Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (15 page)

The act followed the thought: His radio crackled to life, and minutes later Davison was back in the air, trailed by Falcon 9, with WO2 Jack Coonce on the stick, and headed for an aerial rendezvous with Dustoff 63, the aerial ambulance that I hoped would take out some of my wounded. Hoped, because while the Geneva Conventions specified that ambulances
and their crews were noncombatants, PAVN gunners used the big red cross on a white background adorning each side of every Dustoff bird as an aiming point. Hoping to give Dustoff some breathing space, I requested a Spooky, but it would not be on station until 2230.

“Dustoff 63 was flown by WO2 Denny Harrell, a good pilot and a good friend,” Davison says. Twilight was long gone by the time Davison, Coonce, and Harrell flew past Duc Lap. “There was a little horizon, but not much,” Davison recalls. “It happened so gradually we didn't notice—and then it was just all gray outside and the rotating beacon [on top of each Huey] was flashing off the gray back into the cockpit.”

Startled, Davison called to Coonce to move away. “Break left Falcon 9, we're in the soup,” he radioed. “We're coming around to the right on instruments.” He told his copilot, Bob Maddox, to turn off the beacon and watch the instruments with him. “I hadn't done this since flight school,” he said, and told Dave Nachtigall, his crew chief, and door gunner Cal Serain to watch for ground reference. After a long, nervous minute or so, the flight broke out of the fog. “I never knew you could start sweating so quickly,” he says.

After climbing above the clouds, Davison's Falcon 2 rejoined Falcon 9 and headed west. “Now we started to see patchy ground fog forming, and it was getting thicker as we flew on. I can't speak for the others, but I was certainly . . . on edge,” Davison recalls.

Twenty minutes later, the Falcons and Dustoff were orbiting Kate. From my bunker I could hear them, but we couldn't see each other: Kate was shrouded in fog. I called the Dustoff pilot and told him that it had been fairly quiet since sundown—just a few mortars and some sporadic small arms, mainly from the west. A little earlier, our listening post on Ambush Hill had been hit, and our strikers were bringing in a badly wounded man. It would take a while to get him in; with that man we had five wounded for pickup.

By the time he was back with us, however, Davison's fuel was so low that he was almost ready to abort. Instead, Davison and Coonce put Dustoff between them, Dustoff blacked out, the Falcons lit up their beacons, and all
three birds swooped down through the fog toward us. The Falcon gunships leveled off and Dustoff continued its descent.

“Denny hovered down Kate's [landing pad] light! The stuff those Dustoff guys did was unbelievable,” Davison adds. “We listened as a Special Forces type talked the Huey in to the LZ.

“A few seconds after touchdown, we heard [the Special Forces man] scream into the radio, ‘Incoming mortars! Get out, Dustoff!'

“Bob [Maddox] flipped our Master Arm switch to ‘Hot' and over the intercom confirmed that we were ready to shoot,” Davison says. But after a quick radio check, it seemed that no one on either of the gunships had seen a tube flash through the fog. Without targets to attack, they could only wait.

Fearing that the mortars would hit at any moment, Davison silently urged Denny to take off. Davison's radio blared: “Dustoff 63 coming out to the east!” Denny's usual mellow baritone had somehow been transformed into a squeaky soprano.

As Denny cleared Kate, three mortar rounds landed at the south end of the hilltop, orange flashes biting back the darkness for an instant.

Nelson Koon was just then standing near the wire at that end of our perimeter, unbuttoning his fly. But let him tell it: “I had to take a whiz real bad, so I stood up and three mortars landed maybe ten meters away in a perfect triangle formation. It was like the war had stopped—I was peeing and watching the mortars explode. I didn't get hit—and I'm thinking,
WOW, that's kind of cool
. Then the medic threw me on the ground, and I'm pissing all over myself, and I say, ‘What the hell are you doing?'

“He said, ‘Are you trying to get yourself killed?'

“I said, ‘No, I'm trying to take a leak.'”

High above this earthy comedy, the aerial drama continued.

“Falcons are at 2,500 feet directly overhead, watching for you,” Davison called.

“We're breaking out, 2, coming up bright flash,” Denny replied.

“Contact,” Davison came back. “Are you going to try again?”

“Don't have to. We got 'em.”

“You picked up five in that time?” Davison was incredulous.

“Yep, those guys down there have got their sierra together. Let's go home.”

As the shriek of three jet turbines faded to silence, I radioed my thanks to Denny and his crew. The mortars continued for a bit. Koon changed his pants.

By the time the Falcon gunships made it back to BMT, they had been flying for twenty minutes with the “low fuel” light on, expecting their engines to quit at any moment: There was probably more moisture in Koon's shorts than in Falcon 2's fuel tank. But both gunships landed safely. I never got a chance to thank those Falcon gunship crews, so I do so
now.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning's hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

—Mary Elizabeth Frye

“I
spent the night of the 29th in the generator pit, on the radio with Spooky and Shadow, the gunships,” John Kerr recalls. “I enjoyed that; we had really good support that night. At dawn on the 30th, as soon as the last gunship left, incoming fire resumed. Then it was Albracht and me sitting in his foxhole and kind of staring at each other, as if to say,
What are we going to do now?
”

As soon as that barrage began, I started preparing to defend against a ground attack. The night before, I had sent a coded message requesting more reinforcements, lots of ammunition, and water; we were running low on everything.

The incoming paused again about 0930—and the shit hit the fan: I was with Hopkins walking the perimeter, and as we approached the very steep southeastern quadrant, I saw movement below.

“We saw some people down there, and he called in air support,” Hopkins recalls. “I remember watching the bomb going down there and the concussion wave coming back—wow! That is really something to see!”

I didn't know it at the time, but some of the digging noises we'd heard the two previous nights were PAVN troops cutting steps in the hard-packed
clay of the steep hillside. Now several hundred PAVN burst out of the jungle and started up toward us, firing rifles and machine guns—the big block party I'd been expecting was on. We responded with our own small arms, but plainly the three dozen CIDG riflemen on that flank would soon be overwhelmed by what looked to be at least a PAVN battalion.

I called our FAC, and he vectored some F-100 Super Sabres in to work over the ridge and the ravine between us with 500-pound bombs.

After a few passes, the fast movers pulled out; instantly the tree line was ablaze with fire. With Hopkins, I jumped into a hole occupied by a couple of strikers and our medic, Doc. In a few minutes a quartet of Huey gunships arrived.

“Gunships would come in, they would strafe, we would pop up, we would shoot, they would come in, we would go down,” Hopkins says. “I got my timing off and I got peppered with some shrapnel on my arm. Some of the [fragments] bounced off, and the Yard next to me said, ‘I'm sticking with you, you numbah one!' And I thought,
If he knew how scared I am, he wouldn't want to be close to me at all.
And then Doc said, ‘Oh, you got a Purple Heart there,' and I said, ‘Bullshit.'”

I called for more gunships to help stop the ground assault; with each passing minute, it seemed more and more a threat. My strikers fought bravely and well, but we were heavily outnumbered and soon my men were getting killed or wounded in their holes.

Our PAVN neighbors were really dug in on the east ridge. They'd also emplaced 37 mm anti-aircraft guns; as far as I've been able to tell, this was the first such deployment of that weapons system inside South Vietnam. Some of our aviator pals reported being hit by flak at 10,000 feet near Kate—well above small-arms range. It made their approaches to Kate even more hazardous.

Among the gunships that answered our call were two from the 48th AHC, the Jokers. With First Lieutenant Ken Ryder, a newly arrived replacement, as his copilot, Ben Gay, Joker 73, flew the command ship with twin rocket pods, each carrying 19 supersonic rockets with high-explosive warheads. His wingman was Nolan Black, Joker 85, with a seven-rocket pod and a minigun on each side of his ship. Black handled the weapons,
while in the left seat WO2 Maury Hearne, 22, out of Norwalk, California, had the flight controls. Fair-skinned, athletic, and boy-next-door handsome, Hearne was outgoing, likable, and highly respected as an aviator by his fellow pilots. Behind them, each manning an M60 mounted in a side doorway, were Sergeant Clyde Canada, 21, of Canoga Park, California, and SP5 Douglas Hugh Lott, Jr., 23, of Columbus, Georgia. Black had trained as a crew chief before starting flight school—his copilot was trained as a helicopter mechanic. There was probably no better-trained or more capable Huey crew anywhere in Vietnam.

By the time they responded to my call for help, however, Gay and Black had already had a harrowing morning flying around Bu Prang Camp, which was under mortar attack. While refueling on the small strip outside the camp, their gunships were targeted—their cue to leave. Heavy with ordnance and fuel, Gay attempted takeoff from Bu Prang's short, unimproved strip, but as he neared the end, his main rotor RPM dropped and his transmission oil temperature light glowed red, indicating that both transmission and engine were dangerously stressed. Gay aborted takeoff and tried twice more, each time with the same result. As he was revving his engines for a fourth attempt, his UHF radio crackled to life with a call from our FAC: Kate was under ground attack by a massive PAVN force and his fire team was needed at once.

“I made another takeoff run down the strip,” Gay recalls. “As we neared the end, our RPM dropped again, but I continued anyway; at the end of the strip was a low cliff, and as we fell off that, our airspeed rose, boosting rotor RPM.” That was enough to get airborne. Seconds later, using the same maneuver, Black followed. Together they flew toward Kate as fast as their redlined engines could haul them.

“When we came around the side of the hill, we were maybe fifty to seventy-five feet off the deck, which is almost touching the ground; they probably could've thrown a stick up into the rotor blades and taken us down,” Gay recalls.

“But I couldn't believe what I was seeing: a huge mass of enemy troops, hundreds of guys swarming out of the jungle. Guns on the firebase were pumping beehive rounds out. This was World War II–type combat, not a
guerrilla war with three or four guys shooting bolt-action guns. This was a toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye brawl.”

He immediately opened fire with rockets—momentarily forgetting that, as a safety measure, each must travel about a hundred meters before its warhead arms. “Normally when you fired a rocket, there were two bangs—the rocket breaking the sound barrier, then the warhead exploding. But my rockets did not explode—they simply hit the enemy soldiers,” Gay recalls.

Behind him, Black opened up with his miniguns, joined by Gay's door gunners and his own, to bring down some of the attackers. Both ships circled back for a second pass, this time keeping enough distance to let their rockets arm. “We probably took three or four rounds, most of them through the rotor blades, one to the synchronized elevator, and one round went through the tail boom, but nothing in the cockpit area and no injuries,” Gay recalls.

That pass, and several that followed, saved our bacon, saved everyone on Kate, by breaking the back of the PAVN attack. The survivors withdrew and the shelling resumed, though not as heavily as earlier.

I took stock of our ammo and found that we had very little left. And we had fired off all our claymore mines, usually to good effect. Even if we were to get more of these anti-personnel mines, there was so much incoming that I didn't see how my men could leave cover to emplace them a safe distance below their fighting positions.

Several aircraft tried to bring us ammo, but each was driven off by intense fire.

Around noon there was a little break in the action. By now we were virtually out of water, and many of my strikers had only a couple of 20-round magazines left. While we redistributed what little ammo we had, I called again for resupply.

A 155th AHC slick loaded ammo and water on the Bu Prang airstrip, took off, and headed toward Kate. As it approached, it was riddled with small-arms fire, wounding two crewmen. The pilot wisely aborted the mission and limped back to Bu Prang.

Meanwhile, a 189th AHC UH-1H “H model Huey” slick flown by Jim “Herbie” Matlock, 21, and copilot Wilbur Guthrie, 27, had left BMT after
picking up SP4 Pete Olsen, a Special Forces radio operator who needed a lift to Bu Prang. Tall and lanky, a volunteer from Tennessee, Matlock was only a few months out of flight school but by all accounts a superbly gifted pilot—and not a bit shy about it. He was not, technically, a command pilot as he hadn't yet been so certified, but he was nevertheless in charge of this aircraft. Quiet, short, and dark, Guthrie had already completed a combat tour in Vietnam as an enlisted door gunner; during the Tet Offensive, he'd manned an M60 from an airfield bunker. After rotating Stateside, he reenlisted for flight school. Returning to Vietnam in early October 1969, he joined the 189th at Camp Holloway, Pleiku. Three weeks later, on extended loan to the 155th, he and Matlock were flying ash-and-trash missions in support of Special Forces camps.

Flying out of Pleiku and BMT, Guthrie experienced the war as distant; he looked forward to getting some easy stick time: “I thought that this would be a good mission for me; we would be flying long days and seeing a lot of our company's area of operation,” he wrote. “I would get an opportunity to do hover-down landings through a hundred feet–plus of triple canopy mountaintop jungle terrain. [Matlock] was reputed to be great at these kinds of landings. He had the smooth control touch and confidence to safely perform any kind of difficult landing. He was also a patient teacher and had the nerve to let a new guy put the rotor blades so near the trees and hover there with little to no extra power available in the event of trouble.”

The first few days of their temporary duty were mundane: hauling the wives and children of Montagnard strikers in CIDG units to a BMT hospital or back to their villages. “We flew dogs, hogs, and kids,” wrote Guthrie. “[Matlock] was in the habit of taking a small kid in his lap and [letting] them play with the flight controls, get a thrill out of ‘flying' a helicopter.”

There were no kids, dogs, or hogs aboard on October 30. On the 45-minute flight from BMT to Bu Prang, they listened to three radios—VHF for communicating with other aircraft in their platoon, UHF for an assortment of common aviation channels monitored countrywide by all aircraft, and Fox Mike (FM) to contact ground units. All three radios sprang to life with the sounds of aircraft in heavy combat. “It sounded like there was a hell of [a] war going on somewhere,” Guthrie wrote.

Upon learning that Bu Prang was under attack, Matlock diverted to Gia Nghia to refuel in safety. While JP-4 was being hand-pumped into his bird, Guthrie and Matlock chatted with Gay and Black and their crews, who told them that Kate was under heavy attack and that all available air support had been summoned.

With full tanks, Matlock and Guthrie took off and headed for Bu Prang. From altitude they saw a swarm of aircraft buzzing around Kate a few miles away, filling the airwaves with essential chatter. “I could never explain what it sounds like listening to three radios at once and everyone is yelling and talking simultaneously, men under heavy fire trying to give instructions and duck bullets at the same time,” Guthrie wrote. “We heard aircraft call that they were taking hits from all directions . . . I could not help but give thanks that this was not our fight, that we were only taking a radio operator to his camp, then going back—a simple little mission, thank God.”

Matlock set the Huey down on Bu Prang's airstrip and Olsen jumped out and ran for the gate. As the aviators were ready to leave, “a helicopter from the 155th out of BMT landed, shot all to hell and back,” Guthrie wrote. “They had been trying to take water and ammo in to the troops on Kate. [The pilot] said that nobody could make it through that kind of fire. After assessing the damage to their aircraft, they aborted the mission to return home for repairs,” wrote Guthrie. “Do not misunderstand me. These were brave men and they had tried their best to deliver the ammo. But the fire was too intense and they had sustained a lot of damage and some casualties. We could hear the radio operator on Kate, call sign ‘Chicken Wolf,' begging for water and ammo. They were almost out of everything, and with night coming on, they were sure to be overrun.”

(I worked with the Air Force FACs running the fast movers, and with helicopter gunships. Kerr had another radio on the same frequency; he worked with slicks, using my Chicken Wolf call sign instead of the artillery call sign he would use in the FDC.)

Watching the fighting from three miles away, Guthrie recalled that he had never seen so many gunships in the air in one place, and they “didn't seem to be making a dent in the effort to drive the enemy away.”

That's pretty much what it looked like from Kate too. I spent much of
the day dodging from one foxhole or bunker to another, drawing heavy fire each time I moved around the perimeter. I had to position myself to see specific enemy positions that required a gunship's rockets and guns or Air Force bombs and napalm. I began using tracer ammunition to precisely direct the FAC. I would lay down a stream of tracer fire from my CAR-15 to the exact enemy position that I wanted hit. I had my radio, and when the FAC knew where I wanted it, he radioed, “Got it!” and dropped down, using my tracer stream to aim a marking rocket. Then the fast movers would roll in and bomb on his smoke marker. I did this the first time without incident, but the enemy quickly figured out what I was doing. I was thereafter a marked man. I was out in the open a minute to maybe two, two and a half minutes at a time, and then I had to dodge whatever rockets or mortars were coming and get to cover. To me, the benefits of pinpoint bombing outweighed the risks—but remember, I still thought that I was bulletproof.

Back at Bu Prang, to Guthrie's shock and horror, Matlock casually volunteered to brave the tempest of flying lead and steel around Kate and bring our ammo and water in.

Meanwhile, Joker 73 and Joker 85—Ben Gay and Nolan Black, respectively—had reloaded their rocket pods and miniguns at Gia Nghia and were headed back to Kate.

Considering it unwise to set down on Kate, Matlock had the ammo and water loaded in two rows in each cargo doorway, and got two volunteers from the camp to kick the stuff out as he slowly overflew our hilltop at six feet off the deck.

It didn't quite work out that way. When Matlock's aircraft came into sight, Kerr radioed to ask him if he'd take some of our wounded out. Matlock agreed.