Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (26 page)

A
few days after we walked out, I was in B-23's club in BMT putting away a few beers, and I saw Danny Pierelli. I went over and sat down, and we caught up for the first time since we got back to Bu Prang. Then I told him that I was going to the Mike Force in Pleiku. I was very happy about it, and it showed.

Dan didn't get it. He sort of blinked. “What?” he said.

“I'm going to the Mike Force. I couldn't get in it when I first arrived in-country, because I had no combat experience. Now I do, and the group commander says he'll approve my transfer.”

Dan kind of blinked again.

I plowed ahead. “I'm sure that I can get
you
in too.”

Now I had his full attention. Dan stared at me as if my face were green with purple polka dots.

“You're absolutely insane,” he said—and that caught me off guard.

“What? We're Special Forces! This
is what we
do
!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why wouldn't you want to be in the most elite unit of an elite force?”
I asked, and he shook his head as though I were a child without a brain in my tiny noggin.

“No,” replied Dan. “
I
am going to get a job back here at the ‘B' Team.
I
am going to send radio transmissions. From
here
, in Ban Me Thuot. And when my tour is up, I'm going to go home.”

It was my turn to stare. He shook his head yet again.

“Bill. I'm done,” he said. “And you! The Mike Force? You're absolutely insane.”

Maybe
so.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

—William Shakespeare,
Henry V

I
have stayed in touch with some of the men with whom I served on Kate. Among these, a few maintained contact with still other Kate alumni. When we began to assemble research for this book, we were able to find a few others. Nevertheless, we were able to speak with less than half of the Americans who actually served on Firebase Kate. What follows is a brief description of what became of those with whom I could reconnect, and a few of those with whom I could not. I greatly regret that we were not able to speak with every single American soldier who served under enemy fire on Kate.

Klaus Adam

Klaus flew back to Kate a few days after we escaped; by then it was a smoking ruin. He stayed just long enough to do a bomb damage assessment so that he could submit paperwork supporting combat loss reports for the howitzers and other Charlie Battery equipment that he was responsible for as commanding officer. While acknowledging that Kate had borne the brunt of the fighting, Adam also wanted to be sure that we knew that “the
guys at Annie and Susan all busted their nut to support Kate. Unfortunately, we were too far in range, and that was where the tactical error was made.”

Adam rotated home in early 1970, transitioned from the Army Reserve to the Regular Army, transferred to the Signal Corps, and served twenty-seven years before retiring as a major. He lives near Killeen, Texas, where he is highly respected for his community and church work.

John Ahearn

After bringing Lieutenant Maurice Zollner to Kate, Ahearn flew back to his base at BMT. It was dark when he landed; he parked his Huey, then reported in to operations. “The next morning I'm having breakfast,” Ahearn recalls, “and our assistant maintenance officer gets me out of the mess hall and chews my ass up one side and down the other. There were holes in my aircraft tail boom. The gunship pilots thought it could have been shrapnel from rockets because they were putting them right under me as I approached. Shrapnel or bullet holes, who knew? It was bad form on my part not to have found the holes, but it was dark and we weren't going to stand out there with a flashlight—there were always North Vietnamese lurking around the perimeter.”

Less than a month later, Ahearn flew a resupply mission to a microwave radio relay station on the lip of a dormant volcano south of Dak Lak. This was hands down the most dangerous spot in all South Vietnam for a helicopter. “The site was very actively under attack,” he recalls. “North Vietnamese were outside and inside the volcano. I did a fast approach and dropped off supplies, picked up wounded, and on the way out I got hit in the legs with a couple of AK-47 rounds.”

His copilot, Larry Pluhar, flew him and the other wounded to safety.

“Forty years later, I found out that the mission was actually a check ride to qualify me to become the province adviser's aircraft commander,” he says with a sigh.

Ahearn left Vietnam in an Air Force ambulance plane on December 8, his 24th birthday. “I went to Camp Zama in Tokyo,” he recalls. “I was very fortunate that they saved my left leg—it was touch-and-go about losing it.”

Ahearn was then evacuated to St. Albans Naval Hospital, near his home in New York City. A few months later, while recovering from one in a series of reconstructive surgeries, he received word that his friend Marlin Johnson, copilot on his only mission to Kate, was killed in action on April 20, 1970.

Ahearn remained at St. Albans until the following August. “The Navy orthopedic surgeon told me very directly that I wouldn't pass a flight physical again and I should start thinking about a new career,” he recalls. “I had a wife and an infant son, and a lot of time to sit in a hospital bed thinking about how I was going to make a living. I realized that if I couldn't fly, I didn't want to be an engineer.”

Before he was wounded, Ahearn had been assigned the additional duty of unit property book officer—essentially a bookkeeper charged with maintaining records of all accountable property in the company, from helicopters and spare parts to machine guns and the mess hall coffeemaker. “I was successful at that job, and that led me to go back to school and get a degree in accounting. Then I got an MBA in finance, and became a CPA. I joined an accounting firm and had a very successful corporate career.”

Now retired, Ahearn lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Lucian “Luke” Barham

Barham's recollections of his time on Kate are, by his own description, hazy and incomplete. He recalls relieving another Special Forces officer soon after Kate was established, but cannot recall his name or rank. He also recalls having
two
Special Forces noncoms with him during his weeks on Kate, but cannot recall their names. He does, however, insist that he went on daily recon patrols and saw no sign of the enemy. He was replaced on Kate by an officer whom he recalls only as a “Lieutenant Silver,” in order that he could take command of Team A-234 at An Lac.

“Maybe that wasn't his name—I heard that he got a Silver Star, so maybe that's why I remember him as Lieutenant Silver,” Barham says.

Barham returned to Vietnam in 1972 for about three months on a classified mission called Project Friday Gap. This was a Military Intelligence
operation to instruct men from Cambodia's short-lived Khmer Republic in Special Forces staff procedures. (Recall that Barham speaks Cambodian.) These students returned to Cambodia to become the staff for Khmer Special Forces. The Khmer Republic was swept away by the genocidal Khmer Rouge in 1975.

Barham left the Army in 1973 as a captain. In 1975 he was hired as a civilian contractor to train Saudi Arabia's National Guard, an elite palace guard. In 1980 he switched employers to work on the Saudi Naval Expansion Program. When he returned to the States in 1985, Barham went into construction; he owned a construction company in Utah. In 2005 he was employed as a contractor in support of FEMA for the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. In 2012 he went to New York for FEMA in support of the Hurricane Sandy recovery effort. His home is in Summerdale, Alabama.

Francis “Butch” Barnes

Butch, who served on Firebase Susan and whose gun was taken out of service just when Kate needed it the most, now lives in Antioch, California, and is an engine maintenance supervisor for Delta Airlines.

Nolan Black

Shortly after Kate was abandoned, the remains of Nolan Black and his crew were recovered by elements of the 7/17th Cavalry. The stunning Washington, DC, memorial wall listing the names of America's fallen in the Vietnam War has spawned several adjuncts, including a searchable database of the names on the wall. Comments are allowed, and what follows here was taken from the public comments on Black's page. They are in many ways typical of comments for all who were lost in this war.

From Black's Widow, Carol:

Nolan, I miss you as though you left us yesterday, and here it is 30-plus years later . . . I feel your presence at times, as if you've never left. Laura is a
beautiful woman, you would be so proud of her. She is kind, loving and strong. She was married a month ago. Dad gave her away and it was beautiful! I felt as if you and Mom were there, looking down on her. Others have written about knowing you while in Vietnam . . . While it is painful, it is also beautiful to know that you are being remembered and held close to their hearts, too. I love you, miss you and am proud of you.

Carol, Later:

Happy 60th Birthday. I have been thinking of you a lot lately. Wondering what you would look like as a 60-year-old. Somehow, all I can picture is the way you were the last time I saw you. Laura and I were talking about you last evening. We played a little “I wonder, what would have happened, if you came back.” I pictured you having retired from the Army as a jet pilot
[
sic
] and now working for UPS, doing their flights. We would have been able to take some of those trips we talked about. Maybe even bought the house on the ocean we dreamed of. I saw a happy family, with you enjoying Laura's daughters, your granddaughters Sarah and Ashley. I know you would have been every bit the loving grandpa, as you were the loving daddy. You would have been the strong dad for Laura as she went through her painful divorce. We would have continued to grow in our love for one another, and in our faith in God. Happy birthday, keep flying high and wait for me. Someday, we will fly together, forever.

From His Daughter, Laura:

I was born in 8/68, so I never really got to know my father “in person,” but through my mother, Carol, and my grandparents, I have come to know him. I know he loved to fly and was proud to serve his country, so I know that his death was not in vain. I was brought up to be proud of him and all others who have fought. A Purple Heart Chapter in Wisconsin bears his name. He lives on, through us and all others. I am very proud, of him and all the other heroes, alive, or gone, but not forgotten.

I wanted to thank all the guys who have written me letters about my dad. They mean more to me than you could ever know. Please continue.

From Steven Parker, a Roommate in Vietnam

I think of you often. I remember the late-night conversations about your family, your dreams, fears, your dedication. I also remember the day you died, in support of Firebase Kate. It still wakes me at night. From all the Blue Stars and Jokers. God Speed, Nolan, keep watch for us, we're right there on your wing. Catch the wind.

After Nolan's death Carol remarried. She believes that her Nolan is
“with the Lord in heaven, living the rest of eternity at peace surrounded by the love he so well deserves,”
she wrote. Their daughter, Laura
“is a wonderful, devoted mother and grandmother who . . . exemplifies the love of a mother for her children.”
Laura has connected with two other children of her birth mother.

Carol says that she now lives a life
“filled with sorrow, joy, peace, struggles and the bittersweet memories of the first love of my life, Nolan Eugene Black. A part of my heart was torn from me when he died, and it remains gone to this day. The raw edges have scarred over with time, but the missing piece is with him.”

Reg Brockwell

Brockwell left Vietnam in March 1970 and spent the remainder of his two-year service at Fort Sill as an assistant operations officer. “I was offered the general's aide position if I'd extend for six months in Vietnam,” he explains. “By that time, I'd decided I wouldn't stay there six more minutes.”

After release from active duty, Brockwell returned to Houston and resumed his former job at Shell Oil. “About forty of us had gotten out of the military at roughly the same time,” he recalls. “Shell told us that we had a year, because that's what [a federal law said] they had to give us, but we'd better find another job. Sure enough, at the end of the year they called us all into an auditorium and told us we were gone. I looked for another chemical engineering job, but couldn't find one that I liked or that I felt was suitable. Trading stocks was my hobby, and one day my Merrill Lynch stockbroker asked me if I'd ever thought about doing that for a living. I tried
it, and I loved it, and 35 years later I retired and converted it back into a hobby.”

This book would never have been written without a big push from Brockwell: “Initially I was going through a lot of documents trying to find out what had happened to a Bronze Star that I'd been told that I'd been awarded—I
had
been awarded one in an impact ceremony, but the paperwork had never come through,” he explains. “In Vietnam it was
Go here and do this
, and
Go there and do that
. I had no idea what the big picture was. After I came home, I started looking at the big picture. I had a recurring nightmare at the time where I was walking into this village and it said, ‘Welcome to Bon Sar Pa.' I had no idea where it was. I don't know if it was suppression or what, but in my nightmare I was always in a situation where I was totally overwhelmed. Then, in the mid-seventies, I saw a movie starring Burt Lancaster called
Go Tell the Spartans
, which was based on a book called
Incident at Muc Wa
. A small firebase was surrounded, and the people had to walk off. [In Vietnamese,
muc wa
means “too much.”] All were killed except one. I went back and started looking at some maps and I saw that Bon Sar Pa was on the road between Duc Lap and Bu Prang, and close to a volcano near [firebases] Martha and Helen.”

He continues. “Things started coming back to me. I read a booklet written by an SF soldier,
Special Forces at War
,
and he mentioned . . . Kate, Annie, and Susan. I remembered still more and started doing some research through the archives in 1992. Later I went out to Texas Tech and used their archives of the Vietnam War.

“I began to realize that I was selfishly looking for a potential Bronze Star, and some of the people on this firebase, namely Bill Albracht, had received nothing for what I considered to be a very heroic deed. So I interviewed Major Lattin and several other people along the way, and I was finally able to get in touch with Albracht and [confirmed] that he didn't receive any recognition for [his role as Kate's commander]. Then I talked to Sergeant Pierelli and, beginning in 2005, I wrote
The Battle for LZ Kate
, copyrighted it in 2007 [and then posted on the Internet] for the sole purpose
of [revealing] what, at that time, was probably the better-known, but least publicized, battle of the war.

“As I did the research, things kept coming back. I was going through my pictures one day and looked at those that I'd taken of the 105 crew from Kate who had lost Norton. The 5th of the 27th artillery ended up naming a firebase for Norton, but when you think about what had happened to Ron Ross and Michael Norton, it was really depressing. Nobody seemed to have a handle on what was going on. It almost seemed like the US military had said, ‘We just have to write this bad deal off.' It almost came down to the point that they said, ‘There's nothing that we can do.'