Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (28 page)

While raising his family in Connecticut, Bob was active in the Boy Scouts and enjoyed tennis, golf, and competitive road running. He completed the Philadelphia Marathon in under three hours at age 50. In 2002, he and his wife moved to a golf course community in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

John Kerr

Kerr was flown from Kate to the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, where surgeons treated his leg wound. “I was there for six or seven days,” he recalls. At the time, Army policy was for evacuees to remain in such hospitals for no more than a week. Those unable to return to duty were transferred to a convalescent hospital. “I went to the Sixth Convalescent Hospital on Cam Ranh Bay,” says Kerr, who spent the remainder of the regulation thirty-day post-wounding period there. Soldiers unable to return to duty at the end of that period were then evacuated to Japan for as long as it took them to recover, then sent Stateside for a return to duty or discharge from service.

“After thirty days, my leg was not healed,” Kerr relates. “It was still oozing [pus] and the dressing had to be changed twice a day. My doctors said that it would take another couple of weeks to heal, so I would be sent to Japan.” Once he was fit for duty, Kerr expected to be sent to Fort Hood, Texas.

“I didn't want to go to Japan. And I didn't want to go back to Fort Hood,” he recalls. “I wanted to go back to Charlie Battery, back with my men, to complete my tour of combat duty.”

He had watched nurses change his wound dressing twice a day for a month, so he knew how to do that. “I asked them to give me a big bag of swabs and Q-tips, and promised to keep my wound clean for the next two weeks until it healed—if they'd let me return to duty.”

Released from the hospital, he hitched a ride out of Cam Ranh Bay and contacted 1/92 Artillery Battalion HQ. “They told me to go down to Firebase Dorrie, near BMT, and replace Captain Adam, my battery commander, who had completed his tour of duty and was due to go home.”

Kerr became Firebase Dorrie commander. “We had two 155 howitzers and a 175 gun,” he recalls. He was on Dorrie for about a month, including Christmas, then served on several other firebases until his year of combat ended.

Kerr was then promoted to captain and assigned to Fort Sill, where he served as an instructor in the Artillery Officer Basic Course and for Officer Candidate School.

“That was wonderful,” he says now. “I just loved that duty.” After returning to civilian life, Kerr spent eight years in Minnesota and Wisconsin as a process and quality-control supervisor for Hormel Food Company. Then he returned to Iowa to work for Lyon Energy, the state's only nuclear power plant, as an engineer. “This was state-of-the art, high technology—very interesting, and I learned an awful lot over more than twenty years.”

Kerr took early retirement at age 55 “because I wanted to do something else, before I can't do anything.” He has taught mathematics at a Cedar Rapids community college ever since.

For his service on Kate, Kerr was awarded the Bronze Star with “V” device (for valor) as well as a Purple Heart for his wound. Because of the tangled chain of command over Kate, he isn't sure who wrote up the medal recommendation and if they had a true picture of what he endured or the professionalism of his conduct. He won't say it in so many words, but Kerr believes that his performance under fire should have earned him more than a Bronze Star. I agree, and I have submitted my recommendation that it be upgraded to the Silver Star.

Nelson Koon

“We were only in Bu Prang a couple of hours and then we were airlifted to someplace out in the middle of nowhere,” Koon recalls. “Some bird colonel came in. And he lit my cigarette for me! Then they picked us up again with a Chinook and took us to Ban Me Thuot; we were there a couple of days.

“Lieutenant Smith was awarded the Silver Star there, and Albracht came and he had his green beret on and I asked him what he got for a decoration.

“He said, ‘I didn't get anything.'

“I said, ‘What?!'

“He said, ‘Special Forces is an everyday job.'

“Then we went to Pleiku, and they had an awards ceremony for us there. I don't have much use for the military caste system. Officers got a Silver Star or something, all the NCOs got Bronze Stars, E-4 and below got
the Army Commendation Medal. We said, ‘What a bunch of shit—we got a Green Weenie with a ‘V' cluster.'

“Then [Sergeant First Class] Jimmy Gooch, the Chief of Smoke, came back from R&R. He wasn't on Kate. We were supposed to fly to Ban Me Thuot and then out to LZ Mike Smith. They put us on a C-130, and when we landed and the ramp came down, we were in Cam Ranh Bay! We thought,
This is cool!

“Gooch thought we needed a little R&R, so for three days, while we were waiting for our guns, we were at the clubs. Then we were at the Cam Ranh Bay replacement station and all these new guys came in wearing brand-new jungle fatigues.

“They said, ‘What unit are you guys with?'

“We said, ‘We're the artillery.'

“‘Where are your guns?'

“‘The enemy got 'em. We got nothing except our damn packs and our M16s.'

“Then a sergeant major came out and said, ‘Hey, guys, I know you've been through a lot of shit, but don't scare these guys before I get them out in the field.'”

When their R&R was over, Koon and the rest of Charlie Battery went back to Ban Me Thuot, picked up new howitzers, and went to Firebase Mike Smith. “When we got there they told us, ‘You guys get to rest for a while and relax,'” recalls Koon. “Soon as a Chinook landed and that ramp dropped, we got incoming, 122 mm rockets. We were there for sixty-two days, and we got hit for fifty-two.

“Even though everyone [on Kate] went through basic training and had basic marksmanship training, most of the guys were artillery trained; after their guns were destroyed, they stayed hunkered down. Being infantry trained, it just seemed natural to me to use the M60 and M16. I think Hopkins and Tiranti felt the same. There may have been other individuals or small groups moving around and engaging the enemy; I don't know. All I can vouch for is Hopkins, Tiranti, and myself and the brave gun crew on the 105 howitzer. As for me, it had a lot to do with self-preservation and the will to live. I didn't want to die hiding in a bunker.”

Koon completed his tour in October 1970. He left active duty in 1972 and the following year joined the Washington State Army National Guard. Later he returned to active duty as a career counselor. For personal reasons, he elected to leave the Army two years before he would have been eligible for retirement.

Koon then took a job for a firm that bought specialty cars for overseas clients. Later, he worked in automotive shops and in construction. He suffered a stroke in 2003 and is now retired on Social Security disability and a Veterans Disability Pension for hearing loss, PTSD, and type 2 diabetes resulting from Agent Orange exposure.

He lives in rural Moriarty, New Mexico, with his wife, and enjoys traveling.

George Lattin

George Lattin came from Huntington, West Virginia, and enlisted in the Air Force in 1948 at age 17. I knew him as Walt 20, his forward air controller call sign. Lattin's legend began while aloft in his Bird Dog; he observed a flight of VNAF A-37 jets dropping bombs on their own troops. To stop them, he flew in front of the descending A-37s. More than twenty ARVN soldiers were killed; without Lattin, it would doubtless have been much worse.

In late November 1969, during the Battle of Bu Prang, Lattin's Bird Dog was hit repeatedly by small-arms fire that smashed his instrument panel and severed most of the cables connecting the cockpit to control surfaces; he could move only his rudder, and that not much. I talked him back to Bu Prang. To land on the strip there, he flew through a rain of mortar and artillery fire while fighting a crosswind, narrowly missing a barrier across the dirt airstrip to make a spectacular crash landing. He and his backseat observer came away with only a few scratches.

On December 1, a month after he'd kept everyone alive on Kate by bringing in the fast movers to drop bombs and napalm all around our hilltop, a Boxer Phantom crashed near Bu Prang, killing its pilot and weapons officer. A CIDG patrol recovered the bodies. Upon learning that an Army
Huey was coming to bring the remains to an Army morgue in Pleiku, Lattin realized that the identification process and then notification of next of kin would be delayed for several days until paperwork made its way through Army channels to the Air Force. Not willing to keep several families twisting in the wind for days, not knowing what had happened to their loved ones, he flew to Bu Prang, where the Army chopper was headed to refuel. There he approached its warrant officer pilots and asked them to take the remains to the Air Force mortuary at Cam Ranh Bay. The pilots replied politely that they were under strict orders to take them to Pleiku.

Lattin then politely threatened them with court-martial on the bogus premise that they were in combat and could not refuse the direct order of a superior officer. The pilots flew the remains to Cam Ranh Bay, then flew to Pleiku as originally ordered.

There were plenty of Air Force majors who would have faced disciplinary action for what Lattin did, but not him. Lattin retired from active duty as a major in 1970, after twenty-two years of service and logging more than 10,000 hours in the air. Along the way he earned a Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, a dozen Air Medals, and many other decorations.

Terry Malvestuto

Like all noncoms on Kate, Terry Malvestuto was awarded the Bronze Star. He was discharged the following year and returned to his home in Steger, a Chicago suburb. There he joined the community's civil defense organization and rose to become its coordinator. He died at age 60 in 2008 from the complications of type 2 diabetes associated with his exposure to Agent Orange.

Jim Matlock

On the day that Joker 85 went down, Jim was a Ghost Rider pilot flying a slick on ash-and-trash missions out of BMT. He volunteered to bring our
ammo and take out some of our wounded. A few days after we walked out, I ran into Jim at Bu Prang and admired his wrist compass. I told him how I'd wished that I'd had one like it when we bailed out of Kate. He took the compass off his wrist and gave it to me. I have it still. Jim lives in Somerville, Tennessee, a fine man and a great pilot.

Dan Pierelli

When his hitch was up, Dan returned to his home in Connecticut and married his fiancée. They now have two sons. Dan returned to school, earned a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, and worked in the defense industry for forty years. Like much of America, Dan's community suffered greatly from the catastrophic economic recession of 2008. And like many older workers, he was personally afflicted: In 2010 he was laid off by Sikorsky, the manufacturers of Black Hawk helicopters. Dan now does yard work and serves as an on-call substitute schoolteacher, honorable but uncertain employment in tough times. He lives in Southbury, Connecticut.

The passage of time, and possibly the trauma of being under constant bombardment with almost no sleep for five days, have taken their toll on his recall of events on Kate. Many specifics vanished; others faded into fuzzy, generalized memories. I think that this is a good thing. Nobody on Kate, myself included, put more of himself into that battle than did Dan.

William E. Platt

Will was Mike 82, one of the coolest of the cool Air Force FACs that saved our skins on Kate. The son of a glider pilot and an aeronautical engineer, he graduated from Eastern Michigan University, then enlisted for the Air Force pilot program. After earning his wings, he chose to become FAC as a shortcut to the war.

Will retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1988, and lives in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. With more than 11,000 hours as a commercial aviator, he sometimes flies as a fish spotter. His wartime memoir is
Fly and Fight, Low and Slow.

Gerald “Tex” Rogers

Except for his two years in the Army, Tex lived his entire life in Crane, Texas. He was awarded the Bronze Star, and was honorably discharged in 1970. Returning to Crane, he married Sharron Westfall, and adopted her baby daughter. Their daughter, Misty Renee, was born in 1972. The couple divorced in 1976, and Tex married again in 1980. Soon after returning home, he started Rogers Dirt Construction to build dirt pads for oil rigs, and other earthworks for the West Texas oil fields. He was also a steer wrestler and a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. He loved to hunt and fish and collected arrowheads and other Indian artifacts.

When he reached his thirties, Tex was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I'm not a doctor, but my guess is that was the cause of his night blindness. Tex passed away from complications of the disease in October 1995. He was 47 years old.

Ron Ross

All these decades later, I had another thought about why Ron was sent to Kate: Of all the artillery lieutenants who served on Kate, only he had any experience crawling around a jungle. Ross was a graduate of the challenging and highly regarded US Army Jungle Warfare School in Panama, where he had been trained by Special Forces officers and noncoms. Could that be why he was sent to Kate? Had LTC Delaune, or someone on his staff, anticipated that, after what had happened at Firebase Helen, Kate's artillerymen might have to walk out?

I'll never know.

As a final indignity, Ross's death was reported, unofficially, as that of “XO from Charlie Battery, 1/92 Artillery.” He was in that capacity for about twenty-four hours, as long as he was on Kate, but the man carried in that slot on the battery personnel roster was Mike Smith. Following custom, the 1/92d's next firebase was established to honor a fallen officer. It was called Firebase Mike Smith.

Ross was posthumously promoted to captain, which had the effect of increasing, slightly, the death benefit paid to his survivors. More than forty years later, I learned that he had also been awarded the Silver Star.