Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (5 page)

When Barham regained control of his troops, he spread them around the hilltop just far enough below the summit that a man could stand erect behind his firing position without being silhouetted against the sky, the so-called military crest. He stationed fewer men on the three steep, almost vertical sides, which rose several meters above the jungle's highest treetops.
He reasoned that attack would be more likely on the gentler slopes. With their entrenching tools, the Montagnards began to hack firing positions from the hard red clay.

“They started digging a perimeter right at the edge of the hill,” Scott recalls. “They started out at about two feet deep and they'd throw the dirt on the outside and put their pup tents inside, uphill, so that they could just slide out of their tents and down into the hole, which was then about three feet deep and three feet wide.”

Mike Smith stepped off the chopper onto Kate and was instantly smitten by the beauty of the landscape before him. “When I first saw it, I thought,
Damn, this is great!
We could see everything. Kate was on a little hill out in the middle of lots of valleys; when I look back on it now, [I realize] Vietnam was a beautiful country,” he recalls. “It was a bald hill with lots of tree cover around it, grassy, but not incredibly tall grass, and with really red, hard-to-dig-in dirt. Filling sandbags was filling dirt bags. From the air it looked like a guitar. The firebase was on the big part of the guitar, then there was a neck, and then a smaller knoll where the fret—the fingerboard—was. In profile it was a big hill, then a little narrow area, and then another hill that we started calling Ambush Hill because it looked like a natural place to set up if you wanted to shoot out the bigger hill.”

Four or five hundred meters to Kate's southeast was a high, steep ridge, thickly forested and ending in a long, sharp summit that gave it the look of a knife blade. It was higher than Kate and much bigger, slanting away to the southeast at some twenty or thirty degrees from the parallel. Kenn Hopkins didn't much like that ridge: “It was within range of my M79 grenade launcher. The enemy could have the high ground,” he wrote.

“Kate was barren of trees; basically it was a place that you could look at and think,
Boy, I could defend this forever,
” says Smith. “We were dropped in by chopper, with a fair amount of ammo, and we set to filling sandbags to protect the ammo, then building rudimentary bunkers to protect the troops. Nobody got to sleep until everyone had overhead cover. That's the way it was, everywhere in 'Nam.”

All that took a couple of days. Even with axes and big shovels, it was hard going. “There was lots of grumbling because people were tired and
worn-out from filling sandbags,” Smith continues. “But as soon as we were all under reasonable cover, we were fine. At that time there was no indication that there was any real problem.”

No problem, except hungry bugs. For their first three days on Kate the artillerymen and their Montagnard security force were under constant assault from tiny, gold-colored insects. “It was about a quarter-inch long and sucked your blood . . . They came up from the south side of the hill in late morning, landed on anything with blood, and began biting. After the first day, when the swarm came up, everyone ran for cover,” Hopkins recalls. The gold bugs were soon superseded by six-legged black critters as big as a man's fist. “They didn't swarm in by the hundreds like the gold bugs, they didn't bite or suck blood, but they were so big that they became a distraction,” Hopkins adds.

While Smith's men were sandbagging gun emplacements, digging bunkers for ammo storage, a command post, and a fire direction center, Charlie Battery's Second Platoon, with two 155 mm howitzers, was building Firebase Susan. Three 105 mm howitzer crews from Second Battalion, 17th Artillery, were meanwhile building Annie. All three bases were named for the daughters and wife of IFFV Artillery's deputy commander, Colonel Anderson.

Kate's three howitzers were of designs that had gone into service almost thirty years earlier. They were built to be towed behind trucks, and were equipped with 180-degree aiming mechanisms designed for wars like WW II and the Korean War. Wars with front lines, where howitzers were emplaced in the rear to fire toward the front. In those wars, guns were usually emplaced with enough overhead cover to protect their crews from a direct hit by enemy artillery.

Vietnam's battlefields, however, lacked front lines. Guns could be tasked to fire at targets through all 360 degrees, and at any angle up to almost vertical. Accordingly, Kate's howitzers had no overhead cover; they were protected only by chest-high sandbag parapets that would allow gunners to level their muzzles for direct fire against close targets.

Before dark on the second day of Kate's creation, two enormous boxes of heavy corrugated steel, called CONEX containers, were airlifted in
beneath Chinooks. Set into a shallow pit, then surrounded and topped with sandbags, one served as Kate's command post, medical aid station, and officer sleeping quarters. The other became the fire direction center, or FDC.

As soon as the FDC was set up, the fire direction officer and his assistant, Specialist Four Bob Johnson, 24, a native New Yorker and recent Cornell graduate, began working with the gun crews and observers on firebases Susan and Annie, fourteen and ten kilometers distant, respectively, to register their guns. This involved picking out a prominent landmark and firing a smoke round at it, then adjusting range and deflection until the target was hit three times. Then, using map and compass, they went on to plot, calculate, and confirm range and deflection data for likely targets around their sister bases and Bu Prang Camp.

Kate, Susan, and Annie, along with a trio of bases around Camp Duc Lap, were the brainchildren of IFFV Artillery planners. They were established to provide artillery support to these camps for the expected PAVN offensive.

•   •   •

SHORT,
wiry, and unusually savvy for a man his age, First Lieutenant Reginald Brockwell, 23, was from Paris, Tennessee, a hundred miles west of Nashville. A Vanderbilt graduate with an ROTC commission, he was trained as a chemical engineer and worked in that field before being called to active duty in October 1968. He was a quick study of his new trade in the artillery business, and a few months in combat with the 5/22 Artillery earned him a reputation as an effective forward observer, an outstanding fire control officer, and an all-around up-and-comer.

In September 1969, shortly after I arrived in Vietnam, Brockwell was tasked to help assemble artillery firing charts as a component of IFFV Artillery's plans for the defense of Bu Prang and Duc Lap.

At the time, IFFV Artillery controlled more than twenty US Army artillery battalions firing about 300 tubes, including 175 mm guns; eight-inch, 155 mm and 105 mm howitzers; 4.2-inch and 81 mm mortars; and M-42 “Dusters”—track-mounted, twin 40 mm Bofors-type cannons—anti-aircraft guns employed as direct-fire anti-personnel weapons.

This arsenal was expected to cover IFFV Artillery's tactical area of responsibility (TAOR), which encompassed 79,140 square kilometers, amounting to 47 percent of South Vietnam's landmass.

•   •   •

US
Army personnel policies then in effect reflected military, medical, and political considerations. In WW II, draftees and enlistees alike had served for the duration of the war. Those in war zones were awarded “points” that shortened their exposure to hazard in direct proportion to the degree of danger they experienced. Thus, an air crewman might be pulled from further flight duty after 25 or 50 missions. An infantryman served fewer months in a frontline unit than a finance clerk in that same unit. In contrast, everyone in Vietnam served a year, unless killed or evacuated for wounds before the year was up. This policy was designed to lower the incidence of what we now call PTSD, and to reduce casualties among draftees. Career soldiers, however, could expect multiple tours, with Stateside or European duty in between.

By 1969, noncoms who had served in World War II and Korea were retiring in droves to avoid another tour in Vietnam. IFFV Artillery thus suffered from a severe shortage of midlevel NCOs in firing batteries and artillery operations billets. To fill this gap, promising men in lower ranks were promoted. The command also had several recent graduates of the Fort Sill NCO Academy. These were junior enlisted men with good technical skills but little or no experience. Even so, the shortage of experienced NCOs for such vital positions as battery first sergeants and gun section chiefs “at times degraded the combat effectiveness of the units,” according to its commanding general's after-action report.

IFFV Artillery was also short of field artillery officers. A third of its captains and almost half its majors had been trained for air defense artillery, which was chiefly surface-to-air missiles with some anti-aircraft guns for low-level defense of tactical units. Most of these officers were assigned to headquarters jobs.

To compound these personnel problems, by 1969 many of the command's guns were wearing out from overuse.

Despite such strictures, IFFV Artillery was obliged to create and staff
a forward post in BMT to coordinate all artillery fire for the defense of Duc Lap and Bu Prang, and to cannibalize its firing battalions to assemble a provisional group—what an infantry or armor commander might call a “task force”—to handle all general support artillery missions in the southern II Corps area. Instead of deploying intact batteries, 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers, with crews and bare-bones fire direction sections, were borrowed or swapped from among the group's firing batteries. These guns and FDC teams were emplaced on fire support bases around Bu Prang and Duc Lap.

The firebase concept was invented in Vietnam, although it would be resurrected decades later for the US war in Afghanistan. Like the isolated forts of the Indian Wars, a firebase was a fortified redoubt, deep in contested territory, or “Indian Country,” often erected on a height and usually supplied by air. A large, permanent base might host an entire artillery battalion, as many as eighteen howitzers. Most firebases, however, deployed a battery of six or fewer. Built by Army engineers, permanent bases included underground ammunition storage, troop billets, a fire direction center, a mess facility, showers, and latrines. Infantry—US, ARVN, or CIDG—dug in on the base perimeter to protect the base from ground attack.

“IFFV's Provisional Artillery Group included all artillery units in southern II Corps under its command; it would establish fire support bases around Bu Prang and Duc Lap,” Brockwell explains. Colonel Francis Bowers, commander of the Provisional Artillery Group, told him that firebases hacked out of the jungle for this campaign were
not
intended to serve as permanent locations. They would get little, if any, engineer support in their construction and would offer none of the creature comforts or amenities found on permanent bases.

Kate's guns were placed under the 5/22's operational control. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Elton Delaune, Jr., the 5/22 was headquartered in Phan Rang. It coordinated the fire from its own batteries, and that of others on firebases. Most of these firebases had guns or fire control sections from one or another battalion. The men on those firebases, however, also reported to their original battery or battalion commanders. Infantry protecting each base against ground attack reported to its own
commanders, be they ARVN, US Army, or CIDG. Green Beret advisers to the CIDG units reported to still another chain of command, that of the Fifth Special Forces Group. Orders, reports, munitions and supply requests, intelligence advisories, and other messages moved by radio, back and forth between levels of each chain of command. Between the multiple parallel command chains, however, there was little communication.

To any reasonable military observer, the low end of the operational chain of command on Kate—the part that actually fired at the enemy—and on other firebases established to support Bu Prang, Duc Lap, and each other was a convoluted mess, resembling nothing quite so much as one of those puzzling yet clearly erotic friezes found on ancient Indian temples—or, as most infantrymen would say, in our profane but eloquent way, a clusterfuck. But I would not learn this fact until much later.

•   •   •

NOT
long after his briefing on the IFFV Artillery firing plans, Brockwell was put on a short list to interview for a new job: aide-de-camp for Colonel Charles Hall, the new commander of IFFV Artillery, who was slated for promotion to brigadier general.

Depending on who you ask, serving as a general's aide is either the best job a junior officer could aspire to or the worst, most thankless duty ever invented. On the plus side, it was an opportunity for a young officer to observe firsthand how large Army organizations are run, how generals actually carry out their duties, and to some extent what goes through senior commanders' minds when making decisions. A successful tour as a general's aide would lead to accelerated promotion and elevated odds of eventually wearing a general's star. Since the end of World War II, there has hardly been a general in the US Army who did
not
serve as an aide at least once in his or her career.

On the downside, it was a 24/7 job that quickly lost the aide every Army buddy he'd ever had. He was at the general's beck and call, expected to serve as his eyes and ears, playing no favorites, reporting what he observed directly to the general, carrying private messages not meant for the record up and down the chain of command. An aide was presumed to speak for the general he represented, which created potentially awkward
situations when he addressed officers far more senior than himself. The young aide might be his general's sounding board, or his errand boy, but either way, none of his brother officers would ever treat him with the same sense of comradeship that they had once shared.