Abandoned in Hell _The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate Read online

  INTRODUCTION

  This is the tale of an almost forgotten fight for a small, worthless hilltop in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. It is about some of the finest soldiers who ever served their country. It is a chronicle of shared hardship and danger, of the very young men with whom I served and their constant, casual courage. It is an attempt to describe functioning as a soldier while gripped by deathly fear, the soul-shattering effects of betrayal, and the lifetime bonds that form between fighting men. It is also about the life-changing loss of innocence that follows the death of a close comrade. In a lesser way, it is about a tiny part of a large, strategically vital campaign.

  The five-day siege of Firebase Kate took place in 1969, at a turning point in what now seems like an ancient and misbegotten conflict. Four years earlier, American ground forces went to war against a well-armed and highly motivated North Vietnamese invasion force. America sent its best troops into battle, sent them to grapple with the enemy, to punish and to kill, certainly, but also to take our foe’s measure and to learn if and how a road to victory was possible.

  The year 1969 marked the abandonment of that road. Kate was an ephemeral, cautionary signpost in history’s rearview mirror on what would become a detour to a costly and ignominious failure.

  As late as the previous year, the route to American victory had appeared to be well paved and wide-open. Defeated in the field at every turn, the Viet Cong were seemingly reduced to small, mostly homegrown guerrilla bands. They were a nuisance, but no longer much of a threat. The 1965 invasion by the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), as the North Vietnamese Army called itself, had been turned around by a half million American and Allied troops. Pursued by our highly mobile infantry, attacked high and low by our deadly warplanes, pounded by our armed helicopters and long-range artillery, the PAVN fought hard and fought well but repeatedly was forced to retreat to its sanctuaries in supposedly neutral Cambodia and Laos. Hanoi’s official records show that at least twenty-four PAVN or Viet Cong were killed for every American whose name would be engraved on our wall of tears on the Washington Mall.

  Meanwhile, day after day, US bombers flattened Hanoi and its environs, to say nothing of large parts of South Vietnam, with thousands of tons of explosives—more bombs than were dropped by all sides during World War II. Through America’s largely compliant media, top Pentagon and White House officials assured the nation that even with support from the Soviet Union and Red China, a country as small and resource-poor as North Vietnam could not prosecute war on this scale much longer.

  Then came Tet, a national and regional celebration of the Chinese lunar new year. Until 1968, in the course of this war, Tet was a brief midwinter pause for an informal countrywide truce. Tet 1968 was instead a surprise surge of simultaneous, well-coordinated, and deadly Viet Cong attacks on every major city in South Vietnam. Tet was a shock to America’s nervous system, a blow to the national solar plexus.

  From a purely military perspective, however, the Tet Offensive was a Viet Cong disaster. The nationwide civilian uprising against American forces that the VC had expected to trigger died stillborn. Fighting in some cities persisted for months; when it was over, most of the best VC troops, and virtually all its experienced leaders, were dead.

  In addition, and not least, the usually lethargic Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam, the ARVN, which bore the brunt of Tet’s urban fighting, acquitted itself with surprising distinction: “Initially outnumbered and under fierce attack, the ARVN closed ranks and fought,” wrote General Nguyen Cao Ky, then vice president, and a former commander of the South Vietnam Air Force (VNAF). “From the top down, senior officers led by example, sharing the risks of battle . . . We kicked the VC out of our cities, we kicked their ass. The little Vietnamese soldier will fight hard under good leadership.”1

  Tet was nevertheless a huge propaganda victory for the Hanoi regime. It told the American public that the Pentagon’s rosy predictions of imminent victory were at best wishful thinking but possibly a campaign of deliberate deception. Millions of Americans held a personal stake in the war—those who had served in Vietnam and those at or near draft age who could expect to be called up, as well as their families and loved ones. After Tet, a large and noisy proportion of these citizens demanded an end to the war.

  The public relations disaster of the Tet Offensive forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon his quest for a second full term. It helped to enable former vice president Richard M. Nixon to win the White House on a fuzzy platform that included a “secret plan” to end the war.

  Soon after his inauguration in January 1969, Nixon revealed this plan: Under “Vietnamization,” the ARVN, whose petite soldiers struggled with large, heavy, obsolete American weapons left over from World War II, was to be equipped with the same weaponry as US units. ARVN was then to gradually take over the ground war. America would fund a rapid expansion of the VNAF, and provide air, artillery, and logistical support to the ARVN. As they engaged the enemy, America would disengage.

  By late 1969, most of the million-man ARVN was equipped with lightweight, modern infantry weapons, supported by American and VNAF airpower and an enormous collection of US artillery, and sustained by a generous and efficient US logistics system.

  An impatient White House now demanded that ARVN demonstrate the commander in chief’s wisdom: South Vietnamese units must start to take the lead in ground combat. They must fight and win battles. Americans were expected to do everything in their power to help make that happen.

  If that was Washington’s view of things, it was not necessarily what the Saigon leadership, singular and plural, might have wished for. And it was not necessarily realistic: For one thing, the easy familiarity that American officers and senior noncoms had with complex, combined-arms operations, with coordinating the movement of men and machines—tanks, artillery, aircraft—through four dimensions of time and space while dealing with complex logistics, as well as making full use of the capabilities of helicopters, represented skills that few ARVN officers had acquired, particularly at the company and battalion levels, where they were most needed. Moreover, virtually every man in every US combat unit could read and write and was hands-on familiar with machinery; the typical ARVN soldier was a peasant with fewer than five years of schooling and little experience with machinery, much less the complex apparatus of modern warfare. After 1969, it was not unusual to hear of ARVN artillery shelling its own troops, or of a VNAF strike on friendlies or civilians. Exhibit One: Associated Press photographer Nick Ut’s horrifying photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked from a VNAF napalm strike on her village. And that was in 1972.

  ARVN also lacked an effective logistical system, and much of the war material provided by the US was siphoned off through a web of graft. ARVN troops in the field were often expected to forage for their own food, a huge distraction and an unwanted burden that did not endear them to the local populace.

  While these obstacles could be overcome with time and patience, both were in as short supply in the White House as in the Pentagon.

  Not incidentally, ARVN’s generals and colonels realized that the departure of US forces would dam the Niagara of American cash—billions every month—flowing into South Vietnam’s war economy, much of which trickled into their own pockets. They therefore sought to find ways to postpone the day when that river ran dry.

  Just as unwelcome in Saigon was the fact that taking over the ground war inevitably meant many more ARVN casualties, which from the beginning of the war had been anathema to its commanders. This was, and still is, hard for Americans to accept: By the end of 1969, upwards of 220 GIs were zipped into body bags every week. Americans served one-year tours, however, while ARVN’s troops remained in uniform until they were killed, horribly maimed, or too old to fight. And America’s population was a dozen times the size of South Vietnam’s 16 million people.

  Moreover, despite the influx of new weapons and hardware, despite advisers, training programs, and the demonstra
ted capacity of properly led Vietnamese soldiers to fight well, many ARVN units were even less than what they seemed.

  According to General Nguyen Cao Ky, as many as 10 percent, and in infantry units, even more, of the ARVN’s rank and file were “ghost soldiers,” young men whose well-to-do families bribed a senior commander to report them present for duty while they were in fact happily elsewhere. Legions of these young draft dodgers, dubbed Saigon Cowboys, roamed the capital mounted on new Japanese motorbikes, noisily peddling black-market goods, illicit drugs, and prostitutes, mostly to Americans. Other draft dodgers worked in family businesses. Thousands lived or studied abroad.

  Ghost soldiers’ salaries disappeared into their commander’s pocket; he also sold their rations, uniforms, and sometimes even their weapons. Regimental and battalion commanders knew that any period of protracted combat would reveal the hollowness of their formations. They therefore avoided it.

  Americans advising senior ARVN commanders were not blind to their shortcomings. They were well versed in the commanders’ personal idiosyncrasies, of their eagerness for battle or their aversion to it, and of their units’ combat capabilities. These advisers, however, were also keenly aware of their commander in chief’s desire that Vietnamization show results: ARVN battlefield victories. Most of all, these regimental and division advisers, US Army officers in the crucial middle years of their careers, knew that if reports that they sent up their chain of command described the commander whom they advised, the officer they had been sent to educate while enhancing his unit’s combat effectiveness, as cowardly, or corrupt, or thickheaded, or as someone who displayed little regard for troop welfare, or was reckless and mistaken in his choice of tactics—if they painted a picture of ARVN cowardice or ineptness, they were likely to be replaced by an adviser who wrote more optimistic reports, to the detriment of their own career.

  So the White House demanded ARVN victories, ARVN generals promised that battlefield success was around the corner, and US advisers pretended to believe them.

  As for me, until the previous year, when I was stationed in nearby Thailand, I would have been pressed to find Vietnam on a world map. All that I knew of this war was that America was fighting Communists, and it was my duty to help my country. At age 21, I believed that I was seven feet tall, bulletproof, invisible when needed, and that Vietnam was to be the greatest adventure I could ever hope for.

  I had had three years’ service but not a minute in combat. My troops were very young—many still in their teens. Like me, most had enlisted or been drafted straight out of high school. A few had several months of combat under their belts, but even they could not have been prepared for what awaited us in late October 1969.

  And so we went more or less happily onto the isolated hilltop called Kate, ignorant of the misaligned forces that controlled our fate, never expecting a bloody five-day monsoon of steel and fire, and entirely unaware that the ARVN generals responsible for our lives loathed and feared the mountain tribesmen on whom we relied to defend us and our isolated hilltop from the fierce and relentless PAVN infantry.

  This is how it went, to the best of our recollections.

  PART

  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

  ONE

  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 neve
rtheless 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.