enjoy life with his wife in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. In the course of preparing this book, I was privileged to reconnect with Al; we and our wives became very good friends. He died after a long illness on November 7, 2014.

Ben Gay

Gay completed a second Vietnam tour; after four years active duty, he returned to Virginia, where he enrolled in college and joined a Virginia Army National Guard aviation unit. He graduated in 1974, and then served as a Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent for eight years before transferring to the Treasury Department, where he served seventeen years as a Customs Service criminal investigator. He retired from federal service in 2000. Meanwhile, he remained with the Virginia Guard until 1996, logging more than 5,000 hours of flight time, including more than 1,500 hours of combat flying. His twenty-five years in the air included a Desert Storm tour in Saudi Arabia and Iraq as a Dustoff pilot with the 986th Medical Detachment.

In 2000, he began a new career with the New Kent County (Virginia) Sheriff's Office. He currently serves as a patrol deputy, commercial motor vehicle enforcement officer, and deputy in charge of the Marine Patrol Unit.

“I give full credit to my Lord for all that I have accomplished in this life,” he says.

Warren Geromin

Geromin completed his military service in Vietnam, then returned to his hometown, Middletown, Connecticut. He lives there to this day, employed by the US Postal Service as a maintenance supervisor for a local post office.

Gerald R. Helmich

I knew Major Helmich as “Spad 02,” piloting the A1H Skyraider that kept the enemy at bay as we departed Kate on the night of November 1, 1969. Ten days later, a two-seater Army helicopter was downed about sixty miles west of Dong Hoi, North Vietnam, near the border with Laos. An Air Force Jolly Green Giant CH-53 helicopter was sent to rescue the Army pilots. While the first was rescued, one of two escorting F-4 Phantoms was shot
down by 37 mm anti-aircraft fire. Due to bad weather and poor visibility, the search-and-rescue mission was suspended until the next day. On November 12, the CH-53 returned to the area to find the crew of the Phantom and to rescue the other Army pilot. Helmich and his wingman flew cover for them. While the second Army aviator was rescued, Helmich was shot down during a low-altitude strafing pass. The crash site was never identified and Helmich remains missing in action and presumed dead. He was 38 years old and his home of record was Manchester, New Hampshire.

Kenn Hopkins

Hopkins was sedated for medevac, but it was several hours before we could get him out. “Next thing I remember,” he says, “I'm outside and a medevac is coming. We're going over [Ambush Hill] and I say, ‘Don't go over on this side because they have a .50-caliber over there.'”

When he got to Ban Me Thuot, a doctor examined him. “He asked me if I was okay, and I said, ‘Sure, I'm fine.' Then some officers came in and debriefed me. I told them what I knew, what we were up against, and why I was there. Then the guilt started, because I left those guys out there,” Hopkins says.

The next day he heard that Kate had been evacuated at night. He was returned to Charlie Battery's temporary home in BMT. “When the LZ Kate crew came in, I was deathly afraid that these guys were going to whale on me for leaving them,” Hopkins says. “But not at all. They said, ‘Where'd you go, Kenn? What happened? You wouldn't believe what we went through.'

“And then they talked about Norton. One of the guys told me that as they were leaving the LZ, somebody hit a trip flare [and] everybody froze. Once the flare died down they started up and Norton said something like, ‘God, I left something. I have to go up and get it!'”

Hopkins does not recall who told him that.

His reentry to civilian life was rough. “When I came home, the reaction I received at the airport and the looks that I received from my friends were not supportive. I felt that I had changed, and I was a more complete person. Therefore, I changed my name to Kenn. I liked that four-letter word over
the other four-letter words my ‘friends' and other people called me. I stayed home for only a few months; then I ran away to Europe for four months to settle down somewhat and unwind. I just could not relate to anyone here, and by the time I returned from Europe, I no longer associated with my ‘friends' but made new ones. The old friends wanted Ken back but Ken no longer existed. Kenn was now in charge.”

Hopkins earned a university degree in math, worked for a time as a gardener, and now works as a software engineer for a defense contractor. After a lapse of several years, he returned to surfing. He lives in Chula Vista, California, where he grew up.

Bob Johnson

“Christmas, 1969, was a very long day for me,” Johnson recalls. “I awakened at a transit camp in Vietnam, was bused to the airport and flew across the International Dateline en route to McChord Air Force Base, Washington. At Fort Lewis, right next door, I was discharged from active duty and took yet another bus to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. I flew military standby to New York; Christmas ended somewhere over the Midwest. I took a shuttle from JFK Airport to Grand Central Station, where I boarded an Amtrak train to Providence, Rhode Island. My mother picked me up at the train station.”

Three days later he returned to his job at the Equitable Life Assurance Society in midtown Manhattan. The following summer he began dating a girl in his office. They married the next summer. In 1971, he took a new job at North American Reassurance Company's Manhattan headquarters. The following year he became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and worked in reinsurance operations until taking early retirement in 1993. He now serves as a consultant for reinsurance companies.