The Cold War (55 page)

Unmentioned but ever present during the deliberations were memories of the recent siege at Khe Sanh. Although American generals had always spoken of the battle with confidence and enthusiasm when addressing Washington or the media, they had found it an anxious and wearing experience, superimposed as it was on the widespread and bloody fights of Tet. Now, with this new mini-Tet looming, neither Abrams nor Cushman was inclined to begin another protracted battle. “The decision to evacuate was brought on considerably by the
Khe Sanh experience,” wrote Westmoreland's operations officer. At the conclusion of the discussions, Abrams instructed Cushman to prepare plans for a withdrawal. Westmoreland approved the decision a few hours later.

By the time word of the decision to evacuate reached Colonel Nelson at Kham Duc, all seven of the hill outposts were under heavy attack. Squads and platoons of Americal soldiers reinforcing the CIDG troops on the hills fought desperately, supported by C-47 gunships dropping flares to illuminate the area and peppering the attackers with their mini cannon. As the outposts were overwhelmed, the defenders directed gunships and artillery fire onto their own positions. A few managed to escape into the Kham Duc perimeter, but many died in the hill outposts.

The fate of the outposts added to the sense of terror and foreboding within Kham Duc. The morning began with a fresh disaster when one of the first evacuation helicopters, an army CH-47, was hit by heavy ground fire as it landed on the runway. The chopper exploded, and its flaming hulk blocked the runway for over an hour. An A-1E fighter also was shot down.

As the sun rose over Kham Duc, burning away some of the morning fog, aerial observers beheld a grim sight: The camp was under almost continuous mortar fire, and heavy ground attacks were taking place against the northwestern perimeter. The burning CH-47 sent clouds of black smoke into the sky. On the nearby hills, radio antennae sprouted above the newly established NVA command posts.

Inside the perimeter, men tensely awaited the ground attack. The enemy mortar barrage increased in intensity, and a near-miss showered one squad with shrapnel. An 82mm mortar round scored a direct hit on a nearby mortar manned by CIDG personnel, killing or wounding all three of the crew. Specialist 4 Todd Regon, leader of a mortar team, quickly rounded up some Americal infantrymen, led them to the pit, and gave them a crash course in mortar firing. Scrambling back to his own mortar position, Regon was astounded to see illumination rounds bursting harmlessly over the daytime battlefield. An instant later, the mortarman realized that he had failed to show his infantry trainees the difference between high-explosive and illumination rounds for the CIDG mortar. Despite his grim situation, Regon managed a smile. “This ought to confuse the hell out of the enemy.”

As enemy pressure on the base increased, MACV directed all available air support to Kham Duc. Fighters and attack planes from Pleiku, Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay, and Phu Cat—as well as bases in Thailand—converged on the beleaguered
base in answer to the call from the Seventh Air Force commander, General W. W. Momyer, for a “Grand Slam” maximum air effort. An airborne command post in a converted C-130 coordinated the air attacks as dozens of aircraft responded to Momyer's call. At times there were as many as twenty fighters over Kham Duc. Two forward air controllers (FACs) in light planes flew parallel to each other at opposite sides of the Kham Duc runway, each controlling fighter strikes on his side of the field. Traffic was so thick that by late morning the FACs could specifically select fighters based on their load: napalm, cluster-bomb units, 500- or 750-pound bombs, or high-drag bombs.

“We've got a small Khe Sanh going on here,” an air force officer at Kham Duc recorded. “I hope we finish it before night comes.” The evacuation, when it came, was marked by confusion, panic, and tragedy. Many of the defenders at Kham Duc were not informed of the decision to abandon the camp until many hours after it had been made. The CIDG forces, panicky and on the verge of mutiny or surrender, feared that the Americans would abandon them. Suspicion was mutual, since American troops had heard the stories of CIDG forces firing on other Americans at Ngoc Tavak.

The air force's 834th Air Division, whose giant C-123s and C-130s would have to make the actual evacuation, was also dogged by confusion and lastminute changes. At 8:20 A
.
M. on May 12, the 834th was alerted for an all-out effort to evacuate the base. Two hours later, fighting at Kham Duc had grown so intense that the Seventh Air Force canceled the evacuation and directed the transports to fly in additional ammunition to Kham Duc. By the time the MACV operations center directed the 834th to resume evacuation operations, around one-fifteen P
.
M., transports loaded with ammunition were already on their way to Kham Duc. Other planes on the ground had to unload their cargo before proceeding empty to Kham Duc to bring out the defenders. To complicate matters further, Colonel Nelson's command post could not communicate with many of the supporting aircraft because the Americal's radios were incompatible with those used by most of the planes. Messages had to be relayed from the Special Forces command post, whose radios could talk to the planes. At times the heavy volume of incoming message traffic almost jammed the two available networks. The communications mess made it nearly impossible for ground commanders to coordinate transport and helicopter landings with supporting air strikes.

That complete disaster was averted was due largely to the deadly skills of the fighter pilots and their controllers and to the iron nerve and brilliant improvisation
of the tactical airlift crews. The first C-130 into Kham Duc landed on the debris-strewn runway at about ten A
.
M., in a hail of mortar and automaticweapons fire that punctured a tire and fuel tanks. Lieutenant Colonel Daryl D. Cole's plane, dispatched before the evacuation order had been reinstituted, had a full load of cargo for Kham Duc, but panic-stricken civilians and CIDG troops rushed the plane as soon as it taxied to a stop, preventing either orderly unloading or evacuation. With mortar shells landing ever closer to the aircraft, Cole decided to attempt a takeoff with his overloaded plane, crowded with CIDG personnel and much of the remaining cargo. His first attempt was unsuccessful, and the increased attention that the plane was attracting from NVA gunners convinced the passengers to make a hasty exit. In the meantime, the crew had succeeded in cutting away part of the ruined tire. Dodging the runway debris, with fuel streaming from the wing tanks and under heavy fire, Cole managed to get his stricken C-130 airborne and safely back to Cam Ranh Bay. Cole was followed by a C-123 piloted by Major Ray Shelton, which loaded about sixty army engineers and Vietnamese civilians in under three minutes before taking off under heavy enemy fire.

Throughout the day, army and marine helicopters continued to dodge heavy fire to bring in ammunition and evacuate the wounded from Kham Duc. Yet the helicopters could not carry the large numbers of people now desperate to escape from the doomed camp. Only the large transports of the 834th could do that, and since eleven o'clock there had been no planes. Then, around three in the afternoon, a C-130 piloted by Major Bernard L. Bucher landed at Kham Duc. CIDG troops, women, and children swarmed aboard the plane. The CIDG soldiers and their families were convinced that the Americans intended to leave them behind. Two hours earlier, Special Forces sergeant Richard Campbell had watched in horror and disbelief as a woman and her small child who had fallen while climbing the rear ramp of a CH-46 helicopter were trampled by fear-maddened CIDG soldiers in a rush to board the chopper. Now nearly two hundred women and children were crowded onto Bucher's bulletriddled C-130.

Because he had received heavy fire from the southwest corner of the field on landing, Bucher elected to take off to the northeast. A few minutes before Bucher's takeoff, fighters raked the NVA machine guns on the low ridges north of the runway with loads of cluster-bomb units. The deadly CBUs killed the gun crews, but replacements from nearby enemy positions soon had the guns back in action. Bucher's plane, struck by heavy machine-gun fire, crashed and
exploded in an orange ball of flame less than a mile from the runway. There were no survivors of what has to be counted as one of the worst air disasters of this century, and the costliest one in the Vietnam War.

After watching Bucher's crash, Lieutenant Colonel William Boyd, Jr., pilot of the next C-130 into the camp, decided on a steep, sideslipping descent. Just as Boyd's plane was about to touch down, a shell exploded a hundred feet ahead on the runway. Pushing his throttle forward, Boyd climbed steeply into the air. Landing successfully on his next try, he loaded about a hundred CIDG and Americal soldiers and took off under heavy fire for Cam Ranh Bay.

The fourth C-130 of the day, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Delmore, had been forced to make a second pass to avoid Boyd's takeoff. This time the Communist gunners were ready, and .50-caliber bullets ripped six-inch holes in the sides of the fuselage as the giant C-130, its hydraulic system shot away, bounced along the runway, glanced off the wreckage of the CH-47 destroyed that morning, and plowed into a dirt mound on the side of the runway. Miraculously, the entire crew escaped. A few minutes later, the crippled plane burst into flames.

The remaining C-130 pilots circling above Kham Duc, awaiting their turns to land, had seen Bucher's plane crash and burn, Delmore's wrecked on landing, and two helicopters destroyed by ground fire. The runway was littered with debris and burning wreckage. Undeterred, Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Montgomery brought his C-130 into Kham Duc, followed by two more C-130s; together, the three planes brought out more than four hundred people just as the Seventh Air Force was issuing orders to cancel further landings. As the order was given, Major James L. Wallace's C-130 was able to make a pickup, bringing out the remaining soldiers and civilians.

But in the confusion, according to some reports, another C-130 landed briefly just as Wallace's was taking off. In the mistaken belief that personnel were still on the ground, the three men in the combat control team (CCT), who had been pulled out of the camp that morning after spending two days helping to bring in the Americal Division reinforcements, were now dropped off again—to find themselves alone, surrounded by exploding ammunition dumps and the advancing enemy.

Heavy fire forced the C-130 that had brought them to fly out before the three men could return to the plane. The airwaves fell silent as the pilot, Major Jay Van Cleff, radioed that the camp now was not fully evacuated and ready to be destroyed by air strikes.

On the ground, Major Gallagher and Technical Sergeants Freedman and Lundie took cover in a ditch, began shooting at the enemy—silencing one of the two machine guns firing at them from the sides of the runway—and hoped for a miracle. Lieutenant Colonel Alfred J. Jeanotte, Jr., given cover by fighter aircraft, touched down on the north side of the runway, but the crew couldn't see the three men and had to take off right away because of enemy fire. Once airborne, however, the crew spotted the men running back to their ditch after seeing the rescue plane leave without them. Their position was radioed to the next plane in line to attempt a rescue.

Lieutenant Colonel Joe M. Jackson brought in his C-123 with a sideslipping descent, to make the smallest possible target. Despite sharp objects and holes on the runway, the plane landed safely, rolled as close as possible to the ditch, and swung back around for a departure as the three men raced from their cover and were pulled on board. In under a minute, with bullets, shells, and even a 122mm rocket striking all around them, the C-123 took off and got away without a single hole in the plane. Jackson's daring rescue of the last three defenders of Kham Duc earned him the Medal of Honor.

It was over before five P
.
M. Communist troops advanced cautiously into Kham Duc and along the runway perimeter as explosions from the burning aircraft and ammunition dumps lit up the twilight sky. The following morning, sixty B-52 bombers, the entire force available in Vietnam, rained twelve thousand tons of bombs on the camp, and MACV proclaimed that the enemy had suffered severely. Yet nothing could disguise the fact that Kham Duc had been an American defeat—a Khe Sanh in reverse. Twenty-five Americans had been killed and nearly a hundred wounded, and there were several hundred Vietnamese casualties; seven U.S. aircraft and all the camp's heavy military and engineering equipment were also lost. American commanders had vacillated between reinforcing the camp and evacuating it, finally opting for evacuation under the worst possible circumstances. Command, control, and communications had been confused and often ineffective. General Abrams termed the operation “a minor disaster.” “This was an ugly one and I expect some repercussions,” wrote the chief of Westmoreland's operations center.

Yet the repercussions were few
.
Abrams angrily ordered I Corps commanders to review their command, control, communications, and planning, so “that when your command is confronted with a similar imminent problem, appropriate action would be taken so that we would not lose another camp.” But the
general's expression of unhappiness was confined to top-secret messages. No heads rolled; no investigations were launched. Saigon and Washington remained unruffled, barely concerned. The news media, preoccupied with the Communist attacks in Saigon and the peace negotiations in Paris, paid little attention. In a war in which the distinctions between success and failure, victory and defeat, had long been blurred, even an unequivocal debacle like Kham Duc could be obfuscated, obscured, and ignored.

MARILYN ELKINS

The fate of MIAs—the missing—was the bleakest of issues in the Vietnam War, and one that refuses to go away. The war may be decades behind us, but even today many Americans believe that somehow, somewhere, in the Socialist jungles of Vietnam, unredeemed captives remain. In towns all over the nation (including my own), you can spot those black MIA-POW flags, with a bowed silhouetted head in a stark white circle and behind it, a guard tower: The words YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN complete that doleful scene. The MIA issue is one that long ago became politicized. At a time when the nation was splitting apart over American involvement in the war, the Nixon administration flaunted it in an attempt to rally the faithful who still supported our presence in Vietnam and the bombing of the North. The message on that black flag has taken a tenacious hold on the American imagination, acquiring a life of its own. No doubt it helped to delay U.S. recognition of the united nation of Vietnam by a good twenty years. That did not happen until 1995, twenty-two years after the North Vietnamese released 591 POWs and President Richard M. Nixon announced that “All our American POWs are on their way home.”