Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (18 page)

Our conversations were in the clear: My Signal Operating Instructions, a little set of laminated cards that gave us frequencies and call signs and authentication tables, were current for only one month. They expired at
midnight on the 31st; as that date approached I was told to continue using what we had been using. It didn't much matter: PAVN knew exactly where we were, and they were zeroed in on every inch of the firebase.

I was always worried when neither Spooky nor Shadow was overhead at night. Like me, Dan Pierelli, and the artillerymen who were fighting as infantry, the strikers were exhausted from days of fighting with almost no sleep. I had them on 50 percent alert—one guy in each hole awake—but between their fatigue, the ground fog that sometimes settled over Kate, and the nearness of the jungle below our positions, more than once we caught enemy sappers who had crept within a few meters of our perimeter. With Spooky or Shadow orbiting overhead, just the sound of their engines was a deterrent. Several times a night, we'd ask them to fire for a few seconds into a tree line a little below us, just in case PAVN was massing for an attack.

When each Spooky or Shadow aircraft appeared overhead, I usually went over what we needed that night, and I usually added, “As long as they hear you up there, you put out [minigun fire] a little bit here and a little bit there, they're not going to try a hell of a lot, because they know what you people can do; they know you can shoot [them] up every time they move.”

“Roger that,” Dykes returned on this night. “And by the way, Chicken Hawk, Happy Halloween, the Spookies are out!”

•   •   •

BUT
this night was different. Even with Spooky above, spreading the gospel of lying low to every PAVN trooper within earshot of its engines, we observed flashlights on the heights to our east periodically throughout the whole night. The 105 crew fired several HE rounds at them, and so did Pierelli with the 81 mm mortar. Moreover, even the sound of Spooky's engines could not mask the digging noises that came from all sides, or the racket made by large numbers of troops moving through the jungle, especially around our south end. I directed Alabama to saturate these areas with fire, but its effects on what sounded like a large force were unknown, and in any case temporary.

About an hour before dawn, Sergeant Houghtaling, the young noncom in charge of the 105 howitzer crew, was in his hooch, a half culvert of corrugated steel that sat on a couple of layers of sandbags and was covered with
more sandbags. The cannoneer who shared his shelter had reloaded his M16, but forgot to set the safety. As he crawled in, his rifle discharged and hit Houghtaling in the right elbow; the bullet went up his arm and exited his shoulder. The medic came over and patched him up, but he was in great pain.

“A guy came up to me and said, ‘Sarge, Houghtaling wants you,'” recalls Pierelli. “I went over there and got down on my knees next to him; he was in and out of consciousness, and every so often he would say, ‘Sarge, it hurts, it hurts!'

“I asked if they had given him morphine, which can make you crazy, and someone said that they did. I asked when they last gave him a shot, and I told the medic to give him another one. Then I painted a big
M
on his forehead with iodine,” he adds.

The continuous troop movements during the night had me worried more than usual. When the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, about when Spooky usually packed up and left, I called Alabama.

He told me that he had to go, that he had to beat the sunrise home.

I asked if there
was
any
chance that he could stay until the sun came up. And I told him about the PAVN located on the ridgeline across from us, and that every time, as soon as the sun rose, they fired rockets and then mortars at us.

Dykes said, “Hang on a minute.”

Lieutenants Crites and Resquist, Spooky 41's pilots, listened to our conversation.

Dykes said, “Well, crew?”

Crites, the pilot, replied, “You don't even have to ask; you know that we're going to stay.”

“I had that kind of a crew; we're going to stay where we have to,” says Dykes. “I called Hawk back and said, ‘We're going to go out to the east and just orbit until the sun comes up, and then we'll cruise back in.'

“We had a little more than 2,000 rounds of ammo left,” he continues. “We started back in just as the sun popped up over the horizon. Hawk was right: We saw four rockets launched from that one position. I told the pilot, ‘Just open up on 'em and give 'em all of it.' We were on them in half a minute—
dropped in with the sun behind us, rolled up on our left wing, and fired all 2,000 rounds,” says Dykes.

Spooky 41 then climbed to about 6,000 feet and turned for its base at Phan Rang.

“I was not a troublemaker, but everybody I worked with knew that I was headstrong about certain things, and that I wouldn't back down,” recalls Dykes. “The sun was well up when we landed [at Phan Rang] and taxied in. The squadron commander, a colonel, was standing there waiting while we climbed out of our ship. He didn't call to the pilots. He waved me over. Just me.

“He said, ‘Do you know that I could have you court-martialed? You broke all the rules!' I stood there at attention for about five minutes and all I said was ‘Yes sir' and ‘No sir,' and he went on and on and on. I'd never been chewed like that in my whole career, before or since. I've had a few people say, ‘Now, Al, you don't do that,' for something, but not like that, standing at attention getting chewed out. When he was finished, the colonel looked at me and said, ‘If he asked you to stay again, you would, wouldn't you?'

“I said, ‘Yes sir.' And he turned and left.”

Dykes felt that he had made a connection with me and everyone on Kate. “I don't know, I can't explain it, but [that morning] I got back to my base and I went in to the duty officer and I told him to put my name down to fly every night. As long as Hawk needs somebody over there, I'm going back,” Dykes explains.

“The duty officer signed me up,” Dykes continues. “I didn't fly with the same pilot each time, but I was the NAV every night. I felt a connection with them; I didn't know what it was then, but I do now: When I was ten years old, we lived south of Gadsden, Alabama, in a place where there were no real houses or buildings, and you could look up and see five or ten hawks flying around all the time. I collected their feathers to make my own arrows to play bow and arrows. So the hawk has always been my favorite bird, and then I go over to Vietnam and there was Hawk . . . It might sound strange, but I felt that connection to
him.”

FUNERAL FIRES

Gun fire and fear

Grew bigger

With each moment

We laid there,

Covered by an umbrella of terror.

Where not even the blue sky

could touch us

or give us courage.

We lay there

Listening to the rhythmic bombings of Elysian Fields

By angels flying B-52s while

We dreamed of voyages beyond

This corpse-filled moment

But I also knew, for sure, I was not ready

For any funeral fires.

I just had too many more desires!

—Anonymous, War Zone C

A
bout the time that Al Dykes was getting his ass reamed by his squadron commander, twenty-seven American airmen were sitting down to morning chow in an Air Force mess hall about 400 miles east of Kate, in Utapao, Thailand, a resort city on the north rim of the Gulf of Siam. After eating, they would walk over to a makeshift briefing room, where they would learn the details of that morning's mission. They would be looking at aerial photos of the area east of Bu Prang, closely examining our battered and cratered hilltop and the surrounding terrain, especially to the east.

As those airmen emptied plates heaped with cooked-to-order bacon and eggs, as they buttered their toast and stirred cream and sugar into their hot coffee, I was picking my way around the west side of Kate's perimeter with Ron Ross, giving him the lay of the land, helping him to see our situation through an infantryman's eyes, and sharing my most immediate tactical concerns with him. By then, I had been forced to consider what might happen to Kate if I went down, and it wasn't pretty: Kerr was wounded and needed a hospital. So did Houghtaling—from what I had seen, probably the most effective of Kate's artillery noncoms, and the ramrod of a small crew of determined cannoneers who for days had stood their ground, loading
and firing even under heavy fire. Pierelli was a solid guy, but he had no experience working with the controllers who brought in the fast movers for close air support. And he wasn't an officer; some of the artillery sergeants, the ones who mostly hid in their holes, outranked him. If I was gone, it would be up to Ross and Pierelli to hold things together. And despite Spooky 41's presence and excellent gunnery, PAVN had been moving troops around us all night. I was pretty sure they weren't planning a parade.

About this time, 23-year-old Warrant Officer John Ahearn, call sign “Stagecoach 11,” a former engineering student from New York, climbed into a 155th AHC slick and took off from BMT for Gia Nghia. During the previous week, he had flown almost continuously between Gia Nghia and Dak Lak, east of Kate. “I vividly remember seeing almost continuous air strikes on Kate. I'm a couple of miles away at 4,000 feet and I see an [Air Force] F-100 come in to attack; as soon as it breaks off, I see all these ants swarming out of the jungle and running up the hill—North Vietnamese troops. Absolutely astounding.”

Ahearn's Halloween mission was to pick up a replacement for Ron Ross, so that Ross could go to Hawaii for R&R. First Lieutenant Maurice “Moe” Zollner, a 1/92 Artillery fire direction officer, was waiting at Gia Nghia; Ahearn was to fetch him, then fly to Bu Prang to load ammo and supplies, bring both to Kate, then pick up Ross and take him to Phan Rang so he could go on R&R. All these years later, I have to wonder which bonehead had decided to send Ross out to Kate for one day and then replace him. Whether that was Lieutenant Colonel Delaune or one of his underlings, he
had
to know that the most perilous part of serving on Kate was simply getting there or getting out of there. How many Kate-bound helicopters had turned back because of the hellish ground fire in the neighborhood?

Ahearn had never flown into our perilous little heliport. “Bu Prang—I knew it like my backyard,” Ahearn says. “I also flew frequently into Susan and Annie.” But not Kate. With copilot Marlin Johnson of Decatur, Illinois, in the left seat, Ahearn climbed to 4,000 feet—just out of small-arms range—and headed west.

Meanwhile, those Air Force aviators were on the Utapao flight line,
going through long, detailed preflight checklists on each of their three B-52D bombers. These airmen were on temporary duty from one or another of the Strategic Air Command bases scattered around the world. Their usual duty was flying a B-52H long-range heavy bomber configured for delivering thermonuclear bombs on targets thousands of miles distant. Their STRATCOM training missions involved flying great distances to drop such bombs on city-size targets from high altitudes. So far, they've never dropped an actual nuclear weapon.

Before arriving in Thailand, these crews completed an intensive two-week training course in the B-52D. The aircraft they would fly this morning was configured to bomb troop concentrations and other live targets from below 26,000 feet, the altitude at which exhaust from their eight jet engines is likely to create telltale streamers of ice crystals—contrails—that are visible from the ground from as much as fifty miles. The B-52D “Big Belly” fuselage has been modified to carry eighty-four 500-pound bombs; each will also hang a dozen 750 pounders under each wing—all told, thirty tons of explosives per aircraft.

About the time when the B-52 aircrews were poking and prodding their aircraft systems in Thailand, PAVN stepped up to Kate for another dance: Accompanied by melodious but deadly mortars and rockets, they launched another full-scale attack at our southeast quadrant, the steepest slope of our fortress hilltop—by far the most difficult to climb.

For that reason, I didn't have many men there. Several hundred PAVN infantrymen surged out of the jungle and up that slope, shooting as they came; many dropped, but some rolled right over my strikers.

I was on the radio, trying to get more air support, when a runner appeared and told me what was happening. I ran to the fight, found some sandbags for partial cover, and began directing the counterattack. PAVN had punched through the wire along a twenty-yard section; some were now through the wire, some still in the midst of it, others firing at us from around our own foxholes. Nearly every Montagnard striker I ever met was a good fighter. He became twice as bold, twice as brave, twice as aggressive, when an American was fighting alongside him. My presence in the middle of that firefight bucked them up, and they leaned into the battle.

Strikers from other parts of the perimeter left their positions and joined me to hit the invaders on their flanks. After a short, vicious firefight—it seemed like a long time, but it was actually only a few minutes—PAVN broke contact, dragging their dead and wounded back over the crest and down the slope. They left behind several satchel charges; I presumed they had expected to destroy our bunkers. We set the fuses and hurled them over the wire, down through the trees, to explode in the jungle below.

A couple of Falcon gunships made passes at the slopes and the jungle below our wire, which served to discourage the rest of the attackers and drive them back.

The gunships soon exhausted their minigun ammo and they returned to Bu Prang. In the few minutes before the enemy attack resumed, I had our wounded moved to our makeshift aid station, and reinforced that section of the perimeter by thinning out the other parts—but now I was running out of able-bodied infantry. Aside from the strikers wounded during that little episode, a few others had been hit by fragments from “friendly” bombs—the Air Force, praise the Lord, dropped their napalm and bombs very, very close to our lines.

Meanwhile, Ahearn was landing at Bu Prang with Zollner. He was there to load our desperately needed small-arms ammunition. “Our Falcon gunship pilots were waiting,” Ahearn recalls. “They wanted to tell me something that they didn't want to say [in the clear] on the radio: that they were out of [7.62 mm] minigun ammunition. They could cover me with rockets,” Ahearn recalls. “I would have much preferred the miniguns, [but] all I said was, ‘Fine, let's get this done.'”

Before taking to the air, Ahearn warned Zollner that if the ground fire was too intense and he couldn't risk a landing, the lieutenant should be prepared to jump into Kate; the pilot would tell him when to go.

Ahearn knew that his best hope for a successful in-and-out was speed. “As I took off from Bu Prang,” he recalls, “I flashed on an experience the previous April, when Major Moore taught me that, in an emergency, I could fly my UH-1H up to 20 knots over the indicated red-line speed for a short time. I don't know that I hit
140
knots getting to Kate, but I sure pegged 120.”

His RPM indicator redlined, Ahearn flew straight east. “I stayed low, and as I flew over the jungle close to Kate, I saw many trees that had been blown away by air strikes. Huge craters were everywhere! Everything was brown where the foliage had been blown away,” he says.

As Kate loomed up in front of him, “I did what's called a cyclic climb, where you pull the control stick back and trade airspeed for altitude, just climb right up the side of the mountain.”

He arrived as we were beating back PAVN's third ground assault of the day.

“It was a terrible approach—I didn't know where the helipad was. I just popped over the ridge and hovered over a revetment with a howitzer in it. We're getting fired on, and Zollner has to jump from about five feet. The crew chief and the gunner push all the supplies off, and I put the nose over and fly down the hillside in ground effect [riding on a cushion of air, rather than true flight using rotor-blade lift]. I stay in the trees and finally turn northeast . . . remaining just off the trees for ten minutes or so, scared shitless. It was a terrifying experience, but we did what we had to do.”

By then, the three B-52s of the 486th Bomb Squadron were rolling down the long runway at Utapao Royal Air Base. Arc Light Mission Golf 476 would climb to 25,000 feet as it flew south and east at 525 knots over water. In half an hour they would approach Vietnam's watery Ca Mau Peninsula, a Viet Cong stronghold.

Zollner was about Kerr's age, as I recall him, perhaps an inch under six feet and 190 well-muscled pounds, with wavy light brown hair. Although both Kerr and Zollner were from the 1/92 Artillery Battalion, they had not met previously. They huddled in the FDC while Kerr gave Zollner a cursory situation briefing. Minutes later, as incoming rockets and mortars resumed, a Dustoff helicopter dropped out of the overcast. Kerr dragged himself to the helipad, and then helped the heavily medicated Houghtaling get aboard. A few seconds later, dodging a renewed rain of rockets, they hovered off Kate and flew directly to the well-equipped 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku. “Coming out, we were lucky that we didn't get hit by a rocket,” recalls Kerr.

Zollner was not so lucky. Soon after arriving on Kate, he was hit—
mortar shrapnel pierced the bridge of his nose. It was painful but not life-threatening, and Zollner proved himself a trooper: He refused evacuation, and afterward, when he was on the radio with Spooky or other close-support aircraft, he used the call sign “Beak” as his private joke. I was glad to have him; he did absolutely everything I asked of him, and he did it well.

About the time Dustoff left with Kerr and Houghtaling, the three command pilots of Arc Light Golf 476, now at 25,000 feet over the Ca Mau Peninsula, turned north by northeast. They throttled their engines back to 400 knots. Bombardiers on each aircraft began pre-bomb-run checklists. Navigators reminded their respective aircraft commanders that they were programmed to turn west just before overflying Dak Som and, as a backup, provided the preplanned turn time and compass heading for the move.

A little before 1000 hours, warning messages were received almost simultaneously on the FDC radio and on mine:
Take cover immediately
. Recall that I had been in the field less than a month, that this was my first time in combat, and that I had never seen a B-52 strike. A day earlier, I had requested heavier bombing closer to our perimeter. But this was my first inkling that my request had been granted—and I didn't know exactly what was coming. I passed the word, and we buttoned up Kate as best we could. With everyone deep in their hole or bunker, if PAVN had hit us right then, they could have washed over us like a wave. But several minutes before I got the take-cover warning, the mortars and rockets had stopped, and for a short while it was actually quiet around Kate.

Ahearn had refueled at Gia Nghia and was back in the air. “A FAC pilot radioed me to position myself north of Kate, circle, and await a B-52 strike,” he recalls. This put him over Cambodia, but he didn't regard that as a problem, because nearly every 155 AHC pilot who flew from Bu Prang to BMT took a direct route that took them over a part of Cambodia's supposedly neutral territory, a salient jutting into South Vietnam.

But the prospect of circling over territory that he knew was crawling with PAVN troops made Ahearn cautious. “Because I was going to be in a relatively fixed position, I climbed to a higher altitude,” Ahearn recalls. “We flew race tracks and figure eights for twenty or thirty minutes.”

I never saw the B-52s. I never heard their engines. At 1011 local time,
thirty-six seconds after the first bomb was released, as it reached a velocity of just over 800 miles per hour, it slammed into the ground and detonated. It was followed by 323 more bombs. Ninety tons of high explosives packed in steel landed half a kilometer or less from Kate.

Not knowing what was coming in, I glanced eastward and beheld the first few massive explosions—for a fleeting moment, I thought they were the back blasts from some indirect-fire weapon. Recoiling, shocked, I thought,
Oh my God! If that's the back blast, how in God's name will we ever survive the impact?
Then the incredible shock waves and deafening sounds rolled over me and my nose went in the dirt.

From his perch over Cambodia, Ahearn had the catbird seat: “I'm looking south at Kate from around 6,000 feet and all of sudden, my God in heaven, an ugly brown zipper opens in the green jungle right along the narrow, east/west ridgeline just south of Kate,” reports Ahearn. “The entire hillside erupts from east to west on a continuous line westward, toward Bu Prang.”

On Kate, it was like being camped out on the road between Sodom and Gomorrah while fire and brimstone rained from the heavens. An unearthly roar assaulted our ears. The earth bucked and dipped and shook for a minute that seemed like an eternity.

Although they slept on clean sheets, showered daily with hot water, ate in an air-conditioned mess hall, and nobody was shooting at them, I've got to applaud those airmen for putting their bombs just where I wanted them. If any
one
of those 500-pounders had landed on Kate, I'm certain that it would have killed me and everyone else on our hill. As it was, one bomb landed in the gully to our east, close enough for shrapnel to kill one of my strikers and wound two others.