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

  On the other side of the lines, the French developed the first modern field gun. First deployed in 1870 and steadily improved for decades, the French 75, towed by horses or by a motorized vehicle, went into service with a range of about five miles (8 kilometers); over time that increased to almost eight miles (12.9 kilometers). The gun’s rifled barrel imparted a spin to projectiles that enhanced their accuracy. A hydro-pneumatic mechanism absorbed the recoil of firing over a two-second cycle; this kept the gun trails and wheels locked and unmoving during the firing sequence and enabled subsequent shots without reaiming. Unlocking the loading door at the rear of the gun ejected the spent brass cartridge. A fresh cartridge containing bags of gunpowder and affixed to a projectile was thrust into the breech, the door locked and the gun ready to fire again in as little as two seconds—faster than bolt-action rifles of that era.

  Along with breakthroughs in battlefield communications, the French 75, and other guns based on its design, changed the way artillery was used. No longer did the big guns deploy alongside infantry. Towed behind trucks or mounted on an armored, self-propelled chassis, artillery took up positions miles to the rear and fired over the heads of friendly troops. Forward observers on the ground or aloft in balloons fed target information to the guns over telephone lines or, later, by wireless.

  Cannon with a variety of barrels were developed. Long barrels hurled huge shells over enormous ranges. Equipped with shorter barrels and consequently possessing a lower center of gravity, howitzers could raise their tubes to almost vertical, allowing them to be sited on a reverse slope to fire on high trajectories that soared over a ridge or summit to find targets in defiladed valleys. For centuries employed as heavy siege weapons, mortars became small and light enough to be carried into battle by infantry.

  In the US Army, artillery assumed new roles. Artillery battalions were integrated into infantry divisions to provide direct support to ground troops. Because the demands of a fully engaged division exceed the capabilities of these battalions, additional artillery units, often with heavier guns capable of firing at greater ranges, were placed under the control of higher headquarters, such as the corps and field army. These guns were to provide “general support,” and responded to fire missions from any unit within their range and geographical area of responsibility.

  Now removed miles from the front lines, unable to see their targets and firing projectiles weighing hundreds of pounds, cannoneers relied upon the discipline of ballistics. By World War II, it was no longer enough to know merely the range and direction to a target. After selecting the most effective trajectory, fire direction specialists could also calculate the time of the projectile’s flight; the effects of barometric pressure and air temperature at firing elevations; the speed, altitude, and direction of winds aloft; the difference between magnetic north and north as indicated on firing maps (“magnetic declination”); and, at longer ranges, even the rotation of Earth.

  Accomplished with speed and precision, such calculations allowed artillery to fire over great distances with impressive accuracy. Such computations, however, demanded individuals with the aptitude and training for complex mathematics. While gun crews remained the domain of brawny men capable of manhandling heavy projectiles and guns, artillery officers were selected for their mathematical acumen no less than for their leadership qualities.

  Which was why in 1968, when tall, thin, calmly intense John Kerr graduated from the University of Iowa at age 22 with a degree in mathematics and a shavetail ROTC commission, he chose to become an artillery officer. “For my senior year, our professor of military science was a field artillery officer,” Kerr recalls. “I liked him, and I liked math, and when he explained that ballistics is based on differential equations and calculus, I wanted to serve in the artillery, instead of some other branch.”

  Kerr spent his first year in uniform learning about field guns and troops at hot, dusty Fort Hood, Texas. After a promotion to first lieutenant, he received orders for Vietnam, where he was assigned to Charlie Battery, 1st Battalion, 92nd Artillery.

  Charlie Battery 1/92 was the designated II Corps “swing battery” and boasted the region’s only airmobile 155 mm howitzers. From the worm’s-eye perspective of tall, rangy Kenn Hopkins, 21, a Charlie Battery ammunition handler and surfer out of Chula Vista, California, things appeared somewhat different. “Charlie Battery was an experiment,” he says. “They’d send us out during the monsoon to see if we could last without helicopter support. They sent us to a place like Kate, stuck us next to an NVA training camp a couple clicks away from what we were told was Cambodia.”

  Hopkins had a certain perspective on this: Although he was young and very junior in rank, he’d been in-country since March of that year, and had served on several firebases that were involved in almost constant fighting. “At Ben Het, we were getting anywhere from 200 to 300 rounds a day of incoming—mortars, rockets, and artillery,” he recalls. “And lots of small-arms fire.”

  At one firebase, he says, many Montagnard infantrymen were accompanied by their older children. “Ben was 12, Mo was 14, and the rest of the kids were 13. We got hit one night, and we gave our M60 [light machine gun] to Mo,” he recounts. “A flare went off and I saw Mo down there with the M60! I called to him. He turned around with a big shit-eating grin on his face, and then he turned back and brrrrrrrrrap! He was firing that gun John Wayne–style, this 14-year-old kid, doing this stuff. Just phenomenal.”

  Hopkins arrived on Firebase Kate on September 13, 1969, just about the time that I was assigned to Bu Prang. His platoon’s two 155 mm howitzers—six tons each!—were sling-loaded, one at a time, beneath a behemoth CH-54 Sikorsky Flying Crane. The troops were delivered in big-bellied CH-47 Chinooks. The rest of their field gear, along with such construction materials as pierced steel planking, railroad ties, plywood, and fasteners, was packed into big cargo nets and slung beneath a Chinook to be delivered to this steep, football-shaped hilltop, elevation 910 meters, less than two miles from Cambodia. With the guns came a Charlie Battery fire direction team.

  In charge of Kate’s guns was First Lieutenant Mike Smith, 25, Charlie Battery’s executive officer. (Unlike the infantry, where the XO is largely an administrative job, an artillery XO takes charge of the guns.) Handsome, very short, and wiry, Smith grew up on a ranch outside Muleshoe, Texas, about twenty miles southeast of Clovis, New Mexico, and fifty miles northwest of Lubbock, Texas.

  In 1964, he was working as a Lubbock hospital orderly and getting tired of Texas. He planned to strap on his hog and head for California. “I was pretty much a ne’er-do-well motorcyclist, Harley-Davidson type,” he recalls.

  At the hospital he met Elizabeth Clark, 21, a nursing student and the daughter of a Southern Pacific Railroad employee. She was from Sanderson, Texas, on the northern edge of the Rio Grande Valley. “A week before she graduated, she asked me to a dance at the nursing school,” Smith recalls. “I never went to California.”

  A few months later, Smith’s mother signed a consent form allowing the State of Texas to let 20-year-old Mike marry Elizabeth. Two years later, they decided to escape the heat and monotonous flatness of West Texas and move to the cool, green, rumpled landscape near Fort Collins, Colorado. Elizabeth found a hospital job as a registered nurse; Mike took veterinary classes and worked as an emergency room orderly. Life was good. “We lived in a little cabin, paid $60 a month rent, had a pickup and a dog, had each other, a fireplace, and we were living in the Colorado mountains—a heck of a time!”

  Then came 1967. American soldiers were dying in Vietnam by the thousands, and Mike’s friends began receiving draft notices. “I got wind that the draft was getting worse,” he says. “I called the Muleshoe draft board to see where I stood, and they said, ‘You’re about number four on the list, and we need five people.’”

  Mike had a friend in Oklahoma, an Army lieutenant, who opined that if Mike wound up going to Vietnam, he’d “want to be an officer because you’ll get more money and life is a little bet
ter than it is as an enlisted man.”

  So Mike found the Fort Collins Army recruiter. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, if you sign up, I guarantee you’ll go to OCS. If you don’t sign up—well, they hate draftees and you’ll never get to OCS.’”

  Smith took basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, then went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for training in artillery, and then OCS. “But while I was in [artillery school], they changed the rules,” he says. “You had to have two years of college to go to OCS, and I had only a smattering.”

  It looked like he was headed for a firing battery. But Smith had learned to type in high school, a highly valued skill in the Army. He became a battery clerk. “I wound up with a helluva job, inside, no heavy lifting. The first sergeant was death on errors, didn’t allow any at all, but he made a damn good clerk out of me. So I did that for several months,” he continues. “Then, I guess, a bunch of guys got killed in ’Nam, and they needed more officers, and they took that college restriction out, and six months later I bounced out of OCS as a second looey. I spent some time training cannon cockers, which was enjoyable; by and large I enjoyed my military experience. And then I was sent to Vietnam.”

  • • •

  SHARING space on Kate with Charlie 1/92’s men and guns was a 105 mm howitzer section from Charlie Battery, 5th Battalion, 27th Arty—half a dozen men ramrodded by a burly sergeant in his mid-twenties named Houghtaling.

  Protecting Kate’s artillerymen from ground attack was a CIDG company of about 100 Montagnards from Special Forces Team A-233 at Trang Phuoc (also, for obscure reasons, known as Ban Don). CIDG units were nominally under the command and control of ARVN Special Forces; an ARVN officer therefore commanded Bu Prang’s CIDG forces, and the yellow-and-red-striped flag of the Republic of Vietnam flew over the camp, as it did over every Special Forces camp in Vietnam.

  In practice, however, ARVN Special Forces officers rarely accompanied CIDG troops into potentially hazardous places or situations. I could never decide whether the ARVN officers were more afraid of their Montagnards, or of the North Vietnamese. Either way, I never saw an ARVN officer on Kate or with a CIDG patrol out of Bu Prang. To be fair, however, I must say that when I later served in a Mike Force unit, a few ARVN Special Forces officers operated with us in the field.

  Lacking ARVN boots on the ground, on Kate and other firebases protected by CIDG units, the US Army Special Forces, although officially mere advisers, exercised control of Montagnard CIDG troops through the power of our Army-implanted charisma: They obeyed our orders, but only because they chose to do so.

  In mid-September, as the artillerymen began building Kate, they were defended by a hundred-man CIDG company led by Captain Lucian “Luke” Barham, commander of Team A-234 at An Lac, and Staff Sergeant Santiago Arbizo, a demolitions specialist from A-233 at Ban Don.

  Forrest Scott, 22, a Georgia native with a Gumpian accent to match, graduated from an Atlanta trade school with a certificate as a sheet metal mechanic in 1967 and was drafted the following year. He joined Charlie Battery as a fledgling gun bunny in January 1969, when the entire battery was at beleaguered Firebase Swinger, fifteen clicks west of Ben Het. “We were there for about 97 days and took incoming rounds continuously for 87 or 88 days,” he recalls.

  And that was the easy part. “When we got there, the North Vietnamese were on the hill and we shot and killed them, drove them off before our infantry got there. And then we set up and got the guns going, built the fire pit, the ammo pits, and dug our underground two-man hooches,” he says matter-of-factly, in the manner that only combat veterans and homicide detectives use to tell a story. “[The firebase] was near Mile-High Hill, so they called our hill Half-Mile Hill. It was real steep on all sides except one, and that was kind of a semigrade that they used to shield the choppers to keep the enemy from knocking them out of the air when they came in. But that was Charlie Company, and all of those guys were accustomed to that.”

  Scott and the rest of Mike Smith’s cannoneers were already digging and filling sandbags on Kate when their infantry defenders arrived. Alighting from helicopters, the Montagnards discovered termite mounds concealed in the high grass. As the Americans watched in amazement, they began kicking in the mounds and grabbing up as many insects as they could cram into their mouths, swallowing their surprise feast with great gusto down to the last crawler.

  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.