Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (23 page)

Except for the faint buzz of the Skyraider orbiting overhead, it was eerily quiet. For the first time in five days, I was not actively involved in
defending Kate, and I had a few minutes to reflect. I ran through our E&E plan again in my mind. I couldn't see how it could possibly work—but I also couldn't think of anything better.

A Shadow gunship had been promised for an hour after dark, and I listened to my PRC/25 radio for his call. I wanted to start the E&E now—
right
now. Waiting was brutal.

Thinking ahead, Pierelli had positioned his infrared strobe light in the center of Kate. Once we departed, this light would become a beacon that would serve as Shadow's reference point.

For the first time since arriving on Kate, I was in a situation that I could not control in any way. The enemy had attacked us almost without pause for days—and I expected them to renew their assault at any moment. What was going on in the darkness beneath our summit? What was PAVN waiting for? What were they up to?

Then came word from Main Tripod—Bu Prang Camp's new call sign. The Shadow we expected at about 1900 hours had experienced mechanical problems and returned to base. We would have to wait a little longer, until a second bird could be scrambled.

“I'd seen a Spooky in action the night before I got hit,” says Mike Smith. “Spooky 41 was the number I remembered. [That night] a Spooky was supposed to be on-site; we all watched the sun go down, then it got darker and darker and there's no Spooky. It was like something in a movie, where at the last minute the cavalry comes riding over the hill to save the good guys. But now it's
really
dark, we're ready to go—and Jesus, where the hell is the guy? My heart sank.
Maybe,
I thought,
the cavalry can't make it. Maybe there's
not
going to be a Spooky.
”

Koon: “There was a rumor about the Montagnard leader that if any of his men were badly wounded, and had to be carried or something, he'd shoot them. He wouldn't let that slow us down. If they couldn't make it on their own two feet, too bad.”

About 1930 hours, with everyone nervous and antsy, Main Tripod called again: The second Shadow had also experienced a mechanical problem and had to abort the mission. We would have to wait for a Spooky to be scrambled in its place.

I got back on the radio with Spad Zero Two; Major Helmich told me that he was low on fuel. To return the hundred miles to Pleiku Air Base, he could cruise at 200 miles per hour, burning comparatively little gas. Or he could land at BMT or Nha Trang to refuel. But a strafing run meant cranking his giant Wright Duplex-Cyclone engine to turn out every one of its 2,700 horses. He'd dive at 335 miles per hour, followed by a high-speed climb back to altitude—and all that sucks up a lot of the high-octane stuff. Helmich said that he could stick around a little longer, but that he had fuel enough for only one more strafing pass.

So now it's nut-cutting time: Do we stay and wait for Spooky, or take our chances with just the Spad and a single strafing pass? I decided to save the Spad for our walk-out, in case we were attacked.

But we couldn't wait much longer to leave.

He brings his regiment home—

Not as they filed two years before,

But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn,

Like castaway sailors, who—stunned

By the surf's loud roar,

Their mates dragged back and seen no more—

Again and again breast the surge,

And at last crawl, spent, to shore.

—Herman Melville, “The College Colonel”

B
y 1940 hours, I decided that if a Spooky gunship was coming, it ought to be within radio range. Big Tex Rogers had volunteered to carry my radio and serve as my RTO. As the artillerymen crowded around in the darkness, I took the handset and called Spooky.

No answer.

I waited an eternity—maybe two minutes—and called again.

No answer.

I tried a third time.

No answer.

Frustrated and angry, I turned to Tex. “This damn radio isn't working!” I hissed into the gloom. Tex swallowed a smile. In his calm, amused Southern drawl, he whispered, “Sir, you need to release the push-to-talk switch.”

Those tactical radios operate on a single frequency. When I squeezed the handset “talk” button, it disabled the receiver and turned on the transmitter. I looked down at my hand: I held the push-to-talk in a death grip. My transmitter was
on
, my receiver
off
. I relaxed my hand, releasing the switch.

“All of a sudden the radio goes, ‘This is Spooky 4-1; we're coming in,'” says Lieutenant Mike Smith. “Everybody got excited—the cavalry was riding to our rescue.”

Embarrassed, I managed to mumble thanks to Tex. Again I understood that I was just as frightened as everyone else. Panic is more contagious than the common cold. If we were to have any chance to get out alive, I needed to remain calm and focused.

Silently, cloaked by the night, I now made my peace with the Almighty. I resigned myself to the realization that I would not see another sunrise: I could not envision a scenario where this would end well. Not only did I
know
that I would die, I knew
where
it would be: as I entered the gap in the jungle leading to Ambush Hill.

So I prayed not for my own life but for the lives of those who had been entrusted to me. And then, unbidden and unexpected, I was filled with a sense of calmness and well-being. It felt like a good night to die.

“Alabama” Dykes was again Spooky's mission commander. It would be a little while before he would be in position to fire for us.

I didn't want to leave anyone behind, so I told the men that I was going to run back to the south end and make sure. Turning to leave, I heard gunfire—small arms—coming from that direction.

“The captain said that he was going to run back to the other end,” recalls Nelson Koon. “He said if he's not back in five minutes, to leave without him. We all said, ‘If you don't come back, we ain't going anywhere,' because we didn't know the lay of the land like he did. So everybody was shaking hands and whispering, ‘Well, if I don't make it out and you do, get ahold of my parents and let them know what happened here.'”

It took only seconds to reach the south end. The shooting had stopped. All our foxholes and fighting positions were empty. As I squatted on my haunches in the darkness, listening, I heard, faint but clear, the unmistakable sound of barbed wire being snipped. And the muffled clatter of sandals moving up the hillside. They were no more than fifty meters down the hill and coming! The hair on my back and neck stood up; I started back for the north end. Then I heard the soft, evil cough of a nearby mortar firing, and
went prone just as the first round exploded a few meters away. Then another blast, a little farther north. A few seconds later, another—the enemy was walking fire south to north along the length of the firebase toward where everyone was massed for evacuation. When the barrage ended, I ran to the north end to find that one man had been killed. Then came a popping sound from high above—a mortar illumination flare. Then another pop, and then another.

Kate was naked to any observer on the eastern ridge. Everybody flattened on the hard ground. My heart was a kettledrum, threatening to explode from my chest—I was certain that hundreds of enemy infantry were about to spill over the south crest and come at us, firing.

There was no time to lose. When the last flare burned out, I jumped to my feet and announced that we were leaving. But before we took more than a few steps, our point man, in the act of clearing our wire for the main body to pass through, accidentally set off a trip flare. Again, everyone hit the ground. As the shifting, unearthly orange light of the flare floated down on us, we waited for the mortars. None came. That flare seemed to burn forever before it sputtered out.

Everyone got back on their feet. For a moment, it was utterly still. Then I heard the welcome sound of the Skyraider diving low toward our hilltop, hoping to make the neighborhood bullies think that he was on a strafing run. But as he barreled over, low and fast, he didn't fire; I knew that he was low on fuel and almost out of ammo.

I expected a Mike Force element to be waiting at the foot of Ambush Hill. I had been told that they would lead us to their main body, a few miles away. To make it easier to enter their perimeter, I put everyone into a single file.

I gave the order and we moved out—but after forty or fifty meters, the line stopped. I worked my way to the front and found the point man twenty meters from the gap leading to Ambush Hill. Frozen with fear, he was unable to move forward. Spooky was still too far to fire and clear our path. The enemy was on our heels; I must act immediately.

I moved up and took the point.

I understood that I was about to die. But it had to be done, and there was no one else. My carbine was slung beneath my right arm and held waist-high on full automatic, my finger resting on the trigger. I gripped the radio handset in my left hand.

“Follow me,” I said, and stepped into the night.

At a rapid walk, I led the column into and then through the gap, well aware that it was a textbook example of a perfect ambush choke point.

As the troops moved past me and into the open, Tex and I remained at the mouth of the gap until Pierelli, who I had stationed near the middle of the column, relieved me. His job was to ensure that the troops stayed together and kept moving. Because I was all but certain that the enemy would come up behind us, I instructed Dan to form a small rear guard to cover our withdrawal. He was the one man that I was comfortable entrusting with this vital task.

In earlier clear radio traffic with Spooky and Shadow about our planned escape, I tried to make sure that they knew our precise route. This was critical, because we expected one or the other to fire its miniguns ahead of us. My plan was to bring our column across the open space toward Ambush Hill, and then descend to the west, or left, of the hilltop, thereby avoiding what I believed was the heaviest enemy concentration, then link up with the waiting Mike Force.

Now, unexpectedly, I found myself near the gap and out of position to direct the point man. I had briefed him on the importance of turning leftward out of the gap, and then to pass to the left of Ambush Hill's wooded summit. In the darkness, however, I couldn't tell if the man who had minutes earlier frozen was still on point, or if someone had taken his place. Guided by the hand of God, he led the column to the
east
,
or right, of Ambush Hill. I was annoyed and worried, until I realized that without Spooky overhead to clear the way, the exact route was less important than avoiding contact.

And by this time, the main body of the column was committed and moving rightward. In a few minutes, we passed close to the top of Ambush Hill; had an enemy force been concealed in the trees and brush near the summit, it was so dark that we could not have seen them.

But there was neither sign nor sound of the enemy as we started down the slope toward the wood line near where, three days earlier, my patrol had been ambushed and the point man mortally wounded. The head of the column entered thick, pitch-black jungle, dimpled here and there with deep bomb craters, many fringed by the battered remnants of trees—King Kong's obstacle course, with giant toothpicks haphazardly studded across it. In minutes, the troops were dangerously disorganized and scattered everywhere. Pierelli and I began grabbing men, pushing or pulling them back into the column, trying to restore order and discipline. By remaining at the jungle's edge, we got the men headed away from Kate in a northerly, downhill direction, making sure that each followed the boots in front of him.

I got on the radio and called the Mike Force element waiting below us to advise them that I was about to enter their perimeter.

No answer.

A moment later, SAS Major Brydon, the commander of both Mike Force battalions in the vicinity, replied from Bu Prang.

No Mike Force troops awaited us below Ambush Hill, he said.

They were miles away, to the northwest, and we would have to find them.

I was pissed, but before I could react to this shocker, great green balls of fire came hurtling down the slope, just over our heads, and the stuttering roar of a heavy machine gun broke the silence. I thought that Spooky was firing on us.

I yelled, “Cease fire!” into the radio. The Skyraider pilot came back that Spooky was not firing and wasn't yet on station. Then, through the foliage, I saw that the fire was coming from the top of Ambush Hill.

Warren Geromin: “We were trying to avoid a North Vietnamese .51-caliber [12.7 mm] machine gun, and when that opened up, oh man, it was like a flaming thing with green tracer rounds like strobe lights that just lit up! We were close enough to see the muzzle flashes—I could almost see the crew members on the gun—something dark, moving around. We stopped and somebody poked me and said, ‘Geromin, open fire,' and I thought,
Wait a minute; something's not right
. Then the gun opened up again and I could see through that green light that our guys were between
me and the gun—we were going downhill. If I had fired, I'd have gotten them first. Then the Yards who were near the gun started throwing hand grenades at it. Someone yelled that the enemy was shelling us, and we tried to run but couldn't get far because there were so many bomb craters there at the bottom of the hill and it was pitch-dark.

“So I did something that we'd been told never to do—if we got lost, we weren't supposed to light anything, but because everything was so messed up, I lit a cigarette lighter real quick, because nobody was expecting to see a North Vietnamese soldier who was speaking English. Someone recognized me. He said, ‘Okay, put out the lights; we'll have to figure this one out.'”

“There were a couple of areas where the ground was mush,” recalls Pierelli. “When a bomb hits, it really breaks up the ground, so there were times when we would walk into and out of a crater. About a half hour into this, once we scattered in there, I heard somebody yell, ‘Sarge, Sarge!' When we were on the hill, we knew where our people were, who was with whom, so they knew where I was. I said, ‘What's the matter?' [An unidentified American soldier] said, ‘We're lost! I can't find the people up front—I lost them!'

“I gathered everybody around and said, ‘Look, be quiet, here's what we're going to do: I'm going to go first; the man behind me is going to grab my web gear. Everybody hold on to the person in front of you, and we're going to do that until everybody's hooked up. Under no conditions do you let go.' I also told them that we had to be completely quiet so that we could hear the enemy; you learn that in basic, that sound travels farther at night. I listened, and off in the distance I heard somebody walking, breaking brush. So I started going, and about every thirty or forty steps I'd stop, I'd listen; we were getting a little closer. I did that about five or six times and found the guys up front, but I wanted to make sure that I was following the right people,” Pierelli continues.

“I could hear English being spoken, so I went up to whoever it was, an artillery guy, but by that time we were walking away from that machine gun, we were moving about ninety degrees away from him, we were distancing
ourselves from the enemy. We started this E&E about 2000 hours, full darkness, but fortunately it wasn't pitch-black; otherwise it could've been a real disaster.”

About then, Mike Smith, very near to Pierelli in the darkness, was having second thoughts about being in the dark jungle. “The night belongs to Charlie,” he says. “We'd learned that. And I'm an artillery guy. I've never walked around in a jungle in a combat situation. We were all afraid, but we're not stupid; we knew that we had to do something, that we had to keep going.”

Koon: “Before we left, Captain Albracht told us, ‘If we take fire, don't shoot back. They might be trying to recon by fire. They may not know where we are, but if we shoot back, then they'll know.' Some of the guys had left their M16 and everything else. They walked off with nothing. Once the flare went out, we started down the hill and we're out [where Ambush Hill descends into the jungle] and a machine gun opens up on us.

“Some of the Montagnards were afraid to go into the jungle. They didn't know what was in there, but they knew we were surrounded. But once that machine gun opened up, those Montagnards beat feet for the tree line.

“Albracht had to try to stop them and all of us. We ran into the tree line and guys were yelling, ‘US!' to let them know that we were Americans and which ones were Montagnards. Then we're down in the jungle and the tracers are going over our heads because they couldn't get their barrel down low enough to hit us. We hit the dirt, and then this guy, a staff sergeant, laid his M16 across my arm and opens up, trying to hit that damned machine gun. Somebody said cease fire to him, and he stopped.”

I believe that Koon is correct: After I realized that it wasn't Spooky, I recognized the gun firing at us as a PAVN 12.7 mm, a crew-served machine gun. But why was this tripod-mounted weapon firing over our heads? It had to be because, like the GI version that it was modeled on, that big, heavy gun was attached to a traversing and elevating mechanism. That supported the heavier end, and allowed the gunner to sight and zero in on distant targets, and return to them later. This T&E device has a limited
amount of vertical travel, both up and down, and the steep angle at which our hillside declined exceeded the limits of the mechanism. In simple terms, the PAVN gunner couldn't lower the weapon's muzzle far enough to hit us. Had the crew known in advance that it was going to be firing that low, of course, they could have dug out the hillside and sited their gun properly. That makes me think that they had hastily moved the gun from where they had set up, on the other flank of Ambush Hill.