by Albracht, William; Wolf, Marvin; Galloway, Joseph L. (FRW)
After sunset, the wind died. A cloak of darkest cobalt settled over our battered hilltop. Soon it was quiet enough to hear the faint clank of metal meeting earth—the sound of men digging in the surrounding ravines. For an instant, my blood ran cold.
On guard near the north end, Nelson Koon and PFC Dennis Nadine, a powder man, “heard the enemy cutting down trees in the darkness, apparently to reinforce their positions,” Koon recalls. “It was eerie.”
The digging noises continued until the faint drone of twin Wright Cyclone engines was heard from high above. Shadow 51, an AC-119G gunship, descended from the clouds and began a slow, counterclockwise orbit; within minutes, from somewhere to our north, green tracers spouted from a PAVN 12.7 mm, searching the sky for Shadow. Shadow 51 responded with a fountain of red tracers, painting the hillside where the greenies had issued. The nightly fireworks show was on.
“And when he gets to heaven,
To Saint Peter he will tell;
One more Marine reporting sir,
I’ve served my time in hell.”
—Marine grave inscription on Guadalcanal, 1942
EIGHT
By the time US combat troops were committed to Vietnam in 1965, the Viet Cong had perfected a battlefield tactic that allowed them, at a time of their choosing, to overcome ARVN’s overall superiority in numbers and firepower, and thereby to inflict many casualties. The grift went like this: A battalion-size force—about 500 men—would infiltrate an area over a few days, quietly dig in, and then lay siege to some small ARVN or US Special Forces post. First they’d bombard it with rockets, recoilless rifles, and mortars, and then they’d maneuver a small force close enough to trade small-arms fire with the outpost, with the objective of forcing the defenders to expend their ammunition. Usually, the VC were capable of capturing this outpost at any time—but that wasn’t the game. Instead, they punished it, killing as many of its defenders as possible, and meanwhile shooting at low-flying aircraft and helicopters that were bringing in supplies and reinforcements, or evacuating the wounded.
The VC objective was to draw a relief column. When the situation at the besieged camp reached the crisis point, the ARVN usually dispatched a modest force, perhaps a company or two, by road. This relief column would be ambushed by a second and larger Viet Cong force. If a second relief column was dispatched, then it too would be ambushed. Thus ARVN commanders were lured into committing their forces piecemeal, allowing the enemy to kill and wound far more soldiers than if they had attacked a larger force. That accomplished, the enemy either melted back into the jungles, swamps, or mountains, or they joined with previously positioned reinforcements to mount an attack on the now diminished parent unit of the relief force. In this fashion, from time to time they were able to take over provincial capital cities, hold them long enough to inflict still more ARVN casualties, then slip away to fight another day. The strategy was to wear down as many ARVN units as possible while fostering the notion that eventually the ARVN would fold. When the PAVN entered the picture, they took over this game.
By 1965, even the dimmest ARVN commander had to know this con well enough to beat it—but no. They continued to piecemeal their forces into meat-grinder ambushes. Some ARVN commanders refused to send any relief force at all, because they feared inviting an attack on their own location.
Thus it was that almost exactly four years before I arrived on Kate, in October 1965, a regiment-size PAVN force besieged the Plei Me Special Forces camp forty kilometers south of Pleiku. This triangular-shaped jungle fort was defended by an “A” Team and a CIDG battalion. PAVN pounded the camp with mortars and rockets, ringed the hills around it with 12.7 mm anti-aircraft guns, and, after shooting down two Air Force attack planes and an Army Huey, effectively shut down the airspace. An elite Delta Force team under Major (later Colonel) Charles Beckwith made their way into the camp and for a time held off the attackers, though at the cost of many American and Montagnard lives. When the situation again grew dire, the ARVN II Corps commander, Major General Vinh Loc—a cousin of Báo Dai, Vietnam’s effete emperor-in-exile—ordered a reinforced company to take the road south from his headquarters in Pleiku and rescue or reinforce Plei Me.
This was, of course, exactly what the PAVN commander wanted and expected. Major General Harry Kinnard, West Point Class of 1939, commanded the First Air Cavalry Division at An Khe, about forty miles east of Pleiku. Kinnard held no royal pedigree—although he had been knighted by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands—but in 1944 he’d jumped into Normandy in command of an airborne infantry battalion. Before deploying to Vietnam, Kinnard had read ARVN advisers’ after-action reports and boned up on Viet Cong tactics. To head off Vinh Loc’s stupidity, he flew to Nha Trang to ask Lieutenant General Stanley “Swede” Larson, commander of Task Force Alpha (later renamed I Field Force Vietnam), to intercede with Vinh Loc. Vinh Loc apparently understood that PAVN was running a scam and that he was the pigeon—but nevertheless feared that Pleiku would be imperiled if he risked the two battalions that might be required to effectively break the siege of Plei Me. So Kinnard offered to move two battalions of his cavalrymen to Pleiku to guarantee that city’s safety. He also offered the ARVN relief convoy artillery and air support from First Cav assets, which included four artillery battalions and hundreds of helicopters.3
At Kinnard’s urging, Vinh Loc dispatched a heavily armored ARVN convoy, including tanks, personnel carriers, field artillery, and two infantry battalions, to rescue and evacuate Plei Me. These troops fought their way to Plei Me and overcame a first ambush twenty miles south of Pleiku and a second, much larger one only four miles from Plei Me. Supported by the Air Cav’s aerial rocket artillery, the rescue force turned the tables on PAVN by beating back both ambushes with minimal casualties.
I mention this here because, four years later—just before I went to Kate—something much like what had been used to relieve Plei Me had been ginned up in anticipation of a PAVN attack on Bu Prang: Major General Donn R. Pepke, commanding the US Fourth Infantry Division based at Pleiku, created Task Force Fighter, a battalion-size force composed of an air cavalry troop, a ground cavalry troop, and an infantry company, along with command and control elements and logistical support. He positioned Fighter at BMT’s larger airfield. “Task Force Fighter was to serve as the command and control element of two [Fourth Division] infantry battalions that would deploy, if required, to BMT to replace two battalions from the ARVN 23rd Infantry Division,” wrote Pepke in his after-action report. These two ARVN battalions, based at BMT, were committed to reinforce or relieve Bu Prang, as the situation required.
All units in Ban Me Thuot’s TAOR, including Bu Prang, were under control of the 23rd ARVN; a division forward command post was established at Gia Nghia.
Unlike the relief of Plei Me four years earlier, however, this deployment would be dictated not by tactical necessity but by US domestic politics. To demonstrate that Nixon’s “Vietnamization” strategy was on track, the 23rd, regarded as second only to ARVN’s First Airborne Division in combat capabilities, would be handed a tailor-made showcase to display its prowess.
At the time, I was aware that Bu Prang and its supporting firebases were under the 23rd ARVN’s operational control. But no one on Kate knew that Task Force Fighter had been created to eliminate any plausible excuses for the 23rd not taking the field against PAVN. Personally, I expected that if the Americans and their CIDG infantry on Kate needed help holding it, I would get not only air support but infantry reinforcements from the 23rd ARVN or the US 4th Infantry Division.
If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight;
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier”
NINE
One of the many things that aviators of all US military services s
hare is that, in a cockpit, the command pilot, sometimes called the aircraft commander, is the one with the most experience and demonstrated aptitude for the job, but he is not necessarily the ranking individual.
One of the things that makes Army aviation unique is that, starting with the Vietnam era, most of its pilots are warrant officers.
During World War II, before the Army Air Corps broke off to become the Air Force, a separate service with its own uniforms, force structure, and chain of command, almost all Army combat pilots were commissioned officers. After the separation into two services, the Air Force continued that custom. To this day, virtually every Air Force pilot is a commissioned officer. Likewise, except for a handful of chief warrant officers, all US Navy aviators are commissioned. During the Vietnam era, the Marine Corps employed so-called naval aviation pilots—enlisted men in the highest enlisted grade of sergeant major flying their H-34 helicopters and O-1E Bird Dogs.
After the creation of the Air Force, fleets of bombers, transport aircraft, attack planes, and fighters were shifted from the Army to the Air Force. The Army retained a relatively small number of aircraft for battlefield observation, liaison, command and control, and medical evacuation. Until the late fifties, nearly all were flown by commissioned officers. Congress limits the size of each service and fixes a ratio between its officer corps and its total manpower; during the early sixties, when the introduction of helicopters brought explosive growth to Army aviation, the decision was made to open flight training to warrant officer candidates. While a junior warrant officer earns only a little less than a junior commissioned officer with a similar length of service, they are considered specialists, not commanders. They are not trained to lead large formations of troops, plan elaborate operations involving thousands of men, or manage complex logistical problems. They are trained to fly, fight, and survive. Thus it is also cheaper and faster to train a warrant officer pilot than to mint a new second lieutenant and then teach him to fly: a warrant officer candidate completes flight school in only four months, with most of that time devoted to developing his aviator’s skill set. After graduation, most serve two years or less on active duty. This allowed the Army to put literally thousands of helicopter pilots into the air within a relatively short time without requiring congressional authority to fund an expansion of the officer corps.
The result was a flock of young, eager pilots, many still in their teens, flying a multitude of aircraft, but mostly helicopters, that supported the fighting in Vietnam. The Air Force and Navy put college graduates with a year or more of flying time in the cockpits of their multimillion-dollar jets. We had high school grads with four months of training and less than a hundred hours in the sky to jockey our helicopters, which went for $25,000 a copy, guns, radios, and paint job extra.
One of our Army pilots—a good one, but also very much a typical Army aviator—was Harold Benjamin Gay, a short, powerfully built Virginian. As a boy he was known as “Butch.” As a young adult, he chose to go by his middle name. Ben Gay grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and as his high school graduation approached, he signed up for delayed entry into the Army’s flight school program. He entered basic training in October 1967 at Fort Polk, Louisiana, then reported to Fort Wolters, Texas, for flight school. “There were about 225 in my basic class,” he recalls. “The first couple of weeks were very intense; our drill sergeants were constantly on us in an attempt to weed out people who couldn’t perform under pressure.”
Flight school began with four weeks of academics: basic military protocol, officer subjects, and such fundamentals as navigation, aircraft systems, flight theories, and tactics, students meanwhile absorbing aviation’s special vocabulary. On March 1, 1968, Gay climbed into a Hughes TH-55 Osage, a tiny, two-place helicopter with a reciprocating gasoline engine; it was the first aircraft of any type that he had set foot in. “My concern was whether I was going to pass out, throw up, or both,” he says.
With an instructor pilot at the controls, Gay took off from the main airfield and headed to a small outlying airstrip called a “stage” field. Minutes later, Ben witnessed a midair collision; both helicopters exploded. “I still remember the flaming fuel tank from one of [the helicopters] doing loops as it fell to the ground,” says Gay. “My instructor pilot called the tower and said that they needed a medevac and two body bags. He kept on going, and there wasn’t much expression or response from him, so my feeling was, Maybe this happens all the time.”
Welcome to Army aviation, Cadet Gay.
Like OCS, flight school was highly demanding on many levels. Even with a big dose of daily classroom instruction, Gay and his fellow aviation cadets were expected to solo with only ten to twelve hours of in-flight instruction. “If we couldn’t solo—take off, fly three patterns, and land safely—we were out,” he explains.
Gay pinned on aviator’s wings and warrant officer’s bars on October 21, 1968. Twelve days later he was in Vietnam, assigned to the First Aviation Brigade’s 155th AHC in BMT. The unit’s 24 troop-carrying “slick” Hueys and six Huey gunships flew in support of US, ARVN, and Allied infantry and artillery units in southern II Corps. “A typical mission was assignment to a particular commander for the day,” Gay explains. “We might take him or his XO out for a recon of an area, or bring food, water, mail, or ammunition to a firebase, or take an infantry unit to the field, or carry troops to the rear area so that they could go on R&R or sick call—what we called ‘ash and trash’ missions, which was whatever they needed us to do,” Gay explains.
[Before most Americans heated their homes with oil or gas, stoves or furnaces required periodical cleaning, which entailed removing coal or wood ash and carrying it outside for disposal. The colloquial phrase “ash and trash” refers to mundane but necessary housekeeping chores.]
“We flew every day,” Gay went on. “Probably once a week we had either a small-scale or large-scale air assault, primarily South Vietnamese soldiers. Occasionally, we worked with the [US] Fourth Infantry Division.”
Flying in the Central Highlands was challenging. The dry season brought almost talcum-fine dust that got into everything and caused severe visibility problems during landings. In the rainy season, that fine dust turned into the most icky-sticky red mud that most GIs would ever see. The region’s saving grace was daytime temperatures in the nineties, compared with triple digits at sea-level elevations.
Nevertheless, nineteen-year-old Gay took to combat flying like a salmon to the sea. “We were up in the mountains. It was absolutely gorgeous and the scenery was breathtaking,” he recalls. November in the highlands is cold at night and warm and pleasant during the day. “We built little wooden hooches and dug very large underground bunkers; our airfield was somewhat isolated, and we came under mortar or rocket attack maybe once or twice a week—not very intense, but if even round one lands, it’s enough to get your attention.”
Soon he was logging twenty-five to thirty hours a week in the air. In April 1969, Gay was transferred to the 48th AHC. He continued flying slicks; after a short time he qualified as an aircraft commander, and two months later, on the cusp of the summer rainy season, he was invited to join the unit’s gunship platoon, known by their call sign, “Jokers.” Flying a gunship is more difficult than piloting a slick, and gunship missions were of a very different and far more demanding character. For these reasons, joining the Joker platoon was by the platoon commander’s invitation only.
Soon after Gay became Joker 73, the 48th traded in their UH-1B gunships for the new UH-1C. “The Charlie model was a lot faster; it had the [bigger] L-12 engine instead of the L-11 or L-9 like the Bravo model,” Gay explains. The two airframes were much the same: the main differences were that the Charlie model had a redundant hydraulic system—if one system was hit by ground fire, the second would continue to operate—and its main rotor blades were about 50 percent wider than those on the Bravo. “This gave it a lot more maneuverability, and a lot more speed—but it also made it mo
re difficult to get into the air,” he recalls.
“Right about then is when I decided to extend,” Gay adds. “I was 20 years old, single, flying a helicopter, I’m an aircraft commander, I’m in Vietnam, I had great friends; it was a very exciting time.”
The job was not without hazard: By halfway through his first year in combat, Gay had already lost several friends. “Most of them died due to accidents, from flying in bad weather, or while flying at night—especially in the 155th,” he recalls. “There were no navigational aids like back in the US. There was no one to call who could get you on radar and direct you in. We were purely on our own up in the mountains, and with poor maps—a bad combination that took a lot of lives. We also lost some to combat.”
Gay was shot down twice. “Shot down, as in the aircraft was coming out of the sky because pieces and parts were coming off,” he explains. The first time, flying a slick southeast of BMT, he autorotated into an open field and was extracted; his aircraft was recovered. The second was a far more harrowing experience: flying a gunship, he autorotated into dense jungle near the Duc Lap Special Forces Camp. He and his crew left their ship in a tree, and evaded the enemy to reach the camp. The aircraft was lost.
One of Gay’s closest friends was Chief Warrant Officer Nolan Black, who before coming to the 48th had served with Gay in the 155th and before that was in the 101st Airborne Division. Slim, with a swimmer’s shoulders but a head shorter than most of his brother aviators, Black was 27, older than most of his peers. Born into an impoverished Missouri farm family, he narrowly survived a childhood bout with polio. After World War II, his family moved to Rockford, Illinois, then a booming manufacturing hub. While in high school, Black joined the Civil Air Patrol and became enchanted with flight. Dreaming of becoming an Air Force pilot, he earned a private pilot’s license, and came in second to another boy in a fruitless quest for a senatorial appointment to the Air Force Academy. During high school, Black became a lifeguard and pool manager at a resort hotel. There he met 17-year-old Carol Marks; after high school, she enrolled in Rockford’s Swedish American Hospital School of Nursing.
