Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (3 page)

ONE

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley'd and thunder'd;

Storm'd at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the 600.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Bu Prang, Republic of Vietnam, October 1969

I
did not want to go to Fire Support Base Kate. It was about six kilometers southeast of Bu Prang Special Forces Camp, close to the Cambodia border. There was nothing going on there, not a damn thing, and I'd barely gotten my feet on the ground in my first combat assignment as executive officer (XO) of Special Forces Team A-236.

A few days earlier, intelligence officers had warned that Special Forces camps along the border at Bu Prang and Duc Lap could expect an attack soon. I told Lieutenant Colonel Frank Simmons, commander of B-23, my boss's boss, that my talents would be wasted on Kate. I had much to do to prepare Camp Bu Prang for the expected attack. I didn't want to go out to Kate and sit on my ass.

Simmons said that he understood my feelings. And that I was going to Kate.

Maybe it was because an “A” Team authorized only one captain and one first lieutenant—but at the moment, ours had one lieutenant and three captains, and I was the greenest of the trio. I presented myself at six feet and
200 whipcord-lean pounds of rough, tough, romping, stomping, face-chewing, bullet-spewing, airborne Green Beret hell—but I'd just turned 21. And I had just pinned on captain's bars. I'd never commanded troops in the field, never heard a shot fired in anger. Surely I was the youngest Special Forces captain in South Vietnam—very likely the youngest captain of any description among the half million American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen stationed there.

So maybe, in Simmons's mind, sending me to sit on my ass on a remote hill for a few weeks was just the thing to start breaking me in. Or something.

•   •   •

A
typical Vietnam-era Green Beret “A” Team of two officers and ten noncoms, A-236 was based in the tiny market town of Bu Prang, close to a contested salient along the porous, ill-defined Cambodian border, and about forty air miles southwest of Buon Ma Thuot, capital city of Dak Lak Province and the strategic linchpin of South Vietnam's enormous but thinly populated Central Highlands region. To save ourselves the anguish of learning Vietnamese and its tones—to most American ears, they are all but indistinguishable from one another—we called Buon Ma Thuot by its initials, BMT.

The highlands are a series of vast, contiguous plateaus bordering the lower part of Laos and northeastern Cambodia. For more than a thousand years, these jungle-covered hills have supported at least thirty distinct tribal societies spread among six different ethnic groups speaking dialects and languages drawn primarily from the Malayo-Polynesian, Tai, and Mon-Khmer language families. Collectively, these minority societies call themselves the Degar.

Until the eighth century, the Degar tribes thrived in the lowlands and valleys along Vietnam's warm, fertile coast. Over the next thousand years, however, they were steadily pushed into the damp, malarial mountains and valleys of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, first by the Cham and Khmer peoples, most of whose descendants now populate Cambodia, and then by the Kinh, the lowland Vietnamese whose ancestors migrated southward from China and multiplied into Vietnam's majority ethnic group.

The first Europeans to encounter the diminutive, dark-skinned
mountain tribesmen were seventeenth-century Jesuits. These French missionaries noted that while the more numerous Kinh had lighter skins, an advanced culture, and a sophisticated language closely related to the neighboring Chinese, the mountain people were seminomadic, Bronze Age primitives subsisting on hunting, gathering, and slash-and-burn agriculture. Possessed of no written language, they worshipped local spirit pantheons and spoke in a babble of tongues. French missionaries dubbed them “Montagnards,” mountain people, and set out to convert both them and the Kinh to Christianity.

The Jesuits modified the Roman alphabet and added diacritics to accommodate the Kinh tonal language (six tones in the north, five in the south), as well as certain vowels and consonants, then translated the Bible into this
quoc ngu,
alphabet. They won many converts among the Kinh, especially in the hunger-haunted, hardscrabble northern regions, but few among the shy peoples of the misty highlands. This was mostly because, every six or seven years, each Montagnard clan abandoned its tiny farmstead, burned its thatched huts, and moved a few miles to another clearing, where they hacked new fields from the thin jungle soil and started over. Missionaries found it hard to maintain contact.

If they clung tenaciously to their old gods and animist spirits, if they resisted change, most Montagnards nevertheless regarded the French as friends, or at least not as enemies. Then and now, however, the Kinh, whether North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, regarded the mountain people as
moi
, literally savages—inferior, even subhuman creatures—and proceeded to murder and subjugate them, meanwhile shamelessly exploiting their lands and resources. To put it plainly: The Kinh view the various Montagnard tribes much as nineteenth-century Americans reckoned the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains—the Lakota, the Pawnee, the Arapaho, the Comanche, the Kiowa, etc. To most Kinh, the only good
moi
is a dead
moi
.

North America's indigenous peoples were considerably better fed than the Montagnards. They were taller, more muscular, longer lived, better suited physically and temperamentally to war, and far quicker to adapt European ways—notably, the horse—in defense of their homes. Neither the
Native American nor the Montagnard had much success resisting the more technologically advanced cultures that invaded them.

Starting in the seventeenth century, France colonized Indochina. After World War II, she granted political autonomy to Montagnards in the Central Highlands' five provinces. The tribes were in no way prepared to capitalize on this: They had been oppressed for so long that they had few educated people, and fewer still that were capable of governing or administering. Despite their supposed sovereignty, nothing changed for them.

In 1952, Vietnam's French puppet emperor, Bao Dai, abolished Montagnard autonomy but allowed them to retain their lands. Two years later the Viet Minh communists drove the French out; the 1954 Geneva Accords placed all Montagnard tribes under the authority of the new South Vietnam government. When Ngo Dinh Diem was elected president in 1955, he immediately labeled the Montagnard, Cham, Khmer, and Chinese peoples “ethnic minorities.” Under the pretense of bringing them into Kinh culture, oppression became systematic and open. Nearly a million lowland Vietnamese were resettled in the highlands on Montagnard lands.

While the highland tribes feared and distrusted the southern Kinh, the northerners presented a greater and more immediate threat to the Degar. Invading their forested slopes, they enslaved able-bodied men as porters, conscripted younger ones into their military, stole food, and, when it suited them, liquidated entire communities.

Seeking safety, by the sixties many Montagnards had abandoned their seminomadic lifestyle to live in government-sponsored villages with rudimentary sanitation and bare-bones social services and schools.

Team A-236 worked with the Montagnard clans in and around Bu Prang, trained their men to defend the community, and recruited able-bodied adults into the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, a kind of mercenary militia equipped as light infantry and deployed in a wide variety of mostly defensive roles.

CIDG was originally a CIA program. Created in 1961, four years before US combat units were deployed, the CIDG was intended to counter expanding Viet Cong influence and control in the Central Highlands, both
to defend settlements against attack and to deny Viet Cong the ability to conscript Montagnards as slave labor.

“A” Teams from the Army's newly minted Special Forces moved into selected Montagnard hamlets and villages and set up “area development centers.” Each small unit drew upon the specialized training of its NCOs in weapons, intelligence, engineering, communications, and medicine. They concentrated on local defense and initiated such civic action projects as digging wells, teaching sanitation essentials to families who had never known soap, and building schools and rudimentary hospitals. Green Berets trained villagers and provided weapons, equipment, and supplies for defense. They handpicked the best militiamen for further training, recruiting them into quick-reaction forces poised to respond to nearby Viet Cong attacks. The program was almost instantly successful. As each village was pacified, it served as a training camp for neighboring settlements.

By 1963, the CIA believed that greater success against the Viet Cong could be realized by moving both CIDG units and Special Forces teams to military control, where they could carry the fight to the enemy instead of waiting to be attacked.

Operation Switchback transferred the CIDG program to MACV. To manage it, the US Army's Fifth Special Forces Group moved to Vietnam from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. CIDG units were employed in support of conventional military operations, especially patrolling border regions. It quickly became apparent that with patience, training, and leadership these diminutive soldiers could become a loyal, reliable, well-disciplined, and highly effective fighting force.

Nevertheless, South Vietnam's systematic oppression of minorities, and especially Montagnards, continued. In 1964, the Montagnard autonomy movement turned militant. On September 20, 1964, the Degar Highlands Liberation Front revolted, killing many government officials. Several sympathetic Special Forces soldiers volunteered to become “hostages” in order to serve as negotiators. Saigon made concessions and released movement leaders from prison. At the insistence of the US Embassy, the Saigon government, then run by a former Diem supporter, General Duong Van
Minh, restored Montagnard institutions and took steps to win back their loyalty.

Still suspicious of Saigon, organizations advocating for autonomy for the Cham and Kampuchean minorities joined with the Montagnards to create an umbrella organization called the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (in French, Front Unifié de Lutte des Races Opprimées). FULRO was chaired by Y Bham Enuol, a charismatic and often-imprisoned Montagnard.

Leaders of the three organizations agreed that their first priority must be to win the war against the Communists. While accepting the need for Montagnard CIDG units, South Vietnam's leaders nevertheless viewed FULRO with hatred and suspicion. FULRO went underground, meeting in secret, biding its time.

•   •   •

THE
CIDG program grew rapidly and was largely effective, but it could not stop the infiltration of PAVN regiments from Laos and Cambodia. By mid-1965, these units were poised for a quick strike at the Central Highlands aimed at cutting the country in half at its narrow waist, where South Vietnam was only fifty miles wide. If the North Vietnamese attacked in force, there was little hope that the undisciplined, poorly trained, and ill-equipped ARVN, with its notoriously corrupt and venal leadership, could stop them.

To counter this threat, in July 1965 the newly appointed South Vietnamese prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, until a few weeks earlier the flamboyant yet relatively obscure VNAF commander, asked President Lyndon Johnson for an immediate infusion of American combat troops.

This was the start of an enormous buildup that would reach, at its peak, more than half a million US soldiers, sailors, aviators, and marines in South Vietnam and its waters. At the same time, billions of US dollars poured into the country to train and advise the ARVN. To support ARVN, US, and other Allied military units, Fifth Special Forces created the Mobile Strike Force. Dubbed the Mike Force, its units were based in each of Vietnam's four military areas and composed of elite, battalion-size CIDG formations led by US Green Beret and Australian Special Air Service advisers.
Mike Force was a “force multiplier,” designed to supplement and enhance conventional military forces.

Mike Force troops were mercenaries, including Chinese Nung tribesmen, feared fighters whose ancestors had been pirates in the Gulf of Tonkin, and members of the Degar tribes, Cambodians, Laotians, and other persecuted minorities: the Bahnar, Nung, Jarai, and Khmer Krom. Collectively, it was a countrywide quick-reaction force “for securing, reinforcing, and recapturing CIDG ‘A' Camps.” Mike Force also conducted long-range recon patrols that reaped valuable intelligence, went on search-and-rescue missions for US and Allied prisoners of war, and carried out raids on PAVN and VC units.

Mike Force also played a critical role in the rescue of downed American airmen. These highly mobile units moved through even the most challenging terrain, and were often stationed close to the so-called Demilitarized Zone between the two Vietnams. Mike Force established and secured drop zones for paratroop landings and landing zones for helicopter assaults. Equipped with the most advanced radios of the era, Mike Force advisers called in artillery and air strikes on high-value targets.

In short, for an eager Special Forces officer anxious for action and yearning to carry the fight to the enemy, Mike Force was the place to be. By 1969, the largest Mike Force unit was based at Pleiku under Headquarters, Fifth Special Forces Group. It had about as many infantrymen as a US Army brigade or regiment, but lacked the combat support elements of these organizations: Mike Force was all teeth, no tail.

Thanks to my older brother, Bob, a Green Beret sergeant, this was what I had envisioned as my combat assignment when I repeatedly volunteered for Vietnam. And that was why, after completing the Army's tough Special Warfare course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, then spending a comparatively laid-back year in Thailand training the Royal Thai Army, I had volunteered yet again for Vietnam.

Thus my assignment as XO of A-236 was something of a disappointment.

Nevertheless, in the weeks since coming to Bu Prang, I had worked
hard at supervising construction of in-depth defenses of the camp and surrounding area to withstand attack by a large, well-equipped, and determined enemy force.