Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (17 page)

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

. . .

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!

—Rudyard Kipling

I
was running on adrenaline and the tiny dextroamphetamine pills that Special Forces provided for extended combat situations. Late that night I was back on the radio with Spooky 61, orbiting overhead since full darkness, firing at any light they saw around us, and at anything that we heard from the darkness outside our stronghold.

Earlier in the day, Dan Pierelli had discovered that the artillery platoon had their own 81 mm mortar, which was primarily for firing illumination rounds—parachute flares—as a defensive measure. Expert in the use of both light and heavy infantry weapons, he asked around in the artillery community and was rewarded with several boxes of HE rounds. So that night, and on those that followed, when Spooky or Shadow was on station, or during the day when there was no incoming fire, he began laying harassment and interdiction mortar fire on the enemy.

“I fired a lot of HE during the day, in between mortar and rocket attacks,” he recalls. At night, while Spooky or Shadow was circling overhead, he waited until they cleared a certain area, then began firing at tree lines, hillsides, and ravines where we had heard digging sounds. “We could hear
the North Vietnamese digging in, heard rustling off in the distance, so I was dropping rounds, and as Spooky or Shadow flew over, once I knew they were out of the line of fire, I'd start popping a bunch of rounds from about 300 out to about maybe 400 meters,” Pierelli adds. “We knew they were down there.”

A little after midnight, Spooky 61 departed; the mission commander said that their replacement, Spooky 41, would soon be on station. Spooky 41's navigator and mission commander was USAF Captain Al Dykes.

•   •   •

AL
Dykes was a part-time student at the University of Colorado when he got a draft notice. It was 1961, a time of peace, long before more than a handful of Americans had even heard of Vietnam. Rather than face induction into the Army, Dykes decided to enlist in the Air Force. “I wanted to fly,” he recalls, but “the only program open was for navigators.”

After completing a yearlong navigator program at Connelly AFB in Waco, Texas, Dykes was commissioned a second lieutenant. He remained at Connelly as an instructor until 1966, when the school relocated to Mather AFB, near Sacramento, California. Dykes began looking for another job, and learned about a hush-hush project called “Phyllis Ann” in Alexandria, Louisiana. Although no one could tell him anything about it, Dykes nevertheless volunteered for what he thought would be six months of temporary duty.

He joined a small group of pilots, engineers, loadmasters, and gunners. “They took us to a big, long building without offices. It was just tables and chairs, with some temporary partitions,” he recalls. “They said, ‘You have two weeks to figure out an instructional program for the flying phase.'”

That was when he learned that Phyllis Ann was a C-47 transition program. Dykes and his fellow instructors were to teach pilots, navigators, and crewmen how to fly an aircraft that had been developed in the 1930s. Based on the Douglas DC-3, the first practical commercial airliner, but with reinforced floors and wider doors, the C-47 “Gooney Bird” went into Army Air Corps service in 1941. Thousands of these sturdy and dependable aircraft flew for the Air Corps and the Navy, and for many Allied nations. As supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower described the C-47 as vital to winning the war. And to winning the peace: Thousands of C-47 sorties brought food, fuel, and other essentials into Berlin to break the Soviet blockade of 1947–48.

As newer and bigger cargo aircraft entered service, however, thousands of Air Force C-47s were sold as surplus or scrapped. By 1966, there were few remaining in active service and most of those were off-the-books aircraft used by various fighter and bomber squadrons for administrative chores. For Phyllis Ann, aircraft were taken out of storage and from National Guard and Reserve units, then refitted with new engines and sophisticated, off-the-shelf civilian electronics. Some became EC-47s and flew electronic reconnaissance missions. HC-47s were modified with loudspeakers and other equipment for psychological warfare. The rest became AC-47s—gunships. When the Air Force ran out of Gooney Birds, they took dozens of Air Force Fairchild C-119 “Flying Boxcars” from Air Force Reserve units. Because they had more internal cargo space than a C-47, the C-119s were armed with miniguns, 20 mm cannon, sophisticated radar and infrared sensing devices, and spotlights. These “Shadow” gunships were intended to do everything that the AC-47 Spooky could do, but also to hunt blacked-out trucks hauling supplies and reinforcements by night down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

If Shadow was supposedly the more capable aircraft, Dykes was much happier to be in a Gooney Bird. “One night some of us were eating dinner at the Phan Rang Officers' Club,” he recalls. “There were some C-119 pilots and navigators at the next table. We looked down the runway and watched a 119 taxi into position for takeoff. The pilot wound the engines up, then gunned it and took off down the runway as fast as he could. He saw that he wasn't going to be able to take off, so he aborted. Too much ammo and flares, and the ship is underpowered to begin with. Well, he turned around, taxied back, and tried to take off again, and couldn't. Then he tried it a third time, and failed again.

“So I casually said to my friends—just loud enough for the guys at the next table to hear—‘You know, I had to bail out of a C-119
five
times!'

“The 119 guys looked like they were scared to death. ‘What happened, what happened?' they asked.

“I went through the Army jump school at Fort Benning, and that's what we jumped out of.”

That's Al—always good for a laugh.

Dykes and his fellow instructors drew up training routes and flew their C-47s to learn their quirks. Two weeks later, the first trainees arrived. “We had people in their 20s and early 30s in all positions except pilots,” Dykes explains. The Air Force had scoured its rolls to find pilots with C-47 experience. Most were World War II or Korean War veterans.

“We trained more than sixty crews. They ferried sixty-three airplanes to Vietnam. Some went through Hawaii, and some through Alaska, then the Aleutians, and down to Midway Island and across the Pacific to Vietnam.”

The bottoms of these AC-47s were painted black and they were outfitted with a trio of 7.62 mm General Electric SUU-IIA/A Gatling guns, originally designed for use in pods under the wings of an A-1 Skyraider. The SUU-IIA/A's two-speed motor drove a six-barrel gun capable of delivering 3,000 or 6,000 rounds per minute, depending on need.

Because the AC-47 was to fire on narrowly defined ground targets, and to do so at night while flying at low altitudes, navigators and pilots required special training. “Spooky fired, usually, between 2,500 and 3,000 feet above ground level,” Dykes explains.

Above the battlefield, higher is safer, and the 7.62 mm bullet can pierce a filled sandbag more than a mile distant. As an aid in aiming, however, Spooky's miniguns fired one tracer in every five rounds; tracers burn out at half a mile, and their ballistic characteristics are slightly different from armor-piercing bullets. By limiting Spooky to low altitudes and taking fire direction from ground units in contact with the enemy, gunship crews could apply its enormous firepower with almost pinpoint accuracy. But, operating within range of ground-based small arms, Spooky and Shadow were strictly limited to night activity.

While Dykes was gaining experience with Gooney Birds in a Stateside training environment, the first squadron of AC-47s, with only five operational aircraft, deployed to Vietnam in November 1965. By the time Dykes
arrived in 1969, there were two AC-47 squadrons, one at Tan Son Nhut and one at Phan Rang, each with sixteen aircraft. Dykes flew out of Phan Rang.

“We flew Spooky without a rear door, so the loadmaster could throw out parachute flares,” Dykes explains. “They'd float down slowly and light up an area that would help show where the good and bad guys were before we started firing.” Spooky also carried another type of flare, dropped on or near a target to serve as a reference point for adjusting its fire. These flares burned for up to thirty minutes.

The AC-47 crew included two gunners to maintain and reload the miniguns.

“If we were firing all three guns at once, we were firing 18,000 rounds a minute,” Dykes says. Normally, however, Spooky did not use “fast fire.”

“If a target was real hot, we might fire all three, a three- or four-second burst, just to make sure they were all working,” Dykes continues. “Then we took one gun off, to keep it loaded, and cut the other two to half fire, or 3,000 rounds a minute. If it was unnecessary to fire two at once, we'd work one gun at a time, firing for a few seconds at a time. That way we could spend all night with the guys down there—that Gooney Bird would fly for hours and hours. It just didn't burn much gas.”

Each Spooky aircraft carried as many as 40,000 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition, and if conditions permitted, it could remain on station for up to ten hours. It fired while cruising at 120 knots in a left-hand orbit.

“We took a lot of gunfire from the ground,” Dykes explains. “We lost an airplane near Saigon because he came home one morning in daylight; a Viet Cong 12.7 mm shot him down. So our hard-and-fast rule was that we didn't go
to
a target until it was dark, and we were back over home station before first light,” Dykes explains.

Nevertheless, during the course of the war in Vietnam, between the USAF and the VNAF, a dozen AC-47 gunships were lost in combat.

Paradoxically, Spooky's high-tech weaponry was aimed with a crude improvised device. “We didn't have all this GPS and electronics and all that stuff back in the sixties like we do nowadays,” Dykes says. A handmade
instrument was mounted on the pilot's side window. In it was a bulb from a Christmas tree ornament positioned to shine up through a glass with an
X
painted on its center. A mirror reflected the
X
, referred to as a “pip” or “pipper,” at an angle on the pilot's front window, and the aircraft was maneuvered to keep the
X
on the target.

Dykes explains that the pilot usually didn't adjust fire with this aiming device only; he also adjusted it by banking the plane. “The guns were mounted at 12.5 degrees below horizontal. Circling at a 25- to 30-degree bank put the guns at about 40 degrees below horizontal; we could see where the tracers hit and know where we were firing.”

With the aircraft in motion at 120 knots, engineers had calculated that a three-second burst from one gun would put a bullet in every square foot of a space the size of a football field. “Spooky aircraft held the best Air Force record ever established,” says Dykes. “When we were winding the program down, a general, one of the group that created the AC-47 concept, came out from the Pentagon and told us that we had defended more than 6,300 targets and that any target that we attacked with somebody alive on the ground to guide our fire, they got out alive. It was 100 percent successful. He said it was the
only
program in the Air Force that had ever had a 100 percent success rate. That was partly because if we couldn't talk to the guy on the ground, we didn't fire. We had to know that we were never shooting at friendlies. But if he could talk to us, we got him out.”

When Shadow took Spooky's place over Kate, Pierelli would go into the generator pit; he had an infrared strobe that Shadow, unlike Spooky, could see. “I was talking to Shadow one night and told them that I was going to put the infrared strobe in the center of the hill,” Pierelli recalls. He told Shadow that from there he could estimate where we were and where the enemy might be. “Shadow also had spotlight capabilities,” Pierelli continues. “One night, as he was about leave us, he said, ‘Watch this!' He turned on the spotlight and all I could see was one huge circle of light going across the jungle. It was beautiful, for lack of a better word.”

Both Shadow and Spooky communicated on UHF, VHF, or FM radio. “The pilot had the radios taxiing out, during takeoff, and coming back and landing,” recalls Dykes. “As soon as we were off the ground, all
communications were handled by the navigator. We had to record every mission's conversations; we sent map coordinates and everything. So I had a tape recorder on my desk behind the pilots at the NAV station. When someone called us, we'd mash the button and record the conversation.
4
And so the navigator did all the talking while airborne on a mission.”

Spooky and Shadow aircraft were assigned targets by a special air controller. “If you needed air support, you'd call your command post. Those people would call a controller we called ‘Ragged Scooper' and give him the coordinates. He'd alert the nearest available Spooky, wherever it was—sometimes we were flying combat air patrol over Nha Trang, for example; sometimes we'd stay airborne so that we could take off and be gone in a hurry; give us the coordinates and we go right to the target . . .

“I was just out of Alabama, not too many years before, and I had that good ol' Southern accent,” Dykes remembers. “The second time we approached Kate, there was another aircraft in the area, and someone in it noticed my accent and asked, ‘Where are you from?'

“I said, ‘Gadsden, Alabama,' which is halfway between Birmingham and Chattanooga.

“Hawk picked up on that, and from then on I was no longer Spooky 41. I was Alabama.”

Al Dykes's second mission to Kate was around midnight on October 30. “I called Kate up on the radio and said, ‘Hawk, this is Spooky 41. We're about five minutes out from your position.'”

I called back and told him where we were. We were running out of batteries for our strobe, so I turned it on just long enough for Spooky to get a fix, and then turned it off. I told him where the enemy was located—pretty much all around us, but especially to our east and north. I liked the sound of Spooky 41's voice—he sounded calm and avuncular, a rich baritone with a distinctive Old South accent.