Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (4 page)

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FOR
both political and military reasons, South Vietnam's forty-four provinces were grouped into four geographic districts, called Corps, and numbered north to south. II Corps, commanded by an ARVN general, was headquartered in Pleiku City and covered thirteen provinces, from Kontum in the northwest and Binh Dinh in the northeast to Quang Duc, Lam Dong, and Binh Thuan Provinces in the south—the largest Corps in geographic area.

US, ARVN, and Allied military units within II Corps, including two Republic of Korea infantry divisions, were under the operational control of I Field Force Vietnam, a US Army headquarters then commanded by Lieutenant General Charles A. Corcoran. (Corcoran wore another hat: He was the MACV assistant chief of staff for operations.) In size, military components, and organization, it was much like a larger US Army corps—several infantry divisions with supporting units—but designated a “field force” to avoid confusion with South Vietnam's nationwide military-political corps system. Unlike a corps headquarters, however, IFFV had more than a purely tactical function. Its responsibilities also included logistics, running pacification efforts in rural areas, and providing advisers to the ARVN and other South Vietnamese government organizations.

In late September 1969, the G2 (intelligence) staff at IFFV headquarters in Nha Trang—before the war a sleepy resort town with gorgeous white-sand beaches and more than its share of equally lovely women—began to assemble the jigsaw puzzle that is tactical and strategic military intelligence.

G2's puzzle pieces were diverse. In that era before spy satellites were flexible and reliable, ELINT (electronic intelligence, e.g., monitoring enemy radio and radar emissions) was developed from data captured by the NSA, and by Army Security Agency monitoring units; aerial reconnaissance data came from Air Force sources, including high-flying U-2 spy planes, EC-47s—converted WW II–era cargo aircraft jammed with
state-of-the-art electronics—and Army OV-1 Mohawks, Grumman's small twin-engine turbo prop surveillance platform, equipped with side-looking radar or infrared cameras. Mohawks flew in the dark, often at treetop level, popping infrared flashbulbs and snapping large-format images that captured the heat from campfires, engine exhaust, or groups of men. Other Mohawks flew between hills, their radar looking for anomalies in ground cover or movement where none should be.

But the terrain along both sides of the Cambodian and Laotian borders was made for concealment. Thick jungle covered steep hillsides and watercourses. Ground fog and heavy rain often obscured visibility. A U-2 at 60,000 feet is all but blind over these jungles. The EC-47's sensitive electronics could detect the radio-frequency energy produced by a spark plug from miles distant—but not with rain absorbing that energy before it reached the aircraft. And while the OV-1 was designed to fly at very low altitudes, few pilots could fly daily nap-of-the earth missions through monsoon rains and live to tell about it.

US Army aviation units also deployed the tiny but safer O-1 Bird Dog, a single-engine Cessna designed for spotting artillery, and helicopters for tactical patrolling.

July through September, however, is monsoon season in the Central Highlands—not the sort of weather that lends itself to aerial reconnaissance. In that era, the military's most sophisticated snooping gear was of little value while heavy rains drenched the highlands nonstop for upwards of a week at a time. Wind-driven torrents wash out roads and bridges, trigger landslides, drive rivers over their banks, turn the ground into an impassable quagmire, and cover the mountains with low, thick clouds.

Nevertheless, tough, motivated, and well-trained infantry can function even in such conditions. Thus, even before American combat troops arrived, the North Vietnamese had used this season to move men and equipment down the long network of trails and roads they'd established in Laos and Cambodia—the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail. Every October since 1965, when the skies cleared, they launched a new offensive.

As the rains faded in mid-October 1969, I Field Force aviation launched aerial surveillance, including a small helicopter fleet equipped with
ungainly sensor arrays designed to detect ammonia in air flowing through a scoop beneath the fuselage.

Ammonia is a mammalian waste product, found in sweat, feces, and urine.

These sensors were unreliable—a high reading might indicate a troop concentration—but might as well be elephant dung, tiger, bear, a monkey troop, a previously unknown Montagnard village, or nothing at all. Sniffer sorties over thick, trackless jungle with an uncooperative population were usually only a bit better than nothing at all.

Based in BMT, the 155th Assault Helicopter Company began flying sniffer missions along the border and found data suggesting either several previously unsuspected monkey troops and elephant herds, or a tremendous upsurge in enemy activity in the areas around Bu Prang and Duc Lap.

By late October, intelligence had further indications of large troop movements along the Cambodian border north of Bu Prang. Mike Force units patrolling the border confirmed reports from “special agents”—local people paid to keep their eyes open and share what they saw with CIA or Military Intelligence agents—of a buildup of regimental-size units in Cambodian sanctuaries just across the border. On about October 22, the PAVN 66th and 28th Infantry Regiments, supported by elements of the 40th Artillery Regiment and the K-394 Artillery Battalion, whose 37 mm anti-aircraft guns were a new addition to the PAVN arsenal in South Vietnam, crossed the border and melted into the jungles north of Bu Prang and south of Duc Lap.

The PAVN 66th was a familiar foe that had earned our respect. In August 1965, the 66th had slipped out of its base in coastal Thanh Hoa, about a hundred miles south of Hanoi. With some 1,600 men in its headquarters and component infantry battalions, the 7th, 8th, and 9th, the regiment made a grueling, three-month, 500-mile march across the width of North Vietnam, then turned south through Laos and Cambodia to a fateful encounter with elements of the First US Air Cavalry Division at LZs X-Ray and Albany in the valley of the Drang River.

This bloody clash, the Battle of Ia Drang, was the first large encounter between the regular armies of North Vietnam and the United States. Both
sides paid dearly in blood: 241 Americans killed or missing, and 258 wounded, while the 66th lost upwards of three-fourths of its men, about half dead and half wounded.

The regiment withdrew into Cambodia to rest and replenish its ranks with replacements from the stream of PAVN troops flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Almost a year later, back at full strength, the 66th joined the PAVN 32nd, 24th, and 174th regiments in a months-long campaign on the massive hills south and southeast of Dak To. Opposed by elements of the US 173rd Airborne, 1st Cavalry and 4th Infantry divisions, and by the ARVN's elite First Airborne Division, the 66th engaged in some of the hardest-fought and deadliest battles of the war. Battered and bloodied, it again retreated to its Cambodian sanctuary.

The 66th returned to combat in January 1968 with a night attack on Khe Sanh village in northern Quang Tri Province, a settlement defended by a South Vietnamese Regional Force company—lightly armed infantry—and a US Marine rifle company. The Allied forces held their position until first light, when they called in air strikes and artillery from the big Marine combat base nearby. Relentless, the 66th continued the attack through the day and into the next night. The Marines and the RF withdrew after daylight on January 22. This pyrrhic victory cost the 66th Regiment 154 killed and 496 wounded; again it retreated into Cambodia to replenish its ranks and train for battle. By October 1969, the 66th was again combat ready and headed for Bu Prang.

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BU
Prang and Duc Lap were each defended by an “A” Team and CIDG forces; the team at Duc Lap was A-239. To IFFV intelligence officers at Nha Trang, and to the Green Berets of these “A” Teams, however, it was plain that their camps and garrisons were merely nuisances, obstacles to be removed en route to the main objective, the garrison city and provincial capital, Buon Ma Thuot.

Home of the well-regarded 23rd ARVN Division and internationally famous for a hunting lodge built by Theodore Roosevelt, BMT had two airports and straddled a strategic crossroads. A good road led east to a still
better one, the coast highway that runs southward to Saigon and northward to Hue, Vietnam's ancient imperial capital, just below the fortified 17th Parallel dividing North and South Vietnam.

The other highway past BMT ran south to Saigon and north through Kontum to Da Nang. Taking BMT would allow the PAVN to funnel large forces with tanks and heavy artillery into the heart of South Vietnam. If they could seize that prize, it might panic the 23rd Division and BMT's civilian population. That would hasten the disintegration of ARVN defenses and its certain and rapid capitulation.
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But in October 1969, before the NVA could attack BMT, they had to get through us: the Green Berets and our CIDG forces at Bu Prang and Duc Lap.

“We advanced down a gradual descent . . . with the batteries vomiting forth upon us shells and shot, round and grape, with one battery on our right flank and another on the left, and all the intermediate ground covered with the Russian riflemen; so that when we came to within . . . fifty yards from the mouths of the artillery . . . we were, in fact, surrounded and encircled by a blaze of fire. . . .

“I think that every man who was engaged in that disastrous affair at Balaklava, and who was fortunate enough to come out of it alive, must feel that it was only by a merciful decree of Almighty Providence that he escaped from the greatest apparent certainty of death which could possibly be conceived.”

—Major General, the Earl of Cardigan

I
nfantry proudly styles itself Queen of Battle. Like the queen on a chessboard, but with more firepower, infantry goes anywhere: frozen mountains, steaming equatorial swamps, forests, jungles, deserts, plains, tundras, savannahs—to almost any terrain and under virtually any condition on earth. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, however, the Queen of Battle has relied upon support from the King: artillery.

Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, the Chinese invented gunpowder, which led them to rockets and then artillery. Starting in the twelfth century with bamboo barrels, then graduating to bronze, iron, and steel, steadily achieving greater accuracy at longer ranges, artillery became infantry's best friend and most feared foe. By the American War Between the States, advances in metallurgy, chemistry, and manufacturing made possible the development of large-caliber guns with rifled barrels. Hurling time-fused shells that burst into deadly shrapnel, field artillery accompanied infantry on the front lines and was employed with deadly effect.

But not until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 did artillery achieve its modern form and assume its present role in warfare. German engineers
built enormous guns that could lob explosive death up to 75 miles. Though lacking in accuracy, these guns introduced the concept of indirect fire.

On the other side of the lines, the French developed the first modern field gun. First deployed in 1870 and steadily improved for decades, the French 75, towed by horses or by a motorized vehicle, went into service with a range of about five miles (8 kilometers); over time that increased to almost eight miles (12.9 kilometers). The gun's rifled barrel imparted a spin to projectiles that enhanced their accuracy. A hydro-pneumatic mechanism absorbed the recoil of firing over a two-second cycle; this kept the gun trails and wheels locked and unmoving during the firing sequence and enabled subsequent shots without reaiming. Unlocking the loading door at the rear of the gun ejected the spent brass cartridge. A fresh cartridge containing bags of gunpowder and affixed to a projectile was thrust into the breech, the door locked and the gun ready to fire again in as little as two seconds—faster than bolt-action rifles of that era.

Along with breakthroughs in battlefield communications, the French 75, and other guns based on its design, changed the way artillery was used. No longer did the big guns deploy alongside infantry. Towed behind trucks or mounted on an armored, self-propelled chassis, artillery took up positions miles to the rear and fired over the heads of friendly troops. Forward observers on the ground or aloft in balloons fed target information to the guns over telephone lines or, later, by wireless.

Cannon with a variety of barrels were developed. Long barrels hurled huge shells over enormous ranges. Equipped with shorter barrels and consequently possessing a lower center of gravity, howitzers could raise their tubes to almost vertical, allowing them to be sited on a reverse slope to fire on high trajectories that soared over a ridge or summit to find targets in defiladed valleys. For centuries employed as heavy siege weapons, mortars became small and light enough to be carried into battle by infantry.

In the US Army, artillery assumed new roles. Artillery battalions were integrated into infantry divisions to provide direct support to ground troops. Because the demands of a fully engaged division exceed the capabilities of these battalions, additional artillery units, often with heavier guns capable of firing at greater ranges, were placed under the control of
higher headquarters, such as the corps and field army. These guns were to provide “general support,” and responded to fire missions from any unit within their range and geographical area of responsibility.

Now removed miles from the front lines, unable to see their targets and firing projectiles weighing hundreds of pounds, cannoneers relied upon the discipline of ballistics. By World War II, it was no longer enough to know merely the range and direction to a target. After selecting the most effective trajectory, fire direction specialists could also calculate the time of the projectile's flight; the effects of barometric pressure and air temperature at firing elevations; the speed, altitude, and direction of winds aloft; the difference between magnetic north and north as indicated on firing maps (“magnetic declination”); and, at longer ranges, even the rotation of Earth.

Accomplished with speed and precision, such calculations allowed artillery to fire over great distances with impressive accuracy. Such computations, however, demanded individuals with the aptitude and training for complex mathematics. While gun crews remained the domain of brawny men capable of manhandling heavy projectiles and guns, artillery officers were selected for their mathematical acumen no less than for their leadership qualities.

Which was why in 1968, when tall, thin, calmly intense John Kerr graduated from the University of Iowa at age 22 with a degree in mathematics and a shavetail ROTC commission, he chose to become an artillery officer. “For my senior year, our professor of military science was a field artillery officer,” Kerr recalls. “I liked him, and I liked math, and when he explained that ballistics is based on differential equations and calculus, I wanted to serve in the artillery, instead of some other branch.”

Kerr spent his first year in uniform learning about field guns and troops at hot, dusty Fort Hood, Texas. After a promotion to first lieutenant, he received orders for Vietnam, where he was assigned to Charlie Battery, 1st Battalion, 92nd Artillery.

Charlie Battery 1/92 was the designated II Corps “swing battery” and boasted the region's only airmobile 155 mm howitzers. From the worm's-eye perspective of tall, rangy Kenn Hopkins, 21, a Charlie Battery ammunition handler and surfer out of Chula Vista, California, things appeared
somewhat different. “Charlie Battery was an experiment,” he says. “They'd send us out during the monsoon to see if we could last without helicopter support. They sent us to a place like Kate, stuck us next to an NVA training camp a couple clicks away from what we were told was Cambodia.”

Hopkins had a certain perspective on this: Although he was young and very junior in rank, he'd been in-country since March of that year, and had served on several firebases that were involved in almost constant fighting. “At Ben Het, we were getting anywhere from 200 to 300 rounds a day of incoming—mortars, rockets, and artillery,” he recalls. “And lots of small-arms fire.”

At one firebase, he says, many Montagnard infantrymen were accompanied by their older children. “Ben was 12, Mo was 14, and the rest of the kids were 13. We got hit one night, and we gave our M60 [light machine gun] to Mo,” he recounts. “A flare went off and I saw Mo down there with the M60! I called to him. He turned around with a big shit-eating grin on his face, and then he turned back and
brrrrrrrrrap!
He was firing that gun John Wayne–style, this 14-year-old kid, doing this stuff. Just phenomenal.”

Hopkins arrived on Firebase Kate on September 13, 1969, just about the time that I was assigned to Bu Prang. His platoon's two 155 mm howitzers—six tons each!—were sling-loaded, one at a time, beneath a behemoth CH-54 Sikorsky Flying Crane. The troops were delivered in big-bellied CH-47 Chinooks. The rest of their field gear, along with such construction materials as pierced steel planking, railroad ties, plywood, and fasteners, was packed into big cargo nets and slung beneath a Chinook to be delivered to this steep, football-shaped hilltop, elevation 910 meters, less than two miles from Cambodia. With the guns came a Charlie Battery fire direction team.

In charge of Kate's guns was First Lieutenant Mike Smith, 25, Charlie Battery's executive officer. (Unlike the infantry, where the XO is largely an administrative job, an artillery XO takes charge of the guns.) Handsome, very short, and wiry, Smith grew up on a ranch outside Muleshoe, Texas, about twenty miles southeast of Clovis, New Mexico, and fifty miles northwest of Lubbock, Texas.

In 1964, he was working as a Lubbock hospital orderly and getting
tired of Texas. He planned to strap on his hog and head for California. “I was pretty much a ne'er-do-well motorcyclist, Harley-Davidson type,” he recalls.

At the hospital he met Elizabeth Clark, 21, a nursing student and the daughter of a Southern Pacific Railroad employee. She was from Sanderson, Texas, on the northern edge of the Rio Grande Valley. “A week before she graduated, she asked me to a dance at the nursing school,” Smith recalls. “I never went to California.”

A few months later, Smith's mother signed a consent form allowing the State of Texas to let 20-year-old Mike marry Elizabeth. Two years later, they decided to escape the heat and monotonous flatness of West Texas and move to the cool, green, rumpled landscape near Fort Collins, Colorado. Elizabeth found a hospital job as a registered nurse; Mike took veterinary classes and worked as an emergency room orderly. Life was good. “We lived in a little cabin, paid $60 a month rent, had a pickup and a dog, had each other, a fireplace, and we were living in the Colorado mountains—a heck of a time!”

Then came 1967. American soldiers were dying in Vietnam by the thousands, and Mike's friends began receiving draft notices. “I got wind that the draft was getting worse,” he says. “I called the Muleshoe draft board to see where I stood, and they said, ‘You're about number four on the list, and we need five people.'”

Mike had a friend in Oklahoma, an Army lieutenant, who opined that if Mike wound up going to Vietnam, he'd “want to be an officer because you'll get more money and life is a little better than it is as an enlisted man.”

So Mike found the Fort Collins Army recruiter. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, if you sign up, I guarantee you'll go to OCS. If you don't sign up—well, they hate draftees and you'll never get to OCS.'”

Smith took basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, then went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for training in artillery, and then OCS. “But while I was in [artillery school], they changed the rules,” he says. “You had to have two years of college to go to OCS, and I had only a smattering.”

It looked like he was headed for a firing battery. But Smith had learned
to type in high school, a highly valued skill in the Army. He became a battery clerk. “I wound up with a helluva job, inside, no heavy lifting. The first sergeant was death on errors, didn't allow any at all, but he made a damn good clerk out of me. So I did that for several months,” he continues. “Then, I guess, a bunch of guys got killed in 'Nam, and they needed more officers, and they took that college restriction out, and six months later I bounced out of OCS as a second looey. I spent some time training cannon cockers, which was enjoyable; by and large I enjoyed my military experience. And then I was sent to Vietnam.”

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SHARING
space on Kate with Charlie 1/92's men and guns was a 105 mm howitzer section from Charlie Battery, 5th Battalion, 27th Arty—half a dozen men ramrodded by a burly sergeant in his mid-twenties named Houghtaling.

Protecting Kate's artillerymen from ground attack was a CIDG company of about 100 Montagnards from Special Forces Team A-233 at Trang Phuoc (also, for obscure reasons, known as Ban Don). CIDG units were nominally under the command and control of ARVN Special Forces; an ARVN officer therefore commanded Bu Prang's CIDG forces, and the yellow-and-red-striped flag of the Republic of Vietnam flew over the camp, as it did over every Special Forces camp in Vietnam.

In practice, however, ARVN Special Forces officers rarely accompanied CIDG troops into potentially hazardous places or situations. I could never decide whether the ARVN officers were more afraid of their Montagnards, or of the North Vietnamese. Either way, I never saw an ARVN officer on Kate or with a CIDG patrol out of Bu Prang. To be fair, however, I must say that when I later served in a Mike Force unit, a few ARVN Special Forces officers operated with us in the field.

Lacking ARVN boots on the ground, on Kate and other firebases protected by CIDG units, the US Army Special Forces, although officially mere advisers, exercised control of Montagnard CIDG troops through the power of our Army-implanted charisma: They obeyed our orders, but only because they chose to do so.

In mid-September, as the artillerymen began building Kate, they were defended by a hundred-man CIDG company led by Captain Lucian “Luke” Barham, commander of Team A-234 at An Lac, and Staff Sergeant Santiago Arbizo, a demolitions specialist from A-233 at Ban Don.

Forrest Scott, 22, a Georgia native with a Gumpian accent to match, graduated from an Atlanta trade school with a certificate as a sheet metal mechanic in 1967 and was drafted the following year. He joined Charlie Battery as a fledgling gun bunny in January 1969, when the entire battery was at beleaguered Firebase Swinger, fifteen clicks west of Ben Het. “We were there for about 97 days and took incoming rounds continuously for 87 or 88 days,” he recalls.

And that was the easy part. “When we got there, the North Vietnamese were on the hill and we shot and killed them, drove them off before our infantry got there. And then we set up and got the guns going, built the fire pit, the ammo pits, and dug our underground two-man hooches,” he says matter-of-factly, in the manner that only combat veterans and homicide detectives use to tell a story. “[The firebase] was near Mile-High Hill, so they called our hill
Half-
Mile Hill. It was real steep on all sides except one, and that was kind of a semigrade that they used to shield the choppers to keep the enemy from knocking them out of the air when they came in. But that was Charlie Company, and all of those guys were accustomed to that.”

Scott and the rest of Mike Smith's cannoneers were already digging and filling sandbags on Kate when their infantry defenders arrived. Alighting from helicopters, the Montagnards discovered termite mounds concealed in the high grass. As the Americans watched in amazement, they began kicking in the mounds and grabbing up as many insects as they could cram into their mouths, swallowing their surprise feast with great gusto down to the last crawler.