Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (22 page)

THREE

Shoe the steed with silver

That bore him to the fray,

When he heard the guns at dawning—

Miles away;

When he heard them calling, calling—

Mount! nor stay:

Quick, or all is lost;

They've surprised and stormed the post,

They push your routed host—

Gallop! retrieve the day!

—Herman Melville, “Sheridan at Cedar Creek”

T
he message was a shocker. What the hell? For a moment I felt more alone than I had ever been.

But we couldn't stay on Kate. I grew up idolizing men like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis. They stood their ground at the Alamo, sacrificed their lives, because they knew it would buy Sam Houston time to raise the army that eventually won Texas its independence. If holding Kate had meant saving others' lives or advancing America's cause, I would have died there. But Kate no longer served any purpose. So it came down to a simple choice: Do we stay and die in place, or do we attempt to escape and evade the enemy? It was clear to me that it was better to leave, better for my men, better for their families and loved ones, and better for my country if at least some of us lived to fight another day.

I took a few deep breaths and composed a somewhat longer message. Choosing my words for maximum impact, I explained in greater detail the condition of our hilltop impact area, our lack of resources with which to mount an active defense, the inoperative condition of our howitzers and therefore the loss of our raison d'être, and finally an educated guess at how many thousands of enemy troops were in the surrounding hills and valleys.
But this second message was
not
a request. I concluded by saying that we
were
leaving. I didn't ask permission, but I added that a little air support on our way out the door would be very helpful. Then I encoded what I'd written with a CAC code—a group of randomly generated letters and numbers substituting for each character in my message. I read the encrypted message over the radio to Rocco DeNote at Bu Prang.

With his radio operator, SP4 Billy Weaver, to spell him only long enough to take a leak, for five days DeNote had faithfully relayed our support, ammo, and supply requests to B-23 at BMT. He had done everything but hold my hand over the radio since the shooting started. He had secure voice and secure teletype circuits to B-23; after decoding my message, he sent it to the “B” Team commander, who passed it up the line. While I waited for an answer, I began making preparations for leaving.

•   •   •

“ACCORDING
to the plan, we would march through triple-canopy jungle in the dark until we linked up with a relief force at least a couple of miles away,” recalls Bob Johnson. “Captain Albracht had the grid coordinates for the linkup. The relief force was [composed of] Special Forces leading Montagnard troops. Until that time—all through the siege—I had assumed that the US Army would come to the rescue of Americans who were stranded, as we were. I thought the relief force was at least a couple of US Army companies. I did not know that there were no American troops involved in any way in relieving the siege of Kate,” adds Johnson.

I, of course, was by then well aware that no American unit was coming. What I didn't know until many years later was that while I awaited a response to my last message, high above Kate, at an altitude beyond the range of even PAVN's spiffy new 37 mm ack-ack guns, the three-star commander of I Field Force Vietnam and his aide were circling in a Huey fitted out as a command and control bird. Lieutenant General Charles A. Corcoran, who answered only to General Creighton Abrams, boss of all US forces in Vietnam and its waters, had received my classified message.

Like virtually every senior officer in Vietnam, he had chosen his own call sign, a reflection of his self-image. A call sign so different and unique
that anyone who might hear it on the air would know at once that they were talking to the boss.

For all I knew, Corcoran was a warrior genius, Alexander the Great reincarnated. Even if he was merely a run-of-the-mill American three-star general, however, he should have known that as ego-gratifying as that might have felt, his choice of call sign was dangerously stupid. Just a year earlier, Major General Keith Ware, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient and the first OCS graduate to pin on the silver stars of a general officer, had been lured into a Viet Cong ambush by a bogus radio call. And this was Ware's own fault: As commander of the First Infantry Division, nicknamed “the Big Red One,” Ware chose the call sign “Firefly One.” Ignoring advice from his own division signal officer on the advisability of keeping
an
y call sign longer than a month, much less for his entire tour of duty, he had “Firefly 1” painted on the underside of his command Huey's fuselage.

By 1966, US intelligence was well aware that the Viet Cong had an active and effective signals intelligence organization, roughly the equivalent of the US Army Security Agency. The Viet Cong systematically monitored and decoded US, ARVN, and Allied forces radio transmissions on hundreds of frequencies, including those used by aircraft and ground forces. They maintained what we would now call a database of call signs and frequencies, from which they had identified the commanders of virtually every Army, Marines, and Air Force unit of battalion size or larger in South Vietnam. From repeated sightings of Ware's aircraft, they had matched it to his call sign. When some of his troops were operating near the Cambodian border, the VC set up an ambush on what was meant to look like an active landing zone; when Firefly 1 was spotted in the area, a Viet Cong impersonating an American soldier called on a captured radio to ask Ware for help in evacuating a critically wounded GI. When Ware landed, his aircraft was riddled with machine-gun fire and everyone on it was killed.

Within weeks, this incident became part of the “Lessons Learned” curriculum in several Army officer schools, including the Command and General Staff School, the Army War College, and the Signal Officer Advanced Course, at which my coauthor learned this lesson in 1969.

Ignoring the fate of Major General Ware, General Corcoran, who as a boy had roamed the streets of Laredo, Texas, decreed that he would be known on the air as “Pawnee Bill,” a reference to Gordon W. Lillie, a Wild West show performer and contemporary of “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

“Pawnee Bill
Alpha
was Corcoran's squeaky-voiced aide,” recalls DeNote. “Pawnee Bill Alpha called Bill Albracht—Hawk—from way high over Kate. We used several different frequencies at Bu Prang Camp, but for whatever reason, Pawnee Bill couldn't communicate directly with Hawk,” DeNote continues. “Two or three times, Pawnee Bill came back on the air with the same fucking request—to verify the size of the force surrounding Firebase Kate.

“So I got on the frequency, identified myself by call sign, and said, ‘Pawnee Bill Alpha, if you don't believe them, drop your fucking helicopter 10,000 feet and take a look for yourself. OUT!'

“And the voice that came back—a voice that sounded like God—said: ‘This is Pawnee Bill. Roger, copy; OUT!'

“Somebody in [the Camp Bu Prang] radio bunker said, ‘You fucked up!'

“I said, ‘What are they gonna do, relieve me and send me to Nha Trang so that I can surf and eat at the Dairy Queen?'”

Shortly after that exchange, the order was given for Firebase Kate to execute an escape and evasion. That could only have come from Corcoran, or from Lu Lan, the ARVN two-star general commanding II Corps (who was directly under I Field Force). Thanks, Rocco, for having my back when I needed it most.

When permission to withdraw came, it was accompanied by the recommendation that we leave under cover of darkness and use an Air Force gunship as covering fire. Apparently, Pawnee Bill and his Flying Wild West Show believed that my troops and I might have held off a small army for five days, but that we were also stupid enough to attempt an escape and evasion operation in daylight.

On the other hand, we were definitely foolish enough to attempt escape and evasion as an intact unit. After 1953, when the lessons of the Korean War had sunk in, every US Army basic trainee has been taught that men in
a unit trapped behind enemy lines stand the best chance to evade capture by breaking into small groups of three to five men, each group leaving separately at different times and from different places on the perimeter, and taking different routes in attempting to evade the enemy while returning to the safety of their own lines. Then and now, I believed that my Montagnard strikers, left to their own devices, would have done just that, and that probably most would have survived. They had lived in this region for their entire lives. They were at home in the highland jungles, and they were superb hunters and stalkers.

If Dan and I had attempted escape together, just the two of us, I would have given us a better-than-even chance for survival: We were Special Forces, trained and comfortable in jungles and in rough terrain. Comfortable moving around at night. Not so Kate's artillerymen. I doubted that more than a few would have any idea what to do in the jungle, and most of them already showed symptoms of battle shock.

But if there was even the slightest chance for their survival in a group, I couldn't abandon them. We would all leave together. We would take our chances together.

As the sun set around 1720 hours on the night of November 1, the fast movers broke off their bombing runs and returned to base: They were not equipped to operate at low altitude in the dark.

They were replaced by a pair of A1H Skyraiders from the USAF's 6th Special Operations Squadron at Pleiku Air Base. Affectionately dubbed “Spads,” after the French-built biplane famously flown by World War I ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker (and by
Peanuts
cartoonist Charles Schulz's Snoopy), the Skyraider was an enormous, single-engine fighter-bomber. Designed for service in World War II, it could carry four tons of ordnance—more than its own weight—in bombs, rockets, and ammo for four 20 mm cannon or a minigun pod. Heavily armored, it could absorb a lot of ground fire without endangering the pilot or a vital aircraft system. Best of all, the Skyraider could fly at night and remain in the air as long as seven hours.

About 1900 hours, with Kate in total darkness, one of the Skyraiders, its ordnance expended and low on fuel, returned to base. The other, call
sign Spad Zero Two, with Major Gerald R. Helmich at the controls, orbited overhead; it was supposed to remain until a Shadow gunship arrived to take its place.

Shadow was going to walk us out, firing its lethal miniguns ahead of us to sanitize a path for us to meet up with the Mike Force.

I gathered everyone—strikers and artillerymen—in the vicinity of Kate's north end, the only slope that could easily be traversed, and the one from which we had taken the least amount of enemy fire. It was dark and the sky was clear; slightly more than a half-moon would rise about 2300 hours. By then I wanted to be long gone. We got busy with preparations to move through our own wire and then through enemy lines.

In my heart of hearts, however, I believed that we were merely dead men walking: I didn't see how it would be possible to evade the thousands of PAVN troops roaming the hills and valleys surrounding Kate. I kept such thoughts to myself as I circulated among the artillerymen, telling them how we would join up with the Mike Force near the bottom of Ambush Hill, that everything was under control, that if we stuck together and didn't panic, we would all be fine. Many of these guys had lain up in their bunkers for days, suffering from the effects of battle shock and hopelessness from days of almost continuous shelling and the knowledge that they were surrounded by a vastly larger enemy force known for its cruelty to prisoners. I did all that I could to instill hope in these men, and to boost their morale. It seemed, at least to my untrained eyes, that they did perk up a little.

After I'd explained our situation, I told everyone what to do to prepare to escape Kate and then evade the enemy.

“We were ordered to destroy all equipment, especially the FDC radios, destroy all papers, to leave all personal effects behind except for dog tags, so that when [
sic
] we were captured there would be less that they could use against us in interrogation,” Bob Johnson recalls. “We were to carry as much ammo as we could, and of course take our helmets and flak gear and weapons. We fully expected to fight our way through the slot at the bottom of the hill and across Ambush Hill. We expected that we would take heavy casualties in the exit from the firebase. We were to move at a fast walk or a slow trot, definitely not to run, which would expend our energy before we
actually got into battle. But we wanted to move quickly through the area. We were in a very vulnerable situation.”

“There was another guy named Johnson, a gun bunny—we called him Peewee—and he was kind of a weird dude,” recalls Koon. “He piled up a bunch of his stuff and took some old powder bags and set it on fire—he must have had a flame twelve feet high! It lit up the whole place, and we started getting mortars and rockets. That was on Peewee.”

I had Pierelli send some of the artillery guys to finish the howitzers with thermite grenades, devices that burn white-hot, generating enough concentrated heat to melt a barrel's hardened steel. Cannoneers call this “spiking a tube.” Apparently, this was a rarely used procedure.

“I was involved with going around to the howitzers with Sergeant McFarland,” recalls Koon. “He was so excited about getting to throw thermite grenades down the tubes of these guns that he couldn't wait to do it!”

We also used thermite on the artillery unit's heavy communications equipment, the useless .50-cal machine gun, the FADAC computer, the generators, and all official documents.

I had decided that it would be hard enough to get everybody off Kate in one piece, and then survive a night march of several miles, at least, through trackless, triple-canopy jungle. It would become impossible with the added burden of carrying our dead. It was unfortunate, but I decided that the needs of the living outweighed the respect and courtesies due our departed comrades: We would have to leave the dozen or so dead strikers stacked on Kate's helipad.

I worried over how the artillerymen would handle themselves if we had to fight our way out. Would they panic and run? Stand frozen, waiting for someone to shoot them? I hoped that a few would put up a fight, at least fire their rifles at the enemy. My strikers had shown that they could fight, and fight very well, from foxholes and other protected firing positions. Would they know what to do in an ambush? Would they assault their ambushers or take off into the jungle? It was too much to worry about, I realized, when I wouldn't be able to do much about it.