Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262)
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If this didn’t stop soon, we would all die. Our defenses simply could not take a direct hit from that kind of artillery and survive. I called—screamed, actually—for Major Lattin to call in the fast movers to silence those guns.
He flew northwest, circling low over the Vietnam side of the international border. After a few minutes, he called back.
“Can’t do it, Hawk,” he said. “They’re on the other side of the fence.”
I got back on the radio and told Lattin in no uncertain words that I didn’t care where they were. I wanted them hit.
“The only way I can do that is if the ground commander declares a tactical emergency.”
No sooner had these words caressed my ears than I said, “I declare a tactical emergency,” in the same tone of voice that I might have used to order a cold Tiger Beer at the officers’ club.
“Roger,” returned Lattin. The next thing I knew, the fast movers were screaming eastward to bomb the bollocks out of Camp La Rolland. A week later there was a blurb in Newsweek to the effect that US Air Force planes had bombed a neutral Cambodian Army base. John Kerry mentioned it in his Winter Soldier rants. So let me set the record straight for all time: That was me. I did that. If I hadn’t, my bones, and those of everyone else on Kate, would probably be rotting in the bottom of a big ravine below Kate’s ghost.
The cross-border strike triggered formal protests of outrage from Phnom Penh and all the rest of that bull. I still chuckle when I realize that my name was probably on President Nixon’s desk the next morning, the rogue officer who had created an international incident by directing a “neutral” country to be bombed.
But as soon as that heavy incoming artillery was stopped, PAVN attacked from four sides, hundreds of enemy soldiers running, walking, or crawling up at us, firing. Thanks to Major Lattin and the fast movers he brought in, we held our hilltop. A little later, however, when I got the casualty reports and ammo status, it was clear that we were losing this battle. The next time PAVN attacked in force might be the last.
Later, as I did every night, I radioed a casualty report to Rocco at Bu Prang. When I had concluded, Rocco asked if that was it.
“One more thing,” I said, thinking about the big bag of M&M’s peanut candy that I had stashed in my rucksack. Shrapnel from the PAVN artillery had holed my rucksack and pierced the half-empty bag.
“I took a direct hit in my M&M’s,” I added, going for the laugh.
“Do you want a medevac?” he replied, concern in his voice.
“Nope. That’s it,” I said, and signed off.
Not until days later did I learn that Rocco, and the rest of our team at Bu Prang, had mistakenly understood my reference to M&M’s as code for testicles.
• • •
BETWIXT and between all my other chores, I’d been back and forth to Bu Prang on the radio and, reading between the lines, I was given to understand that there would be no help coming from the 23rd ARVN or the US 4th. The former, I am now certain, because I challenge anyone to show me ten ARVN officers who would have given a rabid rodent’s rectum for the life of one Montagnard, let alone a hundred or so who knew how to fight and didn’t much care for their kind either. The latter, I am now equally certain, because the Pentagon was crooning “Vietnamization,” music by Richard M. Nixon, lyrics by Department of the Army, arrangement by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
In plain English, the Fifth Special Forces request for assistance from the ARVN high command had been met with stony indifference. The ARVN would never say no to an American general, but they had a dozen ways to avoid saying yes: They would “study the request.” Or “seriously consider it.” They would “explore the ramifications.” They would try to “reorder their priorities.” They would apologize for communications difficulties.
What they wouldn’t do was fight for us.
On the other side of the table, US commanders were under strict orders to implement Vietnamization. Most of the warm bodies on Kate—and most of the cold, stiff ones in body bags stacked like cordwood on our landing pad—were South Vietnamese Montagnards, members of the CIDG, whose chain of command ran through the ARVN Special Forces. Recall that the yellow-and-red South Vietnamese flag flew over Camp Bu Prang, as it did over all Special Forces camps in Vietnam. Note also that there was not then, nor had there ever been, so much as a single ARVN soldier on Kate. Nevertheless, whoever was running the US Army in our part of Vietnam would not allow his subordinates to commit troops to a rescue, since relieving Kate’s garrison was to him so obviously an ARVN responsibility.
Bottom line: If we could hold Kate, fine. If the ARVN 23rd’s commanding general changed his mind and sent some of his precious troops to help us, woo-hoo! Another win for Vietnamization!
And if not—them’s the breaks. Shit happens. It’s a war, y’know.
We were pawns in a political poker game in which neither side would call the other’s bet.
So we’d been written off. Sacrificed for the greater good of forcing the Saigon regime to take responsibility for its own war. By then, almost 47,000 American soldiers had died in Vietnam. What were a couple dozen more corpses if it would speed the day when Nixon could declare victory, bring all Americans home, and win a second term?
All that aside, I didn’t believe for a minute that my Special Forces brothers would abandon me and Pierelli, along with more than a hundred Montagnard strikers, and of course all the artillery boys, if there was anything at all that could be done.
• • •
KATE’S perilous situation was not unique. By this time, the IFFV Artillery commander’s pipe dream that small hilltop firebases along the Cambodian border would protect Special Forces camps at Duc Lap and Bu Prang had become a catastrophic nightmare. Duc Lap’s Firebase Helen was the first to fall. “It was overrun on October 28th,” recalls Reg Brockwell. “There were quite a few causalities, and [PAVN] then made it their own firebase.”
Nearby to Helen was Firebase Martha, evacuated the next day, the day that Kate had first come under attack. Despite those defeats, and what was all too apparent at Kate, no senior IFFV artillery officer was disciplined or relieved of command for sticking indefensible firebases on PAVN’s doorstep.
Describing these tragedies in the February 1970 edition of the IFFV troop magazine, The Typhoon, Colonel Francis Bowers, commander of the Provisional Artillery Group, would say that “the important thing is that the artillerymen on those three [firebases] had already done their job of supporting the troops [emphasis added]. There wasn’t any need for them any longer on the hills. The operation on the ground were completed. And these firebases would have been evacuated soon anyway. They were sitting ducks.”
All credit to Colonel Bowers for the sitting-duck metaphor. As far as I have been able to tell, however, Kate’s artillery hadn’t supported any ground troops except themselves. Kate was emplaced to support Bu Prang, but never got the chance to do so. While I hate to disagree with a colonel, the balance of Bowers’s statement in The Typhoon was equine road apples:
“General Abrams eventually blamed Special Forces for all firebase failures in this campaign,” explains Brockwell, forty years after the fact. “I have no idea why. I heard that the tactical zone commander of the 23rd ARVN refused to support [the firebases]. He said, ‘We’re not going to risk any Vietnamese troops. They’re Americans; it’s your problem.’ Plus there were Montagnard tribesmen out there, whom the Vietnamese detested and called savages, so basically, they had no skin in the game.”
So I was greatly cheered when I got an encrypted message from my “B” Team commander indicating that a rescue/reinforcement operation was in the works.
“The overall Special Forces commander for the Bu Prang operation was Lieutenant Colonel Collins, sharp as a needle, a really, really, really good man,” recalls DeNote. “Simmons probably could’ve stayed in BMT, if he wanted, but he chose to come right int
o the camp. He’s the guy who called in the relief Mike Force.”
DeNote is dead right about Collins. I would have followed him through the gates of hell, and that sentiment was shared by everyone else in B-23.
“The plans for Kate’s rescue were drawn up in our TOC,” DeNote continues. “Collins stayed inside it and operated off our map. The Mike Force had their own radios, so [for the duration of the operation] we had two sets; if one [failed], the Mike Force radios would still be operational.”
While I was on the radio, Hopkins had wandered into the FDC, and he sat on one of the desks, listening. For as long as we’d been under fire, he’d been one of our best fighters. He was good with his bloop gun, the M79, and with an M16. Sometimes he paired with Koon on the M60. And always, even under the heaviest incoming, he was moving around the perimeter, helping out in a dozen ways, from bucking somebody up, helping a wounded man, to jumping in a hole to fight alongside a striker. But just then, at that moment, he looked different. Somehow not quite right.
“I went in [to the FDC] primarily to see what was going on because I can’t be outside anymore. That artillery fire is going to kill me. So I went in there to get information instead of to give information,” Hopkins recalls. “Doc was there, and Albracht was talking to somebody about needing more support, because they were beating us up. And whoever he was talking to, they came back and said something that amounted to ‘We’re not sending any more helicopters in because it’s too risky; we’ve lost too many.’
“I looked at Albracht and I said, ‘You mean they’re not going to help us anymore?’
“Albracht said, ‘For all intents and purposes, we’re on our own right now.’
“And I said, ‘Bullshit! What do you mean these people aren’t going to come and protect us? We don’t have guns, we have only small arms, and they say that they’re not going to do anything? We’re on our own now?’”
We were kind of on our own. But, as I tried to explain to Hopkins, the Mike Force was putting something together. If we could hold just one more night, they’d be here. I said that I didn’t know, just at that moment, exactly what was planned.
Hopkins lost it. He is a very brave man. A good soldier. He had done as much as any man to defend our little corner of hell. The fact is, however, that under prolonged combat, every man can be broken, and there is no shame in it. Hopkins had reached his breaking point and couldn’t take any more. He began screaming at me: “I said, this is bullshit! You get me the fuck out of here! This is bullshit. If my country’s not willing to protect me, get me the hell out of here!”
Our medic, Doc, had been in a corner watching and listening. He moved over to Hopkins, repeating his name in a soothing voice. He gave him an injection of some kind, something to calm him, and in a few minutes Hopkins was asleep.
I called for a medevac; I still had to get Red Caldwell out as well. But it would be a long time before anything that didn’t explode or ricochet could land on Kate.
Not every artilleryman in our small garrison was actively involved in our defense. A couple of the more senior noncoms, I am reliably told, remained under cover during every firefight. One PFC—he should be very glad that I never got his name—was sent to load wounded men on a chopper. When the medevac took off, he was on it.
I pulled my other go-to guys, including Koon and Geromin, and a few other artillerymen who had been active in our defense, into the FDC. As I told them what was going on and shared my assessment of our situation, I also explained my very real hope that the Mike Force would get us out. As I spoke, I looked around the dim, crowded room, peering at their dirty, stubbled faces—there was hardly water enough to drink, let alone wash or shave. I told them, as if they didn’t already know, that PAVN had hit us with almost every goddamn thing they had for more than three days. We had bled and we had died, but we held our hilltop still.
Like Hopkins, these were all good soldiers, first-rate guys, a little volunteer squad who’d individually and collectively moved around Kate to wherever they were most needed, wherever that day’s enemy assault was coming from. Even under the heaviest attack, Koon was out on the perimeter manning an M60 machine gun, meeting the tip of the PAVN assault spear and pouring heavy lead into it. I realize now that he and I were not so different: We were both from small Midwestern towns. Both with tough, unyielding fathers. We’d both enlisted right out of high school, looking for adventure, looking for a good fight—and we had sure as hell found one.
As I spoke, updating our situation, I studied their faces. One man—if I ever knew it, I can no longer recall his name—was hunched over, cradling his jaw, looking very much like the famous Rodin sculpture, almost a living The Thinker. I looked into their bloodshot eyes, and I said, “Listen, we’re all under some heavy-duty pressure here, boys, and we’ve got to watch out for each other.”
Just then I saw “the Thinker” tremble—a tiny movement. In seconds he was shaking violently. Then he broke down, muttering, “I’m sorry; I just can’t take this anymore.” He began to weep, and I could see how strongly this affected all of us—how it created an even more intense bond between us. I told him, “Hey, it’s all right, man, it’s all right.” After a little while, Doc came in and sedated him as well.
In 1969 I had yet to start college. I didn’t know how much was then known about what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. In Vietnam we called it combat fatigue or battle fatigue; our fathers’ generation called it shell shock. All the same thing. I didn’t need a degree in psychology to understand what had happened to these men. Lord have mercy, I knew what we had been through, what we were still going through. I never, ever felt anything but sympathy and brotherhood for these guys.
And even though we were now desperately shorthanded, they had to be evacuated. I’d rather go into battle with five men that I can depend on with my life than with a hundred that I can’t be sure of.
So I had no problem sending these men back to BMT, where they would be safe and could get medical attention. They had served their country and their buddies as well as they could, and they simply had no more to give.
It was quite a while before we had a medevac pilot willing to risk flying in and out of Kate. When that brave soul was finally en route, Zollner asked him to take Ross’s body as well. The pilot refused, and I got on the horn and, like Zollner, demanded that he take Ross. The pilot was wiser than both of us. He knew that lingering to take someone already beyond help would increase the risk to our wounded. He took the living, but left the dead. Later, when we finally got some of our dead evacuated, I personally carried Ross’s body and stowed him on the chopper. Even in the bulky body bag, he seemed as light as a child.
As it got dark, as our ammo dwindled again to only one or two magazines per man, and to only a few boxes of linked 7.62 rounds for all our M60 machine guns, Spooky came on station. The small-arms fire stopped as PAVN infantry pulled back. The incoming mortars and rockets halted. Pierelli should have been in the sack, catching a few z’s before spelling me on the radio so I could catch a few of my own. But on Kate he had trouble sleeping, so he went back into the mortar pit, spreading a little 81 mm HE love around the ridges and tree lines.
I, too, couldn’t sleep. I was pretty sure that if the neighbors attacked at first light, as they usually did, we wouldn’t be able to stop them. We just didn’t have enough bullets. Not nearly enough. One big push and they’d be all over us.
• • •
MEANWHILE, at Bu Prang, the wheels were turning. Captain Charles Childers was the Pleiku Mike Force adjutant. We would later become good friends, but just then we had yet to meet. He was in on the rescue operation planning.
“We had two Mike Force battalions [near] Camp Bu Prang,” Childers recalls, “and by the night of 31 October, both were in active contact with the enemy.” Both were commanded by an Australian, Major William J. “Bill” Brydon, a seventeen-year veteran of the Australian Army w
ho had seen combat against guerrillas in Malaya and Borneo.
“Brydon was one of those wonderful, larger-than-life Australian characters who never went anywhere without a very large can of Foster’s Lager,” says Childers. “He always rode helicopters with his feet on the outside skids. His combat kit was a torn T-shirt, an M16, and a Foster’s; that’s how he went in, and that’s how we brought him out. He was much beloved by everyone—and, boy, he was a mean sonofabitch!
“Brydon had his headquarters at Camp Bu Prang. One battalion was to the south and west, and one just outside the camp. When Kate had deteriorated to the point that Hawk was going to lead them out, Brydon’s mission was to set up a corridor on each side of the escape route that Bill would use, so that he wouldn’t be overrun en route. Hawk had no idea about this. It was happening at night, and most of the time nobody knew where anybody else was.”
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And while with silent lifting mind I have trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
—Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., “High Flight”
FIFTEEN
Ken Donovan is tall and trim. He radiates self-confidence from his heartbreaker’s face, he has unusually small hands for a man his size, and he sometimes refers to himself in the third person. “I graduated from high school in ’66, when either you had enough money to go to college and keep your student deferment or you went to the Big Green Machine,” he says. “I was shoveling sand in a Buick foundry, trying to earn enough money for junior college in Flint, Michigan.”