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

  “I have a picture of the CIDG bringing in a big-ass pig,” confirms Mike Smith. “They shot deer, and once I watched them cook a monkey, which looked like a little human. They poked it around in the pot to get the hair off, and then ate the whole thing.”

  “I’m not taking anything away from the [Green] Berets who were there prior to Captain Albracht. They were good guys—but we partied,” says Kenn Hopkins. “We didn’t do anything else but party. We didn’t send out any patrols until Albracht came. We went hunting for deer, pigs, monkeys, and all that good stuff. I was very apprehensive at the staging area, but once we got there, after a couple of days it became relaxed vacation time. We’d fill empty powder canisters with water, put them on top of the hooch during the day, and we’d have hot water to take our little whore’s bath, then sit up there and watch the sun go down. It was ideal, a beautiful place. After the previous stuff we’d gone through, this place was a vacation wonderland.”

  To further dispel boredom, a volleyball net and a ball were obtained, and a makeshift court set up between the gun pits for occasional matches, fast and furious games that relieved the tedium and encouraged aerobic fitness. At night, Kate practiced light and noise discipline, but often as many as eighteen officers and men crowded into the FDC for a poker game in the only space with electric lights.

  As the monsoon season tapered off, days on Kate became hotter and dusty. Water, always at a premium, became scarce. When the contents of their huge, cylindrical neoprene “blivet” ran low, some troops collected rainwater. Some afternoons, rain clouds marched across their valley; anticipating its arrival, everyone not otherwise occupied stripped off their clothes to stand in the rain, soap up, and hope that the brief shower would continue long enough for them to rinse off.

  Field sanitation, always an issue on isolated bases, was rudimentary. Men urinated anywhere outside the barbed wire surrounding their positions. More moving issues were handled at an open-air latrine that was no more than two halves of 55-gallon diesel drums with a wooden bench laid across them and holes cut above each drum. Kate’s garrison included a medical corpsman—like others of his trade, he went by “Doc,” and no one I spoke with about this book could now recall his name. Each week, Doc removed the wooden bench, poured diesel oil over the waste in the steel drum halves, and set it afire. When the waste was consumed and the containers had cooled, the latrine was reassembled.

  Personal hygiene was an effort. When they had enough water, some cannoneers filled an empty powder canister, put one or two garments in with soap, and used their hands and an arm as a plunger to circulate the water. From time to time, resupply choppers brought in batches of recycled fatigues; dirty uniforms and underwear were sent to the rear.

  • • •

  SPECIALIST Four Warren Geromin, 20 years old, had a head of thick, moplike dark red hair. Pale as an Irish coal miner and skinny as a starving ferret, he carried a mere 130 pounds on his five-foot-ten frame. He grew up a Connecticut Yankee, in a blue-collar Middletown family, and was drafted after graduating from high school. After basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Geromin went to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where the Corps of Engineers trained him to operate and maintain generators.

  When he reported to Charlie Battery, however, the man he was scheduled to replace had two months remaining on his tour, so they stuck Geromin on a gun. “I filled sandbags and moved shells. Sometime I’d help break down powder charges; when we got a fire mission, after the shell went in, I would come up and throw in the powder,” he says, still proud to have served as a fighting man, however briefly.

  Geromin maintained three FDC generators, one to recharge the radio batteries, another for lighting, and a third to deliver DC power to the FADAC.

  On a few occasions, he and a few other artillerymen, accompanied by a squad of CIDG troops, would descend Kate’s eastern flank into the jungle, following a game trail to a small clearing cut by that swift, shallow creek. “It was thick and really dark in there,” Geromin recalls. “You couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.”

  Of the officers who served on Kate and shared their recollections for this book, none recall being aware that their men left the firebase and went into the jungle below. On the other hand, personal experience teaches me that officers often don’t know everything that their men are up to. That’s why they have sergeants.

  Kenn Hopkins joined a couple of these expeditions as well. While CIDG strikers took turns on guard, the GIs bathed or washed clothes in the cold creek. Some men went a little way upstream and filled their canteens. “When I was in high school, a guy who’d been with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam told me that a stream running fast through rocks for a few hundred feet is basically good enough to drink,” Hopkins recalled.

  Hopkins’s job on the howitzer was preparing powder charges and attaching fuses to 155 mm projectiles in a gun section under Tex “Don’t Call Me Gerald” Rogers. Tex was a 21-year-old draftee; his promotion to sergeant came just three days after the platoon and their guns landed on Kate. Tall and brawny, ruggedly handsome, with a taste for alcohol and a devil-may-care grin, Rogers grew up in Crane, Texas, population 3,000, about thirty miles south of Odessa, amid the endless oil fields of the Permian Basin. He left school after the tenth grade to work in his dad’s construction outfit. Weekends, he went hunting or wrestled steers at local rodeos, collecting a little cash, a saddle, and a roomful of belt buckles. As big and burly as Tex was, however, his body was slowly being ravaged by diabetes, a condition that would not be diagnosed for several years.

  • • •

  ON October 15, 1969, 18-year-old Specialist Four Nelson Koon flew into Kate to join Tex Rogers’s section as assistant gunner. Tall and muscular, a handsome, serious-minded Ohioan, he was eager to serve his country. Like Captain Klaus Adam, he had been trained in several military specialties—but not on howitzers.

  A year earlier, when Koon was in his senior year of high school in rural Mifflin, Ohio, a tiny town a few miles east of Mansfield, he decided to enlist. But he was only 17, and needed parental permission. His father, a World War II combat veteran, refused to sign unless the Army guaranteed that Nelson would be trained for a military occupational specialty that would keep him out of combat in Vietnam.

  To please his father, “I enlisted for Honest John rockets,” Koon recalls.

  Already obsolete, the Honest John was an unguided, solid-fuel missile launched from a five-ton truck. It accelerated to Mach 2 by the time it was airborne and could reach targets up to 15 miles distant. While the three-stage missile lacked accuracy, it delivered a huge payload of conventional explosives—or one of three types of nuclear warheads, the largest of which packed 50 percent more punch than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

  Despite his enlistment contract, when Koon graduated from basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in September 1968, he received orders for infantry training. “Dad came to my graduation. In World War II, he had served in the same outfit with my training brigade commander,” Koon explains. “Dad complained to him about my assignment, and that colonel put me in his staff car and took me to the personnel office. He told them that the recruiter had screwed up or something. Then he told me that because it would take a while for my orders to get changed, he suggested that I go to infantry school anyway because it wouldn’t hurt to have the training.”

  When Koon got to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, however, his new unit commander told him that orders for Honest John school at Fort Sill had arrived.

  “I told him, ‘I don’t want anything to do with Honest John rockets. I want to stay infantry.’” Koon was allowed to remain at Fort Jackson and complete infantry training.

  Upon graduation, he received orders for Vietnam, with leave en route to a California port of debarkation. While he was at home in Ohio, however, someone from the Department of the Army called and told him that he was not going to Vietnam. He would report to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for Honest John school.

  Koon protested�
�and then reported to Fort Sill.

  Five days after he started Honest John school, Koon’s class, and all future Honest John training, was canceled as part of a program to phase out the weapons system.

  So Koon went to fire direction control school. “I was gung ho and I just wanted to get to Vietnam somehow, so I kind of screwed around in classes. They sent me to the commander, and he chewed me out a little. He said, ‘If you keep this up, I’m going to send you back to the infantry.’

  “I said, ‘Great! That’s what I want!’”

  Whereupon young Nelson Koon discovered that this is not how the Army works.

  “My CO said, ‘You’re too anxious. Get back into class and stay with it.’ I would have graduated from FDC, but then almost everybody in my class was sent to Vietnam.”

  The exceptions were Koon and two classmates, who went to FADAC school, just down the road at Fort Sill. After completing the three-week course, almost everyone in Koon’s class got orders for Vietnam.

  Not Koon. With two classmates, he went to Germany.

  “They put me in an Honest John unit, in the FDC. Then one of my buddies reenlisted for duty in Vietnam. Until then, I had no idea that I could do that. I went down and reenlisted. I wanted infantry or artillery, and the recruiter said, ‘The only two places I can give you are Vietnam or Italy.’

  “I took Vietnam, and he said, ‘You’ve got to be a 13-Bravo.’”

  Military Occupational Specialty 13B was a crewman on a towed howitzer, a weapon that Koon had seen only at a distance. But the MOS was Koon’s ticket to Vietnam, and he took it. En route from Germany to Vietnam, Koon had thirty days of leave. “My father told me that I was crazy for wanting to go to Vietnam, but I told him I had to find out for myself what war was like,” Koon recalls.

  He landed on Kate on October 15 and was introduced to his first howitzer. For everything and anything worth doing—and for a few things that are not—there is a right way and, usually, a multitude of wrong ways. As everyone who ever wore Army green knows, there is also the Army Way. The Army Way for getting a howitzer to do its thing goes like this:

  Using the sight and aiming stakes, the gunner sets the azimuth and elevation. One man sets the fuse on each projectile. Another man opens powder canisters and selects the proper number of bags for each shot, based on range to target. Two men place the 96-pound projectile on a basketlike loader and carry it to the gun, positioning the projectile behind the open breech. A third man positions the projectile in the lip of the breech. A fourth, using an eight-foot steel pole with a rubber tip, rams the shell into the howitzer barrel. The powder man drops the bags of powder behind the projectile. A firing cap is inserted in the door, the door is locked, and the assistant gunner yanks a lanyard to fire the gun.

  That’s how things are done at the artillery school at Fort Sill.

  In the field, in combat, in Vietnam, gun crews were rarely at full strength. Somebody was always on R&R, or detailed to fill sandbags or burn shit, load or unload something, dig a hole or fill one in. Somebody was always on sick call or in the hospital, or on emergency leave, or back at base camp for some reason. For example, Sergeant Tidmore, a Charlie Battery gunner, who had had all his teeth pulled in August, returned to base camp in late October to be fitted with new dentures. And Sergeant First Class Jimmy Gooch, the much-beloved battery Chief of Smoke, a tall, lean, grizzled Korean War veteran, left on R&R two days before I flew into Kate.

  So the eleven-man crew that Fort Sill taught was more often six or seven men in Vietnam. This is how they rolled in Charlie Battery: One strong man picked up the 96-pound projectile, carried it to the howitzer’s breech, and shoved it as far up the barrel as he could. Then another man used the eight-foot pole to shove the projectile all the way into the barrel, followed, as before, by powder bags and a firing cap.

  Most people, including artillerymen, are right-handed: Before the rammer can do his thing, he has to wait a second or two for the loader to get out of his way. But if the loader is right-handed and the rammer is left-handed, the rammer can immediately follow a shove with a push, saving precious seconds.

  Koon is left-handed. He soon learned to use the ramming pole; when he became assistant gunner, he sometimes then pulled the lanyard to fire the gun.

  Section chief Tex Rogers didn’t need a ramming pole. “Tex was one of those guys right out of a movie—the classic Texan,” recalls Mike Smith, the man from Muleshoe, Texas. “He was a good man, a really strong guy, and a good cannoneer. The big deal in an artillery unit was to pick up a projectile—we called them projos, or sometimes just joes—run over to the gun, then use your momentum and strength to shove it way up into the breech, hit it so hard with one arm that it would kind of ricochet up into the barrel. And Tex could do that all day.”

  On Kate, of course, that didn’t happen very often, because they rarely got the chance to shoot.

  Not long after Koon’s arrival in October, the 1/92 Artillery’s S-3, or operations officer, flew in to Kate for a look-see. “Major Riovo told us to build a new FDC, and it had to be entirely underground,” recalls John Kerr.

  “We had been there for quite a while when the order came down through the FDC officer, Lieutenant Kerr, that we had to dig an underground FDC,” recalls Bob Johnson. “An underground FDC was normal; however, this was very unusual because the order was, ‘You will do this as quickly as humanly possible; your most urgent job is to dig an underground FDC and we will send reinforcements out from battalion HQ to help.’”

  Because things had been so peaceful, with no sign of the enemy, Johnson was taken aback. He was constantly on the radio that linked Kate with its higher headquarters. “I don’t know about the officers, but I was the enlisted man in charge of FDC,” he recalls. “Neither I nor any of the other enlisted men had any clue that anything was happening anywhere in the area. But these were very strict orders, and that came as a little bit of a shock.”

  Later that day, reinforcements flew in. “They were base-camp warriors,” Johnson recalls. “They brought their shovels and their hands, and they were good guys. We were all digging in the ground and filling sandbags for at least a week.”

  Johnson took it upon himself to design the underground bunker, and did so in such a manner that when carving a deep hole in hard-packed soil was concluded, the excavation had built-in earthen tables and chairs. “All we needed was to bring in the radio equipment, the charts, the FADAC,” Johnson recalls. “We could stand up in that bunker; around the perimeter were different types of tables for charts, radios, for whatever else we needed. The whole thing was about ten by ten feet, or a little bigger.”

  Johnson and his crew then stacked sandbags three high on the ground around the bunker perimeter, laid steel planks across the space between them, and piled four layers of sandbags atop the planks. “We were impervious to artillery or mortar shells coming down on top of us,” explains Johnson. “And we were too low for rocket fire to hit [the top of the roof], so once we got that done, we were immune from attack.”

  The entrance to the bunker was an outside stairway with a sandbagged roof; at its bottom it took a ninety-degree turn to enter the FDC. This provided a shield against blast and shrapnel.

  “It’s really wonderful when you’re allowed to do the complete design of something like that,” Johnson says. “You can make it as safe as you want.”

  The original FDC, which was vulnerable to flat-trajectory fire from rockets, RPGs, and recoilless rifles, as well as a direct hit by an artillery shell, became the command bunker.

  A few days after the FDC was completed, according to separate recollections by Koon and Geromin, a few cannoneers, accompanied by CIDG strikers, descended to the shallow creek below Kate’s eastern flank. As they approached their usual bathing spot, the Yards suddenly stopped. The GIs smelled smoke. A half-smoked cigarette was found smoldering on the ground near the brook. The expedition immediately reversed course and silently climbed back to the safety of Kate.

  Perhaps b
ecause the cannoneers had left base without official permission, nothing about that smoldering cigarette was reported to either Mike Smith or John Kerr. Nor does Barham recall hearing anything about the incident from the CIDG.

  • • •

  A few days later, on October 27, Sergeant Dan Pierelli, 23, a weapons specialist from Special Forces Camp A-233 at Trang Phuoc (also called Ban Don), arrived to replace his teammate, Staff Sergeant Santiago Arbizo, a demolitions specialist, who returned to A-233.

  Like Nelson Koon’s and Klaus Adam’s, Pierelli’s military route to Kate had been long and convoluted. Handsome and fair-haired, he was a lean, wiry man two inches shorter than my own six feet, but weighing about 40 pounds less than I did at that time.

  Dan had long yearned to serve his country. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in nearby West Haven, in 1965 he earned a coveted appointment to the US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. Like many before him, however, he found the academy’s rigorous academics overwhelming. He left Colorado Springs and, by long-standing custom, was transferred to the Air Force Reserve.

  Had Dan done nothing further, he almost certainly would have satisfied his military service requirement without ever serving on active duty. Instead, he enlisted in the Army. After basic and advanced infantry training, he volunteered for the airborne and Special Forces schools.

  Dan arrived in Vietnam in March 1969 and was assigned to A-233. He sewed on sergeant’s stripes just under two years after joining the Army, about as fast a climb through the lower ranks as was then possible, but also a product of Special Forces’ rapid expansion and combat losses.

  Situated right on the Cambodian border north of Bu Prang, Camp A-233 at any given time had between 200 and 300 CIDG strikers. To detect and deter PAVN infiltration, frequent patrols, often composed of a company-size force, or about half the available strikers, and led by a pair of Green Berets, patrolled the area of operations for which they were responsible.