Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) (6 page)

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. Through 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.

This was, of course, careerism at its most insidious. It takes months on the job before almost any officer reaches his full potential as a battery or company commander, and during that very demanding learning curve, new commanders will make mistakes. Mistakes in combat cost lives. By giving almost every captain a shot at command, and limiting this assignment to six months, Pentagon planners ensured that few American soldiers would fight our difficult war under an experienced and capable commander. This is not to say that there were no good unit commanders, or that even the best and most experienced officers don't make mistakes. But when the average unit commander has three months' job experience, his troops suffer for it, and some will die.

Captain Klaus Adam had eight years on active duty when he arrived in Vietnam. He had attended nine Army schools, and graduated with distinction from eight. He had commanded a Sergeant Missile battery in peacetime Germany. But he had no experience whatsoever with field artillery, so his first combat assignment was as assistant operations officer of the 52nd Artillery Group, a headquarters for several field artillery battalions under IFFV Artillery. “I was basically the night duty officer,” he explains. Six months after arriving in Vietnam, in August 1969, he took command of Charlie Battery, 1/92 Artillery.

In late September he flew into Kate for a look-see. “I met the CIDG force commander [Special Forces Captain Lucian Barham],” recalls Adam. “I surveyed the defensive positions and made sure that my guys were adequately defended, because artillerymen can't fire their guns and take care of themselves at the same time. You either shoot or you duck; you can't do both. At the time, I still had the stupid idea that they were out there to support the Mike Force and the South Vietnamese forces that were supposedly out there; artillery is never told the plan of action for the ground forces. There was no need to brief us, because all the ground forces need do is call for fire. It didn't matter
why
they called it in; we just sent the fire where and when they wanted it. So, my assumption was that there were combat teams
out there doing sweeps, and patrols, and going after the bad guys, and we were there to support them.”

In fact, there were almost no US or ARVN forces in the area at all. Adam was later told by an IFFV Artillery colonel that his men had been positioned as bait, designed to lure the North Vietnamese across the border, where they could be destroyed.

Nobody on Kate was ever told about that.

After looking around for some twenty minutes and finding nothing to complain about, Adam got back in his chopper and flew
away.

When you heard your country calling, Illinois, Illinois,
Where the shot and shell were falling, Illinois, Illinois,
When the Southern host withdrew, 
Pitting Gray against the Blue, There were none more brave than
   you, Illinois, Illinois, 
There were none more brave than you, Illinois.

—Illinois State Song

Rock Island, Illinois

T
he first train to link Chicago with the Mississippi River arrived at the sleepy river town of Rock Island, Illinois, in February 1854 on the tracks of the just-completed Chicago & Rock Island Railroad. Building across the river's largest isle to save construction costs, the rail company thrust two bridges over to what is now Davenport, Iowa, opening Chicago's slaughterhouses, grain mills, and rail network to the farmers of the Great Plains. Rock Island boomed. In 1880 the US Army opened the Rock Island Arsenal, today the nation's largest federal armaments manufacturer, and the Quad Cities—Rock Island and neighbors Moline, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa—became a manufacturing center. (Even after East Moline was incorporated in 1903, these five tough river towns with closely connected economies remained known as the Quad Cities.) Dominated by the United Auto Workers, they were a union bastion whose blue-collar members swore allegiance to FDR and the New Deal and could be counted on to vote Democratic in every election.

I was born in Rock Island in August 1948, the third of five children of
second-generation German American farmers. I am certain that my father, Leander, a welder at John Deere, the giant manufacturer of tractors and farm implements, loved me and all his children. But he rarely showed this affection; taciturn and emotionally closed, a compact, muscular, and short-fused man, he punched like a prizefighter and relied mostly on his fists to communicate his displeasure with me. As I entered puberty, my beloved mother, Germaine, a sensitive and intelligent woman, was diagnosed with depression and hypertension. Like many depressed women of that era, she was severely overmedicated. She was soon bedridden, and rarely left her room for days on end. Mom died of a stroke in 1965. My relations with Dad, which had never been good, chilled to an icy truce.

I am the middle child: Sister Nancy and brother Bob were the oldest, while Don and Mary Beth followed me in birth order. We had always looked out for one another; after our mother died, we became even closer. When Bob finished high school, he escaped the limited horizons of small-town life and enlisted in the Air Force.

Our family wasn't poor in the classic sense. We had enough to eat, a safe roof over our heads, decent clothes to wear, and we all went to Catholic schools. But there was no money for anything else, period. When it was time for me to start high school, we didn't have enough for tuition at the diocese school, Alleman High, where all my elementary school friends were enrolled. I found an after-school job in a grocery store to help pay my tuition.

Alleman was coed; most of our teachers were nuns or priests. Student discipline was strict, and most teachers enforced school policies and their own classroom rules with corporal punishment. I soon learned not to complain to my father about being spanked or slapped or having an ear twisted: That always triggered a second beating, from him.

At this time in my life, academics didn't much interest me; studying was not my thing at all. Instead, I devoted my high school years to enjoying myself. Soon the nuns had labeled me: I was the boy who would never live up to my potential. Held to such low expectations, I did my best not to disappoint anyone: I was happy to earn a C and believed that my parents should also have been happy. I was a classic underachiever—but I
was
voted “Most Fun to Be With” by my senior classmates.

I was big and strong but, in the grand scheme of things, only an average athlete. I was desperate to make the varsity football squad, to become a prince of the campus. In my junior year, however, my job conflicted with football practice. I deferred varsity dreams until my senior year; by then, I had enough work seniority to demand a schedule that allowed for after-school practice. With much help from my coaches—and I mean they gave me every possible break and spent hours and hours with me—I made up for my lack of native ability and playing experience with sheer desire. I never started a game, but I played often enough and well enough to earn the respect of my coaches and teammates—and a prized varsity letter.

This became tremendously important to me for reasons I had no way to predict: Being part of a team, as I saw and experienced, was a powerful force multiplier. Earning that letter was the turning point in my young life, my first glimmer of the power of my own possibilities.

But only a glimmer. As I approached graduation, the future I envisioned for myself was much like the one most of my classmates imagined: I would get obligatory military service out of the way, return to the Quad Cities, and find an apprenticeship in the building trades.

Yet I was anxious to put the humdrum ordinariness and rigidity of small-town life aside, if only for a few years. I wanted adventure. I wanted to break out of the Quad Cities cycle of going nowhere in record time.

With my best friend, Joe Murphy, I spent a few weeks considering service options. I could enlist for three years in the Army, or four in the Marines, Air Force, or Navy. I could volunteer for the draft, or wait to be drafted, which meant only two years.

Joe and I decided that the Marines offered the biggest challenge and the most possibilities for adventure.

I idolized my brother Bob—and he wouldn't hear of me joining the Marines. After completing a four-year Air Force hitch, instead of returning to Rock Island, he re-upped! Reenlisted in the
Army
,
spent eight weeks in advanced infantry training, then went to jump school and
volunteered for Special Forces.

Bob was a paratrooper! In the entire eighteen years of my life, I had never even
met
a paratrooper! So when Bob said, “Forget about the
Marines,” I listened. In the Gospel According to Brother Bob, Special Forces was where the action was. He laid it out for us: Enlist in the Army, volunteer for airborne infantry, then ask for Vietnam.

This was the summer of 1966. Nearly half a million American men had already been drafted for Vietnam service; by the end of that year, some 385,000 US troops would be serving in Vietnam or its waters. Twice that many were in various stages of training for deployment to the war zone. Across America, millions of young men about my age were going to extraordinary lengths to get into perennially understrength National Guard and Reserve units that almost overnight had filled up and grown waiting lists. Men with family, business, or political connections, or with relatives serving in Guard units, proved far more successful in their quest for an honorable, or at least legal, way to avoid the draft and the hazards of combat.

Those lacking such connections—tens of millions of them—began applying for student draft deferments, enrolling in divinity schools or other graduate programs where they would find shelter from the monsoon of draft notices falling on America's youth. Thousands more had fled the country or faced prison by declaring themselves conscientious objectors. Navy and Air Force recruiters were swamped by a flood of highly qualified applicants that allowed them to pick and choose, while their opposite numbers in the Army and Marines struggled to meet monthly quotas.

Many, perhaps most, of those who approached Army recruiters were seeking to do better for themselves than simply waiting to be drafted. Often accompanied by a parent or older brother, potential enlistees came prepared with pointed questions and lists of Army schools. They demanded a written guarantee of training as a dental technician, electronics repairman, military policeman, radar operator, aircraft mechanic, chaplain's assistant, finance clerk—schooling in any military occupational specialty that might offer safety from the danger and privation of a wartime combat unit.

But Joe and I lived in Rock Island. Our parents, our uncles, our older brothers, had all served in the military. As bored as I was with life along the Mississippi, I knew that I lived in the greatest country on earth. I was proud to be American. That we were at war in Vietnam meant that I
needed
to join up, get trained to fight and get to the war zone before it was over. I was almost desperate to do my part for America.

Right after graduation, Joe and I found Rock Island's Army recruiting office and asked about signing up for airborne infantry. The sergeant questioned us for a long time, until he was convinced of our sincerity. Then he smiled.

“This is your lucky day,” he drawled. “I've got exactly
two
quota slots left for airborne infantry. If you're
truly
interested in a life of adventure, in joining a military
elite
, so prized that most who volunteer are turned away or wash out of training, you'll have to sign up right away. Today. Right now.”

Before some friend or relative could talk us into changing our minds.

On October 2, 1966, Joe and I took the train to Chicago, where we reported to the Armed Forces Induction Center. After a physical and a battery of tests, we were sworn in to the United States Army. A little before midnight, just like the lyrics of the Monkees hit song, we “caught the last train to Clarksville,” Tennessee, gateway to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Joe and I were assigned to the same basic training company. A day or so later, we took another battery of exams, including the OCS test. OCS might have stood for Oklahoma Cooking School, for all I knew—I had never heard the term “Officer Candidate School.” I had no idea that such a place existed, any more than I had the merest inkling that there was something called the Reserve Officer Training Corps for college students. I thought that every Army officer came from West Point.

Becoming an officer was not part of my escape-boring-Rock-Island-adventure dream. Officers, I supposed, must have a lot more responsibility than the men in the ranks. They had to be pretty smart, I guessed, because officers would have to know a lot of stuff. They would have to set an example for everyone else. That felt a lot like getting an “A” in every class and being on the student council. It felt like it was going to be an awful lot of work. A lot of responsibility. Not much fun.

It didn't feel like
me
at all.

Joe, who'd earned better high school grades than I did, wanted that
kind of responsibility. His score on the officer candidate exam missed the cutoff by one point.

I
passed
by one point.

•   •   •

GROUND
war is particularly hard on junior infantry officers and noncoms. They're the sharpened tip of the spear; in combat, platoon and squad leaders are killed or wounded far more often than almost any other infantrymen, and the better they are at leading their men against fire, the more likely it is that they will become a casualty. By the autumn of 1966, when I enlisted and, coincidentally, when my coauthor was commissioned as an infantry second lieutenant at An Khe, Vietnam, the Army was so desperate for infantry platoon leaders that the Secretary of the Army, the authority who, with congressional approval, appointed individuals to the officer ranks—until then, virtually without exception, they were physicians, dentists, nurses, clergy, attorneys, and other professionals—delegated this power of direct commissioning to the commanding general of US Army, Vietnam, for the purpose of awarding direct appointments to outstanding sergeants and warrant officers. The Army also opened six new Officer Candidate Schools geared to turning out armor, engineer, ordnance, transportation, signal, and quartermaster officers, respectively.

When my OCS test results were published, I was summoned to my company commander's office, along with everyone else who had passed. It's rare for a basic training company commander to have direct contact with trainees: He has a first sergeant and a cadre of drill instructors for that. When my coauthor went through Army basic training at Fort Ord, California, in 1959, when he was himself a Fort Jackson, South Carolina, drill instructor in 1961, and when he spent a month reporting on a basic training company at Fort Benning, Georgia, for a national magazine in 1979, he never saw a company commander address a group of trainees smaller than a platoon, and then only to scold them.

But it isn't every day that a young captain gets a chance to talk to future officers, an opportunity to impart his wisdom and insight and perhaps influence both their immediate futures and their entire lives. Even as my CO outlined what was ahead for us, he made it clear that some of us would
not
get into OCS, and that fewer still would graduate. But once we did, he explained, once we were appointed Reserve officers, our lives would be far different from those of the enlisted men we left behind.

When he finished talking, the captain asked if we had any questions.

I raised my hand and he nodded at me—permission to speak.

I took a deep breath and said, “What if I don't
want
to go to OCS?”

“Private, let me explain how the Army works,” he replied. “I have a levy to fill, and with everyone in this room, I'll just make my OCS quota. You
will
be going to OCS. Any more questions?”

There were none.

Now that I'd made the OCS cut, I noticed that my drill instructors paid a bit more attention to me. At the time, I didn't understand just how much more. I didn't know that achieving a satisfactory grade on a multiple-choice test wasn't enough to show that an individual has the ability to learn critical leadership skills. My DIs were obliged to take note of my progress, my successes, and my failures. They looked for evidence of personal initiative as well as obedience to discipline, and they made subjective evaluations of my leadership ability, my capacity to learn and adapt to changing situations, my physical conditioning, and my progress in learning the soldierly skills. If I failed to meet their expectations, I would never have been allowed to start OCS.

Looking back, I realize it's a good thing I didn't know any of that.

While Fort Campbell is the home of the 101st Airborne Division, for some reason most of my company's drill instructors were tankers—what the Army calls the armor branch. These men seemed to assume that those of us headed for OCS would go to nearby Fort Knox, the Armor Center and School.