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

  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.

  Brockwell never learned who nominated him for the job—he suspected it
was General Winant Sidle, the outgoing commander, a gentleman of the old school whose own career was headed for a type of greatness—and Brockwell wasn’t even sure that he wanted to be a general’s aide. He arrived for his interview directly from the field, caked in dust and reeking from days without a shower, and learned that Colonel Hall was expected to return from the field at any time. Brockwell spent a cordial half hour with Hall’s deputy, Colonel Anderson, making small talk about duck hunting and family.

  Then he was shown a map overlay of the Bu Prang and Duc Lap artillery defensive scheme. Bu Prang was defended by firebases Kate, Susan, and Annie in a triangle formation south and east of A-236. In similar fashion, Helen, Martha, and Dorrie supported Duc Lap and were between it and the border.

  “I thought I knew about the . . . splitting of batteries for internal fire support to each firebase,” recalls Brockwell, “but when I saw how close to the Cambodian border [the firebases] were, I asked if [my understanding] was correct.”

  Colonel Anderson solicited Brockwell’s impression of the plan. The younger and less experienced Brockwell replied that he understood how, in theory, firebases sited in a triangular formation would allow each to support the others while also supporting a central strong point like Bu Prang, “but since we could not fire into Cambodia and we would have only twenty-five to thirty US artillerymen on each base, it seemed to me that the number of [suspected] NVA in the vicinity could easily effect a siege on all three bases at once and that [none of the firebases] would be firing for anyone but themselves.”

  Long after the fact, reconsidering his briefing by Colonel Anderson, Brockwell realized that the size of the attacking NVA force had never been a factor in IFFV Artillery planning; the planners had assumed that Bu Prang was the sole objective. It had never entered their minds that with enough troops at their disposal, taking Kate would have seemed important enough to justify the effort required. In addition, Brockwell surmised, none of the planners had considered that an NVA base would be established just across the border in Cambodia in support of their attack.

  With the clarity of hindsight, this presents an eerie parallel to the French mind-set at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Supposing that the Viet Minh enemy had no artillery and in any case no way to emplace big guns beyond the reach of French air support, the French put their base in a broad valley, established a chain of outposts with mutually supporting fields of fire, and waited for the enemy to attack, certain that their superior firepower would systematically chew them up.

  Instead, working at night, General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s troops and thousands of conscripted laborers dragged heavy artillery onto the rugged heights overlooking the French positions. They dug caves and deep emplacements, and proceeded to pulverize the French with well-placed fire. Giáp accepted enormous casualties to overrun one French outpost after another with repeated ground attacks and bitter hand-to-hand fighting. In the end, the French surrendered the bulk of their troops and accepted defeat.

  Nevertheless, at his unscheduled and serendipitous briefing in 1969, Brockwell was assured that with on-call air strikes, the support of nearby ARVN units, the Special Forces, and CIDG troops, “this would not be a problem.” His subsequent interview with Colonel Hall seemed to go well, and he left Nha Trang “feeling confident about everything except finding myself on Kate, Susan, or Annie.”

  • • •

  “UNTIL the very end of my time as Charlie Battery commander, the only time I had the whole battery together in one place at the same time was at the very end of my tour, just before I left,” recalls Klaus Adam, then a captain. “We were always split up. Most of the time I had four guns with me and the other platoon was out doing something else. We were always deployed as General Support Reinforcing [backing up artillery units that were in direct support of a particular infantry or armor unit].

  “I can’t even tell you how many men I had in the battery, because all the paperwork, the morning reports, were done in the rear,” says Adam. “I was almost always on a firebase with the guns. But I seem to recall that we were usually at about 95 percent strength.”

  Adam was born in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 1942. The following year his father was killed, and Adam went to live with an aunt in southern Bavaria, which was then beyond the reach of Allied bombers. When the war ended, he was reunited with his mother, and they moved to Wiesbaden, where she found work as a translator for the Occupation forces. “She met an alcoholic American Air Force sergeant, and in order to help her family and help him, she accepted his marriage proposal,” Adam explains.

  The family came to the US in 1951; young Klaus suffered from the effects of his stepfather’s alcoholism, and his parents divorced when he was in his early teens. “As a result of a lack of parental control, I ended up on the streets, did a little gang running—petty theft,” Adam says. “I graduated to major theft. I got caught.” He was 17. A small-town judge offered him a choice of reform school until he was 21 or three years of military service. “When you get an honorable discharge, I’ll purge your records,” the judge promised.

  Adam enlisted in the summer of 1960. After infantry training and jump school, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. During his in-processing, a personnel clerk learned that Adam had taken a high school typing class. Army typists are always in short supply; he was assigned to the division Military Intelligence Detachment. “The top kick was an old airborne infantryman who would not have made it in today’s Army,” Adam says. Short and fat, he looked like a bowling ball on toothpicks. “He was the finest man I ever met,” Adam insists. “He decided to make a human being out of me and sent me to get a high school GED; because my scores were so high, he sent me back to the Education Center to get a one-year college GED. Then he sent me to the Adjutant General school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana.”

  There Adam met Úrsula Viera-Vazquez, daughter of a master sergeant, and fell in love. The attraction was mutual. “Clerk school was six weeks. I called my first sergeant to ask if I could stay a little longer—so he made me a personnel management specialist and gave me another six weeks of classes.”

  Afterward, accompanied by his fiancée, Adam returned to the 101st Airborne. After their marriage, Úrsula began to worry about the part of Adam’s job that involved jumping out of airplanes in flight. To placate her fears, in 1962 he reenlisted in return for an assignment to an air defense unit outside Austin, Texas.

  As a battalion personnel specialist, Adam learned that his upward mobility was limited by his occupational specialty. The specialty with the highest possible rank in his air defense unit was fire control maintenance technician, so Adam requested training in that. The course was almost a year long and came with a one-grade promotion upon graduation; instead of returning to Austin, however, Sergeant Adam remained at Fort Bliss as an instructor. Less than a year later, he was again promoted. In that era, it was not unusual for a soldier to complete a twenty-year career and retire at the pay grade of E-6, but Adam was not satisfied with his status. “I thought, Here I am, five years into my career and I’m only an E-6! And I only have three more steps to the maximum enlisted pay grade, E-9.” The notion of rising to become a sergeant major, an exalted personage who sits at the commander’s right hand, and doing so while still in his thirties, did not satisfy him.

  So Adam applied for flight school; graduation would mean promotion to warrant officer. Adam completed ground school at Fort Wolters, Texas, as an honor graduate, but failed to master the multiple intricacies of flying helicopters; after five months he washed out. As it turned out, that was a good thing: “There were 122 guys in my class; after Vietnam we had only two survivors—me and the other washout.”

  Adam was assigned to a missile site near Lincoln, Nebraska. He didn’t mind the duty, but Úrsula, pregnant with their second child, hated everything about the state. So Adam applied for Artillery OCS. After graduation, he went to yet another school to learn artillery communications. Then he spent a year in Korea. Throug
h a combination of luck and his father-in-law’s connections, Adam was tapped to serve as a general’s aide in the Korean Military Advisory Group. After six months in that job, he took charge of an advisory detachment.

  Leaving Korea, Adam picked up his family and went to West Germany, where he took command of a surface-to-surface missile battery. In November 1968 he was promoted to captain; a month later he came down on orders for Vietnam.

  • • •

  IN time of peace, US Army officer promotions were determined by the size of the armed forces, which has always been regulated by Congress. Peacetime armies are small, and upward mobility in the officer corps is slow. In the decade following the Korean War, second lieutenants served eighteen months before they could be considered for promotion. First lieutenants needed four years in grade before becoming eligible for promotion to captain. The vast majority of OCS and ROTC graduates, Reserve officers, left active duty after two years. Only those with sterling efficiency reports were retained on active duty, and even in training commands, most companies, batteries, and troops were led by captains with upwards of six years’ service. Selection for a command was based on seniority and perceived capabilities, as described in efficiency reports. Once in command, an officer could expect at least a year in that position.

  All that changed with Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1970, Army troop strength grew by more than 50 percent. Officer promotions accelerated—one year from second to first lieutenant, and one year more from first lieutenant to captain. There have always been more staff officers than commanders; as the Army ballooned, staff officer billets grew faster than command slots. Common wisdom among senior officers held that successful command time was a prerequisite for advancement to the highest ranks—an officer who had never commanded a company, battery, or troop would be an unlikely choice to command a battalion. An officer without battalion command would probably never command an artillery group, infantry brigade, or cavalry regiment, and officers without command experience at the brigade level would never be considered to command a division, and thus would never become generals. To ensure that as many officers as possible had the opportunity to demonstrate their command chops, and thus ensure all an equal shot at promotion to the highest ranks, a Pentagon policy limited command time at the battalion level and below to six months, with few exceptions.