Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (25 page)

The man in the field, set there to bait a trap—was that Norton? Unlikely. Probably, it was an enemy soldier dressed in one of our uniforms. It's possible that PAVN captured Norton and took his clothes, but the fatigues might just as easily have been abandoned on Kate when we left. Or were from some other source entirely.

In addition, my coauthor has heard variations of this story from at least half a dozen people, not all of them Vietnam veterans, over the last forty years. None who told the story claimed to have firsthand knowledge. It was always something they had heard from someone else.

As we researched this book, two of the artillerymen who served with me on Kate said that they'd been told by others that, as we were leaving, Norton went back to get something he'd forgotten. Others said that he came off the hill with the unit, but got separated in the confusion during the PAVN machine-gun attack. I have no idea if either account is true; again, no one claims firsthand knowledge. By my own observations, Norton might easily have fallen into a bomb crater or a shell hole and hit his head or broken his neck. For his family's sake, I hope that someday, somehow, his whereabouts are accounted for.

•   •   •

FROM
October 28 through our escape on the evening of November 1, my world had been a tiny hilltop in Hades where fire and steel rained from the sky, a cordite-reeking cosmos of unending perdition. As time's river meanders onward, I have often reflected upon those days, and as I do so, my memory becomes clearer, my senses keener. At times, uninvited, I can almost hear the crash of mortars and the fiery screech of flying rockets. My nostrils are assaulted by the metallic smell of blood and the stench of violent death. I have never felt more needed than I was on Kate, nor have I ever felt more fear. I had come to the firebase for what amounted to a mundane
purpose, but a new and far more important need arose. I was called upon to lead a hundred and fifty fighting men, many suffering from wounds or battle shock, through a gauntlet of fire—lead them to safety. I did not volunteer for this; the task was thrust upon me. Once I could comprehend exactly what I must do, I had resolved that no power on earth would prevent me from delivering these men from harm's way—or I would die trying.

I truly do not understand how we escaped that night; it could only have been the hand of God that guided us. Although I do not dwell on it, it comes to mind more often than I care to admit. A smell, a sound, a flash of light, even a conversational turn of phrase, and I am back on Firebase Kate, fighting for my life. The experience has battered and burned an everlasting wound on my
soul.

F
or six days I had hardly slept, fueled by not much more than adrenaline and Army-issued uppers. Now I needed nothing more than sleep. After a quick debriefing, I tumbled into my bunk and immediately lapsed into unconsciousness.

I was awakened about ten hours later by the sudden rude noise of incoming mortars and the ear-shattering
crack!
of a large-caliber recoilless rifle.

The mighty PAVN force that had been distracted and diverted by Kate for nearly a week now fell on Bu Prang itself. Everyone on Special Forces Team A-236 had an assigned battle station; mine was behind the .50-caliber mounted on top of an elevated bunker at the apex of the camp's defenses. Scrubbing sleep from my eyes, I took up my post and almost immediately spotted PAVN's recoilless on a hillside more than half a mile away, barely within range of Ma Deuce, my venerable .50-caliber Browning M2. Firing short bursts, I walked my tracers toward the reckless rifle's signature firing flash.

That woke the gunner up. He responded with an HE round to the base of my position, blowing me backward off the bunker roof.

I climbed back up and returned fire, a long burst.

He fired again, almost immediately; I saw the flash, noted that the projectile's fiery tail appeared to be headed directly at me.

I jumped to the ground first; the explosion was a near miss.

A very near miss.

Shaken but not injured, I remounted the bunker, righted my overturned .50, and poured a stream of fire directly onto the gun position. This PAVN gunner and his loader had guts—they stood their ground and managed to get off two more rounds in rapid succession. Both exploded harmlessly, several meters short. I raked the entire position until it went silent.

My gun was overheated. The barrel needed to cool, but PAVN had moved into RPG range, and his B-40 rockets were added to the incoming deluge.

Spooky and Shadow gunships appeared overhead. After a brief radio reunion with my friends in the sky, I directed their fire on the rocket positions. To get a better look, I left my bunker and moved to an exposed location. From there I pinpointed the RPG nest, and vectored the gunships' fire on them. Spooky and Shadow unleashed their particular versions of fire and brimstone onto these positions, and in minutes all incoming ceased.

Months later, I would be awarded the Silver Star for this action.

But that night, once the threat had passed, all I wanted was a bed.

•   •   •

I
awoke on Monday, November 3, and was greeted by a public information officer from Fifth Special Forces Group Headquarters in Nha Trang. He said that a horde of media was waiting to interview me about Kate.

To tell the truth, I wasn't really in the mood.

Smooth and self-assured, the PIO told me that Fifth Special Forces Group Commander Colonel “Iron Mike” Healey had insisted on it.

So I girded my loins, and all that. Before I was permitted to meet the press, however, the PIO went over a list of dos and don'ts to remember when speaking about our “gallant Vietnamese allies.”

I had to ask him: Which particular gallant Vietnamese allies is he talking about? And where the hell were they when we needed them?

He had no answers to those questions.

I showered, shaved, put on clean jungle fatigues, and faced the media circus that had gathered from every corner of South Vietnam.

Apparently I got through it all right—it's all just a blur now.

A little later that day, “Iron Mike” himself, a living legend in the flesh, flew in to personally make known his pleasure with my performance on Kate. With my entire “A” Team standing at attention, Healey extolled my accomplishments, described how proud he was of me, how I exemplified the best traditions of the Special Forces, and so on and so forth, at distressing length.

I was more than a little embarrassed. Then Iron Mike asked where I wanted to go next—to include becoming his aide. As I opened my mouth to speak, a gremlin—no doubt merely passing by on some errand of greater mischief—leapt into it. From deep within me, the gremlin summoned the spirit who had been Alleman High's “most fun to be with” of the Class of 1966. This spirit turned off my brain and seized control of my voice. “I'd like to be the officer in charge of the Nha Trang Dairy Queen,” said this imp of Satan through my mouth.

The team loved this response. Iron Mike—not so much. His friendly smile drooped into a half snarl.

“That position is filled,” he growled.

The gremlin departed to complete his original shenanigan. The spirit within me vanished; as I regained control of my wits, I assumed that I had ruled out any chance of becoming Iron Mike's aide. As if that was a job that I'd ever want.

“How about the II Corps Mike Force?” I said.

“You've got it,” he replied. Not willing to waste even one more minute on a clown, Colonel Healey performed a smart about-face, mounted his chopper, and flew off.

•   •   •

TWO
days later, on the morning of November 5, Bu Prang received a priority message from Lieutenant General Corcoran ordering me to a ceremony at Ban Me Thuot to recognize the American defenders of Fire Support Base Kate. Alas, near-hurricane-force winds lashed the Central Highlands that
day. All birds—especially those with rotor blades instead of feathers—were grounded. General Corcoran nevertheless dispatched a slick to pick me up. Apparently Pawnee Bill believed that his three stars outranked Mother Nature's breezes.

The chopper's arrival was, of course, delayed by weather. As it finally came into sight, I was approached by one of the Mike Force commanders. Several of his strikers had been seriously wounded in the previous night's attack. Their wounds were much more than Bu Prang's medics were equipped or trained to handle, and they would probably die without surgery in a well-equipped hospital. He'd been trying to get them out, but even the wonderful lunatics who flew medevac birds were grounded.

Only my special slick was flying. The Mike Force commander asked if I would get his wounded to the BMT field hospital.

I asked the pilot if he could do the medevac, and he replied that he'd fly me wherever I wanted to go. We loaded the wounded and took off. At the hospital I helped get them to the emergency room before heading for the general's ceremony a few miles away.

We landed and I started for the building where I had been told to report to General Corcoran. On the way, I ran into Mike Smith and several of the troops from Kate.

A Silver Star was pinned to Smith's fatigue jacket.

“Where the hell were you?” he asked.

“Unavoidably detained.”

Smith said that Corcoran had waited for a few minutes, and then became irritated at my tardiness. Time waits for no man. Nor do lieutenant generals. Corcoran conducted the awards ceremony without me, and left.

In truth, this was my first indication that I had been invited to an awards ceremony. Or to accept a medal. According to the men from Kate, I was slated to receive a Silver Star as an “impact award”—a medal given shortly after an action and before the paperwork goes in. In my case, I would learn, once statements could be taken from witnesses, the Silver Star would probably be upgraded.

I had missed the ceremony, but I was back in the rear with a bunch of
guys that I had shared a lot with. We discussed it among ourselves, and agreed that we were all due an in-country R&R.

So we took one, then and there.

And while I was in BMT, I made it a point to go to B-23 headquarters and find Captain Richard Whiteside. I laid into him for cutting my ammo request in half, and I got a little carried away. Okay, it was more than a little. When I tried to get my hands on him, he ran, calling for help. I chased him around his desk a few times before two senior noncoms grabbed me. (They later told me that they were hoping that I'd catch him before they had to step in.)

•   •   •

I
later heard, thirdhand, that the awards guy at Fifth Special Forces understood that IFFV Artillery would write me up for a decoration. His opposite number in IFFV Artillery, however, probably believed that my write-up was a Fifth Special Forces responsibility. I seem to recall that Fifth Special Forces was then and for some time to come ramrodded by my friend and admirer Colonel Iron Mike Healey.

Neither full colonels nor lieutenant generals trouble themselves with the minutiae of paperwork. They have rooms full of aides and staff officers for that purpose, allowing them to stay focused on the big picture.

If there was ever any paperwork for a medal with my name on it, it disappeared.

If I had a do-over, would I have let wounded strikers die so that I could get a medal? Of course not. No medal could compare with the lessons that we learned about ourselves on Kate. The experiences that we shared, and the unbreakable bonds forged in the heat of battle—these will live within us till our last
breath.

O
n November 6, 1969, B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., the highly regarded correspondent of the
New York Times
, filed a seven-hundred-word cable on the fighting in and around Bu Prang and Duc Lap. Datelined “BANMETHOUT, South Vietnam,” the opening paragraph summed up what must have been stunning news to New Yorkers:

“United States military officials said today that they had decided not to commit any ground troops to the fighting taking place southwest of here between South Vietnamese and enemy forces.”

A little later in his dispatch, Drummond quoted “a headquarters officer” as saying that “our intent is to force the South Vietnamese to fight a big one on their own. The name of the game these days is ‘Vietnamization.'”

Had Mr. Drummond cared to interview me for his report, I would have been delighted to describe some of the exciting, crowd-pleasing moments in this “game.” But I was not “a headquarters officer.”

•   •   •

ABOUT
the time that Drummond filed his report, Ken Donovan, the pilot who had brought in our last big load of small-arms ammo, was coming out of the 155th AHC mess hall after a long day of flying.

“At the time, I was the unit's senior aircraft commander, and as I came out of the mess hall, Major Owen grabbed me and said, ‘Donovan, how's it going out there?'

“I said, ‘Sir, this thing's probably going to drag on for a while longer, but I want you to remember what a 21-year-old warrant officer told you in November of 1969: The war is over.'

“And that was because we had been putting South Vietnamese infantry battalions into LZs and a few days later we'd pull out what was left, a company or two at the most. They just didn't have the small-unit leadership necessary to conduct warfare at a platoon level,” explains Donovan. “I had a lot of respect for the North Vietnamese, who were some hard-core dudes. We killed them at every available opportunity, because they'd stand there and fight.

“I could never understand why the South Vietnamese weren't willing to do the same thing.”

•   •   •

GENERAL
Corcoran completed his Vietnam service on February 23, 1970. As was customary and proper, he submitted a lengthy, classified end-of-tour report. The narrative portion ran to 21 pages, single-spaced, and discussed in considerable detail every aspect of combat operations, logistics, pacification, and Vietnamization efforts that had been on Corcoran's plate for his year as IFFV commander. It was well written, concise despite its length, and described a far-flung organization that was imperfect but nevertheless effective and steadily improving.

The report was widely disseminated throughout the US Army, including all major commands and training organizations; it has since been declassified.

Two sections stand out in my mind:

Artillery:
 “. . . Limited resources result in split battery configuration being the norm rather than the exception. While efforts are made to maintain unit integrity, demands have at times required a 105 mm battery to be split four ways. While Vietnam has long been
considered as a battery commander's war, all too often we find the brunt of conducting operations resting on the shoulders of the junior officers.”

Vietnamization:
 “. . . The two most significant battles fought in South Vietnam in 1969 were fought in II Corps as a test of Vietnamization in the Highlands. The battle of Ben Het convinced II Corps that they could do the job. The battle of Bu Prang and Duc Lap convinced Saigon. The final test will be the conviction of the
people.”