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

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

  I did not want Armor. No steel coffin for me! Bob had made it clear that the action was in the infantry. But by then, I’d been in uniform long enough to know better than to argue with a drill instructor. Or to voice an unsolicited opinion.

  Following the eight-week basic course, where I learned the rudiments of soldiering—how to march, how to wear the uniform, how to care for and shoot a rifle, how to throw a hand grenade, make proper use of a gas mask, live in the field while practicing good hygiene, use a map and a compass and, most of all, get into good physical shape, I was shipped to Fort Knox for a two-week leadership preparation school. Then I started the eight-week Advanced Individual Training Course in Armor.

  In February 1967, as I approached the midpoint in my Armor training, those of us bound for OCS were called together to hear that the Fort Knox program was at maximum capacity. We would attend Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  I was the only one who cheered this news.

  I arrived at Fort Benning in March 1967. Now that I’d been in the Army for a few months and had begun to grasp the width and depth of the chasm that separates the enlisted ranks, including even the oldest, most experienced noncoms, from the rarefied peaks inhabited by commissioned officers—now that I realized that pinning on the gold bar of a second lieutenant brought not only freedoms and privileges unimaginable to a lowly private but also enormous, life-or-death responsibilities—the notion of becoming an officer at the tender age of 19 was more difficult to comprehend than ever. Each successive day made me more apprehensive: I’d grown up being told by my parents and teachers that I would never amount to anything. That I wasn’t smart enough or enterprising enough or reliable enough to be entrusted with serious responsibility. If I managed, somehow, to get through OCS and become an infantry platoon leader, I would be responsible for the lives of about forty men, most of them my elders. I knew that I wasn’t capable of that. I was almost certain that I lacked what becoming a leader of men in combat would require of me.

  My first day as an officer candidate in 84th Company did nothing to bolster my self-confidence. Standing in ranks in the company street, we heard my company commander issue a challenge: “Look to your left. Look to your right. Get a good look at those men, remember their faces, because chances are they won’t be here on graduation day.”

  Much later in my life I would learn that this is much the same challenge laid down by generations of professors to each new class of law and medical students—to say nothing of the three service academy plebe classes.

  At that moment, however, I was certain that my CO was talking directly to me.

  Over the decades since that day at Fort Benning, I have learned that the US Army has long operated under the doctrine that leaders are made, not born. While not every soldier has the capability to learn and apply leadership skills, the Army has devoted enormous resources to finding the best and most efficient ways to train leaders at every echelon, from squad and fire team leaders to the very senior officers who serve in the Army’s highest commands. Over the last century, the Pentagon has often contracted with academia, both public and private educational institutions, to construct and supervise hundreds of long-running experiments involving tens of thousands of soldiers, all aimed at finding the keys to motivating men to lead others, and then quickly and efficiently training them in the requisite skill sets. Thus it has acquired a vast reservoir of experience in identifying and nurturing those with leadership potential.

  So even if I didn’t think that I had what it would take to learn military leadership skills, even if I felt that I lacked the gumption, fortitude, confidence, and ineffable je ne sais quoi required to inspire respect, to direct men’s actions under the most urgent, trying, and hazardous conditions, the Army was pretty sure that I did, because even before Fort Benning, it had made an investment in me, had evaluated me many times.

  The Army selection mechanism can make mistakes about a particular individual’s leadership potential and personal integrity, especially in wartime. Consider, for example, the officers responsible for the 1968 My Lai massacre. But usually the Army knows exactly what it’s doing when it selects a man for officer training.

  The Army began to envision Officer Candidate Schools in 1938; to meet the threat of rising militarism in Japan and Germany, the Pentagon planned to draft millions of recruits. They would need officers to lead them, and the US Military Academy and university ROTC programs around the country would not be able to meet the demand. In 1941, the Army Signal Corps launched the first OCS program, and the Infantry followed suit almost immediately. By eliminating the field training segment of its 13-week curriculum, Infantry OCS beat Signal Corps OCS and graduated the first batch of OCS-trained second lieutenants. Eighty percent of them died in World War II.

  In my time, OCS was a grueling 23-week course structured to operate with a high attrition rate, to weed out the weak and unmotivated before they were in a position to endanger the lives of their men. Our curriculum had two categories:

  General subjects were mostly taught in the classroom and included leadership; communications; airborne-, airmobile-, artillery-, joint-command, and Air Force operations; combined staff subjects; equipment; serviceability; and unit readiness.

  Critical subjects were taught in the field or on the range, and mastering all of them was considered vital to becoming an officer. They included map and aerial photo reading, the care and employment of small arms, anti-tank missiles, mine warfare, recoilless rifles, mortars, and combined tactics for platoon and company.

  To help digest this Niagara of information, we were obliged to spend two hours a day in study hall. To graduate, we had to achieve a grade of 70 percent or better in each and every subject. This translates to a C average.

  But that was only one dimension of OCS, and for most candidates, the easiest. Added to the classroom work were field training, unremitting harassment, and physical stress. We candidates were hardened by daily physical training and constant running—we moved at double time between classes, to the mess hall and back; we ran everywhere. Infantry tactics discussed in classrooms were put into practice in the field, starting at the squad level, at all times under the intense supervision of young, fit, and tough-minded tactical officers (TACs), all of them recent OCS graduates, all looking for any reason or no reason to put pressure on individuals no less than on a squad or platoon. We got very little sleep, we were forced to eat hurriedly and without conversation, and until the last few weeks of the course we had almost no time off. The slightest slip, the most passing, momentary failure—a speck of rust in a rifle barrel, an almost microscopic thread on a uniform pocket, a bed blanket lacking the required degree of tautness—was punished instantly with push-ups or extra duty or loss of some privilege.

  OCS was not a place for men who needed peace and quiet. Many college graduates, especially those who grew up in calm homes surrounded by protective parents, found the stress and the constant in-your-face hazing insufferable.

  I grew up in no such home.

  My OCS experience began with meeting two of the finest men who have ever walked the earth, Lex Crane and Ed Baltzly—my roommates. An Irish kid from Staten Island, New York, Lex challenged me intellectually, forced me to defend my beliefs and many of my decisions. He is a truly great man, a true friend who taught me more about life than anyone else on the planet. Ed was another native New Yorker who had moved to New Rochelle. Big and tough, he’s an absolute wild man who attacked the Army, OCS, and everything else he encountered with an abundance of enthusiasm.

  With Lex’s and Ed’s support, I took to OCS like a duck to water. As a little kid, I liked baseball and football—but I loved playing Army. I loved exploring the woods above the Mississippi’s eastern bank in Black Hawk State Park, playing Army with my buddies. We’d set up L-shaped ambushes on the trails and come out with blazing cap pistols. Those were the happiest times of my childhood. But while I
always knew that someday I’d be a soldier, I never dreamed that I’d be a leader. While I was growing and learning the OCS brand of self-confidence, I began to notice that some of my classmates, men a little older than me, men mostly much smarter than me, men with a few years of college, even men with college degrees, gave up. They quit the program, gladly returning to the ranks of the common soldier.

  As their desire waned, mine intensified. I became bolder and more confident. I began to understand leadership. At the Benning School for Boys, I learned the most important leadership lesson of all, the lesson that I have carried with me always and applied to any situation of command or management: the three M’s—the Mission, the Men, and, only then, Me. The mission must be accomplished at all costs. Once it is, take care of the men who enabled you to accomplish it. Me—a distant third on the list. Once the mission was done and my men’s needs provided for, any reward or accolade that came my way could and should be accepted.

  It sounds simple, and it is; outside the military, it’s not put into practice enough. Most of the corporate or political leaders and managers that I’ve met put themselves first, then the mission—and their men are left to fend for themselves.

  When it came to OCS academics, I was astonished to learn that I actually wasn’t stupid: I graduated with a B+ grade average. The class work was challenging, but now, suddenly, I was motivated. I accepted my mediocre grades but worked hard to do better. Then came field exercises, and the realization that this was my moment. When we started the Ranger phase, long-range patrols under sometimes very severe conditions, I knew that I would make it.

  For example, at first we operated in very hot weather, and we had no water. Then it was cold and rainy. Several candidates quit during this phase. But once our squad adapted to the weather, once we learned that if we couldn’t be comfortably dry, then all wet is better than partly wet, the weather was simply an inconvenience that could be ignored. We just went with it—accepted that this was how it was just then—and let’s go! Find the enemy, complete the mission, and let the good times roll. In the end, we had a great training exercise, while the other squads, operating under the same conditions, made themselves miserable.

  As for the rest of OCS—maintaining a personal and unit spit-and-polish environment, constant marching and drill formations, parades—it wasn’t fun, but it was tolerable. As a survivor of parochial schools and corporal punishment by unbending priests and nuns, as the frequent object of my father’s fury, the constant hazing and harassment never really fazed me. The trick, I learned, was to understand that it was pretty much all a game. So I played the game. My dad could yell and scream better and louder than any TAC officer; they might get in my face, but I was sure that, unlike Dad, they wouldn’t hit me. Let’s make that I was pretty sure, but not completely.

  Later, of course, I learned that TAC officers have never been allowed to strike an officer candidate or any other soldier. It’s a very rare event when one of those bright, intense young officers fails to remember this. Their supreme gift is planting that doubt in the candidate’s mind.

  As the days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the schooling, the pressurized environment, the young officers pushing and prodding me and my classmates, awoke something in me. One day I realized that, despite my best intentions, despite the years that I had sabotaged myself by clinging to the comfort of underachievement, I had become a leader. Was I born one, or created? It doesn’t matter. Weeks before the Army made it official, I knew that I could command and that I could lead. When the shock of that realization wore off, I felt very good about myself. It had been a long time coming.

  Twenty-two days past my nineteenth birthday, on the last day of August 1967, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Army Reserve, the first in my family to become an officer.

  • • •

  A couple of weeks before graduation, our class was allowed to request individual duty assignments. Some put in for Germany, where the Army kept an enormous garrison, nearly a quarter of a million men, in support of NATO treaty obligations and its policy of containing the Soviet Union. Some asked for South Korea, where some 50,000 American soldiers and airmen remained as a counterweight to the threats of the bellicose North Korean regime. Still others were eager to go to Vietnam. Recalling brother Bob’s advice, I asked for assignment to Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  Immediately after graduation, I moved half a mile across Fort Benning’s vast cantonment and reported for Basic Parachutist School, a three-week course that included a week of ground school—training in the apparatus of military parachuting, learning how to exit an aircraft door, and to land safely while encumbered with a spare parachute, a rifle, and field gear. During Ground Week, we ran everywhere, toughening our legs for the shock of landings, and made several jumps from a 34-foot tower in a parachute harness. The fall is arrested after about ten feet by a steel cable; then we slid down the cable a hundred meters or so to an embankment, where we were caught by a couple of classmates. For week number two, Tower Week, we were dropped from a 250-foot tower under fully inflated parachutes to practice landing falls. During Jump Week, we made five parachute jumps from various types of aircraft, including a night drop. After the last, the graduation leap, I was awarded the silver wings of a parachutist.

  More than a year earlier, as a raw recruit, I had applied for Special Forces, only to learn that enlisted personnel under age twenty did not qualify. There is no restriction on officers, probably because it was and is exceedingly rare to find an officer under that age.

  Like me.

  After jump school, I reported to Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Both Lex and Ed, my OCS roommates, were also assigned. We shared a rented house in Spring Lake, just off the post, which we lovingly referred to as the ABC (Albracht, Baltzly, Crane) House.

  The Army Special Warfare Center is an elite academy. In the earliest days of America’s Vietnam adventure, when US involvement was limited to an advisory role, it minted hundreds of new Green Berets, the vast majority of them career officers and noncoms. Their previous postings reflected a peacetime Army, where promotions were slow and officers and sergeants gained valuable experience in a wide variety of staff and troop-duty assignments within their combat arm or specialty branch. With the introduction of US combat forces to Vietnam in mid-1965, Special Forces expanded exponentially and the school added faculty and facilities. Even so, by the time I headed for Bragg in September 1967, the waiting list for the Special Forces Officers’ Course was almost a year long.

  I got lucky. For reasons unknown, perhaps a death, a serious injury, an extended illness, a family emergency—I never learned why—a slot had opened in the next starting class of the three-month course. If I could start the following Monday, the slot was mine.

  How could I say no to that?

  Lex and Ed had enjoyed a few days’ leave before reporting to the Special Warfare School. They spent months in Special Forces units getting on-the-job training—but never cracked the school waiting list before they were assigned overseas.

  OCS was a demanding and ultimately satisfying undergraduate program that taught me how to use the contents of the small-unit leader’s tool-box: the weapons and tactics of an infantry leader. The Special Forces Officers’ Course taught me how to think outside that toolbox. It was like skipping past the master’s curriculum and jumping directly into a doctoral program. It was physically demanding, of course, but I was fresh from OCS and jump school and in the best shape of my entire life.

  The skull work, however, included short, intensive, college-level courses. For some reason, I did very well in those that presented theoretical concepts, while technical subjects emerged as a formidable challenge. My classmates were mostly college graduates who had long ago mastered subjects that I only dimly understood. For example, I was hardly ready for the application of algebra and geometry to such ordinary Special Forces tasks as s
etting up an aircraft resupply mission: The resupply aircraft is flying north at X knots, the wind is blowing at Y knots from the southeast, the supply bundles will be kicked out at altitude R, each weighs Z, and they fall at rate of speed Q. So how big should I make my drop zone?

  And I had barely graduated from Alleman! Because I did poorly in tech classes, when we went to the field, instructors gave me the hardest practical exercises—and I shined at them. The extra points I earned helped my overall grade average, and that, probably, was the only reason I got through this exceedingly tough school.

  I was the only student just out of OCS. Most of my classmates had served a year or more in various infantry units, and very few, if any, lacked at least some exposure to post-secondary education. But time in a college classroom doesn’t always prepare an officer for the challenges of high-risk, high-stress, unconventional warfare. I recall a particular lieutenant who was brilliant in class but could not operate in the field. He was reassigned to the 82nd Airborne a few days before he would have graduated.

  By then I had realized that Special Forces was where I wanted to be as long as I was in uniform. There was nothing about it that I didn’t like. I’d found a home—a real home with brothers for whom I would die.

  As graduation day approached, I was again given the opportunity to state my preference for a duty assignment. As every good Green Beret officer would, I put in for Vietnam. Bob was there with Fifth Special Forces, but I didn’t think it mattered.

  I know now that it may have. Since the death of the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, when the light cruiser USS Juneau was sunk during World War II, every branch of the US armed forces has shown extreme reluctance in assigning siblings to the same wartime combat unit, although there is no regulation on this subject for officers. More likely, if Bob’s presence in Fifth Special Forces was noted against my desire to join him, it was because he was a noncom and I was a commissioned officer. If we were in the same unit, and he disagreed with one of my decisions, what would happen? Some savvy officer in Special Forces Personnel might have wanted to avoid even the possibility that an awkward situation might arise.