Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (13 page)

A little later, a CH-47 Chinook swooped in to drop sling-load gear, then flew away. It took Sergeant Houghtaling's gung-ho gun crew only about ten minutes to wrap their disabled 105 mm howitzer for pickup. The Chinook returned, hovering low over the gun pit. Inside, on his belly and looking through a small window in the floor, the flight engineer called out directions to his pilots over a headset. When the big bird was close enough, an artilleryman standing on the gun snapped the fifty-pound hook through
the thick, tempered aluminum loop under the Chinook, then jumped down. Slowly, the chopper rose, taking slack out of the heavy slings until they were taut. Then he ascended almost vertically before climbing away with the damaged gun.

Just before dark, the Chinook was back with a new 105 mm howitzer dangling from its belly. In a remarkably short time it was in the empty gun pit. The hook was removed, the sling gear pulled off the gun, and as the Chinook vanished into the sky, the gun crew went to work, relaying their piece and then aligning its sights.

Hopkins and PFC Michael R. Norton, from Eskdale, West Virginia, a short and stocky 21-year-old gunner on the 105 crew, each carried a bloop gun, the M79 grenade launcher, as their sidearm. “We got together to look at the higher ridge facing the side of our LZ,” Hopkins recalls. “[Norton] saw movement, so both of us fired our M79s. All movement stopped after the rounds hit. A few seconds later, Norton fired again, and as the projectile sailed through the air, we both saw an NVA low-crawling. A second later, the M79 round struck the guy and we both jumped up yelling, ‘Got you.'

“We went down to Norton's gun to tell his crew what happened and to receive congratulations,” Hopkins continues. “As I was coming back up to the top [of the hill] I heard a whooshing sound overhead. I looked up and saw a red object going over my head. I remember watching war movies and what you were supposed to do when being fired at, so I started running up the hill, zigzagging all the way. I thought to myself,
Man you probably look silly running like this
. But it did not matter; I made it up to some of my guys and the protection of some sandbags. They told me it looked like the movies with me running up the hill.”

By this time, Bu Prang Camp was itself under intermittent mortar and recoilless rifle fire. The skies between Bu Prang and Kate were full of all sorts of flying machines, including Captain Strange's Bird Dog. He was coordinating all the Army aviation around Bu Prang, including Kate.

A little after the Chinook departed, a line of five UH-1D Hueys—the flying delivery trucks known as slicks and armed only with door-mounted machine guns—approached low and fast from the west. They were escorted by two Huey gunships; all seven aircraft were from the 48th AHC out of
BMT. In the right-hand seat of the leading gunship was Chief Warrant Officer Ben Gay, age 20, of Richmond, Virginia, serving as aircraft commander and leader of this two-ship fire team.

Across the valley to the southeast, our PAVN neighbors had been planning a big reception in our honor. When the party committee saw that we had invited more friends to share the fun, they were furious. As the first slicks approached, the neighbors began shooting at them with 12.7 mm heavy machine guns, small arms, and RPGs. My strikers were in their fighting positions shooting back, but it didn't seem to have much effect. I told Geromin, the generator man, as well as Hopkins and Koon and whoever else I could lay hands on, to find spots and fire at the enemy positions. The 105 crew cranked their gun around to the east and opened up in direct-fire mode.

“There was still green jungle out there then, so I was shooting into the trees where I saw puffs of smoke, hoping that it was a bigger gun because I couldn't see small-arms fire in there,” recalls Geromin. “I hoped that I was shooting at something, but basically I was just shooting into the jungle.”

Invoking the law of unintended consequences, the handful of men firing rifles at the enemy drew the attention of a PAVN 75 mm recoilless rifle crew. Not the sort of weapon that would be fired at a fast-moving aircraft. Several rounds hit a few feet in front of the sandbagged wall that Geromin was using for cover while he fired. “If it had been one degree higher, we wouldn't be here, because the wall couldn't have taken it,” says Geromin. “After that, I thought,
They're trying to kill me
,
so I got really mad and ran off about seven magazines on full automatic.”

Even so, the ground fire was too fierce for the slicks. The two gunships, one firing rockets and the other both rockets and miniguns, made pass after pass, shooting at those automatic weapons and getting shot at in return. For ten minutes it was the Wild West.

Then came a brief lull; the incoming seemed to slacken a bit, and the slicks returned for another landing attempt.

Not so fast. As they descended into range, the enemy opened up with everything it had. Again the slicks were turned away. Gay and his wingman came down for another run, laying curtains of 7.62 fire and high-explosive
rockets on that ridge and the hillside below it. While the PAVN gunners were thus occupied, the slicks slid back in for a third pass. This time they made it in; by the time the last Huey dropped its strikers, the rain of rockets and mortars was almost continuous.

That was the end of my reinforcements. I would have to make do with just forty.

•   •   •

KENN
Hopkins is a brave man and, from what I saw on Kate, a true warrior. But he was not your typical young cannon cocker. Mike Smith, who had been among the officers in the Fort Sill unit that trained Hopkins, knew him much better. “At that time, he dressed like guys dressed when they wanted to sort of assert that they didn't like the Army—they'd wear these little bracelets and necklaces and things that they knew would aggravate [higher-ranking] people, sort of like aggravating your dad, I guess. But he was basically a good soldier . . . just kind of a hippy-dippy guy.”

While Hopkins was in training at Fort Sill, he'd met a Vietnam veteran who warned him about taking refuge in his hooch during a ground attack. “I was pulling guard duty, and there was a sergeant there . . . and he was telling us war stories,” Hopkins recalls. “The sergeant said, ‘If you get hit, and you stay inside your hooch, you're dead.
You never want to stay inside your hooch.
You cannot see what is coming at you and it ensures you will be overrun. They'll just come in, they'll walk right over you, throw a satchel charge inside, and you're dead.'”

It was good advice, but Hopkins, I think, misunderstood what the sergeant meant. He meant that during a
ground
attack, those defending a firebase or other fixed position should actively participate in its defense, not hide in a hole. When there was no ground attack, however, but bombs, mortars, rockets, or other artillery fire was landing on the position, the only sane reaction was to take cover, wait for the incoming fire to stop—and
then
get out of your shelter and into position to help repel a ground attack.

Before he came to Kate, Hopkins served several weeks on a firebase near Ben Het that took a steady pounding from PAVN rockets and mortars. This base, however, was dug in exceptionally well, with deep bunkers.
Moreover, its howitzers were emplaced to fire only within a 180-degree arc, instead of the usual 360. Because of this, each gun was protected by a thick, high parapet with dense overhead cover that would stop even a direct hit.

“I felt safe at Ben Het because we had the gun protected, and we'd actually sit outside and watch the incoming,” Hopkins recalls. “I remember, at Ben Het, we're sitting in front of the hooch door. We had a little blast wall, and we'd just sit out there smoking and watching the incoming and OMIGOD! One hit real close—probably about 100 meters away! Oh, jeez, there's a piece of shrapnel—I've got to get down, down, down. I couldn't go fast enough, damn, and they hit me.

“Stupid. Don't go out there and watch the incoming. It hit me on the belt buckle, and bounced off . . . a piece of spent shrapnel about so big, [like] a big marble.”

He wasn't hurt. And Hopkins's fear of incoming artillery—an entirely rational fear—lessened a bit.

On Kate, Hopkins had dug a sleeping shelter, or hooch, about waist-deep. “We had pierced-steel planking over us, with four sandbag layers,” he recalls. The roof was about three feet above the surface. He shared this space with another cannoneer.

Because of his previous experiences, however, Hopkins feared incoming artillery fire less than the possibility of being trapped in his hooch during a ground attack. “Because if a piece of artillery hit at the door, and we were on the ground, no harm, no foul; concussion, maybe, shrapnel, no harm. I wasn't afraid of that, and I wasn't even thinking of small arms because they kept hitting us with artillery. I don't think we ever, except for ground attacks, got small-arms fire. It was mostly artillery pelting us.”

Then there was the time that he zigzagged up the hill to avoid an incoming B-40 rocket, believing it was aimed at him. I think it unlikely that Hopkins or any other individual was the target of those rockets. The B-40 could carry one of several different types of warheads and was usually fired at vehicles, bunkers, troop concentrations, crew-served weapons, and occasionally low-flying aircraft. I think this episode served, on some level of consciousness, Hopkins's need to feel invulnerable to artillery fire. And I
think
that
need was fueled by the fear of taking refuge underground, in a place where he could not escape an enemy grenade or satchel charge, a place where he feared he would be defenseless and would die.

And so, instead of taking cover behind or under layers of protective sandbags, during the worst of the shelling, when PAVN mortars, rockets, recoilless rifles, and even heavy artillery were pounding Kate, Hopkins remained aboveground. Time after time, with explosions and flying steel all around him, he went prone next to a sandbagged bunker or a steel CONEX container, or crouched behind a blast wall. It is nothing less than a miracle that he was not killed. When we came under ground attack, Hopkins, usually joined by Koon, Tiranti, and sometimes a few others, roamed the perimeter, supporting the strikers by sharing their fighting holes and shooting at the enemy with their rifles or grenade launchers. Koon often had their platoon's M60 machine gun, and he obviously knew how to use it.

When things were relatively quiet, Hopkins sometimes dropped in on his neighbors. “I remember going around all the time, giving people information, telling them what's going on. The FDC crew's job was to stay inside, and our job, in my mind, was to stay outside, see what's going on, and keep the FDC informed, which I did. Bob Johnson told me that he always appreciated me coming around and telling them what was going on outside.”

Johnson concurs. “One day during the siege he came into the FDC bunker,” he recalls. This in itself was very unusual: “I don't remember [anyone] . . . from the guns
ever
coming into the FDC bunker before,” Johnson adds. “He was very friendly, very talkative, and he was describing what was happening aboveground, all around the firebase and the perimeter. For those of us hunkered down in the bunker, it was fascinating to hear all this firsthand information. He spoke very calmly, as if he were the anchor on the nightly news relating events from the war zone. I was thinking,
This is a very impressive individual
, because of how collected he is [while] relating all of this rather dispassionately, with all the hell that was going on. We were very grateful to be brought up-to-date on the action aboveground.”

In fact, Hopkins's visit caused Johnson, by then in his twelfth month in Vietnam and the veteran of many firebases, to reevaluate his personal assessment of Kate's situation. Until then, he had not realized the significance
and immediacy of the enemy threat. Following Hopkins's recitation of the disposition of PAVN troops surrounding Kate, he began to appreciate the great danger that he and everyone else on Kate faced.

“The only time I ever got any sleep,” Hopkins continues, “about three hours, was when Spooky was above. Other than that, it's rattling. When we're getting hit, oh, make sure you're not over in the area that's getting pummeled right now. I'd be up
here
; if we were getting hit
there
, I would be someplace else. I never went inside my hooch until the very last day. I couldn't keep myself inside a hooch; it just freaked me out. I was staying away, like I said; I wasn't necessarily afraid of the incoming killing me—concussion maybe—and as long as we're getting hit on
that
side of my house, I would be over here on
this
side of my house. And as soon as the first round hit, I was up and running just so I wouldn't be in that impact area.”

Hopkins's odd behavior did not go unnoticed by the artillery chain of command: “One of the gun chiefs came to me and said that . . . a member of his gun crew . . . was irrational, delirious, out of control, and needed to be airlifted out,” recalls Kerr. “I suspect that individual was Hopkins. I'm pretty sure it was, but don't know it for a fact. I said no. I didn't want a mass exodus of people going out by helicopter; at that point in time we didn't know but that we were being hit by a half dozen snipers. We didn't know we were up against 4,000 PAVN troops. So I said no.”

•   •   •

FROM
my perspective as ground force commander, the best thing about getting the 105 mm howitzer replaced was that it was the only weapon that could fire something called a “beehive” round, which was devastatingly effective when used in a direct-fire, anti-personnel role. Beehive rounds didn't exist for the bigger-caliber guns on Kate.

Formally called the M546 anti-personnel tracer shell, the beehive round was fired directly at enemy troops, with the gun's muzzle close to parallel to the ground. Before firing, a fuse was set to explode at a given distance from the gun, from a hundred meters to a few miles; the warhead would explode into a cone-shaped cloud of 8,000 inch-long finned steel flechettes. Upon impact, the fins break off, often causing a second wound. Just one flechette was capable of causing a lethal wound.