What It Was Like For A Grunt To Survive 30 Days In A Firebase In Vietnam

You step out of a Huey onto a bulldozed hill in South Vietnam, and after weeks of wandering through the jungle, this is the closest thing to safety you’ve ever seen. There are sandbag bunkers, mail, hot food delivered by helicopters, and rings of barbed wire between you and the enemy.  You will hold this hill for several weeks, maybe a month.

  But a fire base can kill you in its own way. On one hill in March 1971, a company that had been there for barely two days paid the price for mistakes made long before its arrival.  For an infantryman emerging from the thicket, duty at the fire base seemed like a vacation.  This belief later helped lead to the deaths of 30 men on a single ridge.

  But the day the company arrived, it was the best news anyone had heard in weeks.  The reason the company got such a break at all lies in how the Army formed its infantry for Vietnam.  In an official Army study of the history of field artillery in Vietnam, Major General David Ewing Ott explains that a single- battery firebase was usually assigned one rifle company to guard the perimeter and patrol.

  The army took this into account. You see, infantry battalions in Vietnam had four rifle companies instead of three, so one company could hold a hill while the other three worked in the jungle. So how long did the company actually stay there?  One rifle company from the First Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, kept a dated log of each fire base it held.

Its veterans write that they spent about a quarter of their time ensuring security at the fire base. The lengths of stay in that journal range from 8 days to 48 days, with most of them falling within a period of 2 weeks to about a month. In other words, there was never an official 30-day term of service on a fire base .

Call it a month, because that’s about how much time the mouth had before going into the bush again.  If you’ve ever heard a clear fixed number for this, the records don’t support it.  The first days on a new hill are all about shoveling. The guns arrived on Chinook helicopters, and Ott notes that a Chinook could lift an entire battery of 105mm howitzers and ammunition in just 11 flights.  11.

The ideal fire base is a perfect circle of bunkers tightly wrapped around the guns.  Ott admits that this was rarely possible because the terrain was almost never conducive to it.  Inside the circle, a six-gun battery was often arranged in a star shape.  Five guns on the edges and a sixth in the center—the one that fired illuminating shells at night.

Then the sandbags appeared.    The fire base was built from what a helicopter could carry.  Ott lists the materials without embellishment. Sandbags, empty ammunition boxes, powder canisters, perforated steel plates, heavy timber and steel pipe halves, covered with even more sandbags.  Some bases installed chain- link mesh 6–8 meters in front of bunkers to stop grenade launcher shots before they reached people.

  And the work, the work never really ended. Brandy Cox, a rifleman with the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, wrote home in 1970 that they were forced to dismantle the bunker and rebuild it .  In the next line of the same letter, he wrote: ” Tomorrow we have to go out into the field again.”  That’s the entire rhythm of the firebase in two sentences.

One company builds a hill, patches it up, and hands it over to the next company.  This show sounds like regular paperwork.  On one hill, it turned out to be the most dangerous moment of the entire month.  But this is looking ahead.  By the second week, the hill was living on a routine, and almost every part of that routine existed to keep you alive.

  Ott makes it clear that aggressive, continuous patrolling around the base was as important as the wire fence itself. Military historian David Zebecki, writing for Historynet, describes patrols going out day and night, staying within range of the guns— approximately 11 km for the 105 mm guns. Returning to the perimeter, the defense was multi-layered.

There were strips of barbed wire, Claymore mines pointed outward, and signal flares strung low above the ground.  At night, a few people would go outside the wire fence as an observation post, carrying rifles, a radio, and their own ears. Night vision devices amplified the moonlight so the sentry could spot movement in the darkness, and ground-based radar tracked approaches.

  Neighboring fire bases even aimed their artillery at areas near each other’s wire fences, and Ott writes that this fire support was time and again the main reason for the failure of attacks on the bases. The artillerymen had their own tricks. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Dean, commander of the 25th Infantry Division’s field artillery, developed a technique that the crews called the ” Killer Junior.

”  They set the shells to explode approximately 9 meters above the ground at a distance of 200 to 1,000 meters.  Ott considered this method more effective than the famous cluster bomb against enemy soldiers lying down or crawling towards the barricade.  Each of these levels of protection had to be maintained, checked, and restored every night by tired people.

  When one of them made a mistake, the others had to correct it.  And on some hills, everyone was wrong at once.  Even when everything worked, the firebase was never a true rear. Floyd Alexander, a radioman on the forward observation team at Ripcord, was glad to leave that hill, according to his biography from the Ripcord Association, because sniper fire and sudden mortar attacks were a constant threat there.

  John Nolan, a platoon commander in the 4th Infantry Division, noticed something worse in his company.  He wrote that as soon as they began to operate from a fire base, their losses increased.  So, is the fire base a rest or a trap? Much depended on what happened inside the perimeter over the weeks. Quang Tin Province, March 1971.

    The Mary Ann fire support base was located on a bulldozed ridge about 500 meters long.  Kelly Bell, in an article for Vietnam magazine, wrote that it looked like the back of a camel.    The American Division opened it in February 1970 and reopened it in June of the same year. So, by March, the hill had already been occupied for about 9 months.

Company after company passed through it , replacing one another.  The line of trenches connected 22 bunkers, most of which were made from steel shipping containers, and more than 30 other shacks and structures were scattered around them .  Keith Nolan, a historian who interviewed survivors for his book “Sappers in the Wire” (and is not related to the lieutenant we mentioned earlier), describes a place that resembled a slum.

  And the people who lived there also began to look at it the same way.  According to Bell’s account, the garrison came to view Mary Ann as something of a rear area, when in fact it was the division’s most advanced firebase. During those months, the hill’s defenses gradually collapsed.  The base was to be handed over to the South Vietnamese army, so construction was frozen, including the installation of a fence to cover two gaps in the barbed wire.

Most of the mortars and artillery had already been moved to another hill, Landing Zone Mildred.  Every night vision sight and ground-based radar on the base, absolutely every one of them, was sent to the rear for maintenance.  There were no guards at the entrance to the battalion command bunker, although brigade policy required their presence.

  There were also no listening posts around the perimeter.  The brigade commander, Colonel William Hathaway, later explained why. I considered the perimeter listening posts dangerous.  And there were also signal mines. When the Chinooks arrived to supply the base, the airflow from their propellers blew some of them apart.  No one replaced them.

  Lieutenant Jerry Sams, the platoon commander on the hill, later recalled that his men were even sent to collect paper from the wires.  And while they were doing that, they accidentally activated flares.  All these early warning devices that could come in very handy later that night.  Meanwhile, reconnaissance discovered an enemy sapper battalion approximately 15–20 km to the east.

  You would think that someone would have tied it all together .  Hathaway inspected the Mary Ann on March 27 and saw what he called a significant improvement. He noted that the soldiers were on alert.  He did not go around the outer line of wire fences. Most of what we know about the subsequent events on the Mary Ann comes from the words of those who survived and later told everything to a historian.

  That’s the kind of record we’re trying to create here, and that’s why we’re writing our own e-books about the war, starting with “The SOG Files,” a documented history of MACV SOG, where every claim is backed up by sources.  They cost between $7 and $8 , and your first order will cost almost half as much using the link in the description at truevietnamdocs.com.

  Every copy helps keep this channel alive.  So to everyone who purchased the book, I sincerely thank you.  And if you haven’t subscribed yet, that helps too.  The people on the hill were busy fighting another enemy.  On the nights of March 25 and 26, soldiers from the company preparing to depart built rat traps from empty ration cans, luring them with cheese and attaching detonators.

  By morning, 130 dead rats lay in neat rows in front of the command post. Then this company flew out, and in their place arrived Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment from the large base at Chu Lai. Charlie Company shared the ridge with the crews of two large 155mm howitzers, an air defense team, battalion headquarters, and a small South Vietnamese artillery unit.

  Hathaway later described Charlie Company in one sentence.  They were hunters, not prey.  At the time of that momentous night, they had been on the Mary Ann for about two days.  That evening, Capt. Paul Spielberg, an officer on his second tour of duty, watched the base’s mascot dog growl at something down the slope that he couldn’t see.

  He didn’t tell the battalion commander about it.  Whatever that dog heard, Spielberg would remember it for the rest of his life. At 2:00 a.m. on March 28, a team with a searchlight inspected the wires around the Mary Ann for 20 minutes and saw nothing.  At 2:30, the first mortar shells hit the target just as the card game in the radio room was coming to an end.

  Those mines were a signal, and the attackers were already inside.  About 50 sappers from the 409th Sapper Battalion , stripped to their shorts with blackened skin, crawled through three separate wire barriers on the other side of the hill, and none of the sentries in the bunker noticed them .  This is where all the miscalculations appeared.

  There were no sights to see them, no listening posts to hear them, and no one ever replaced the signal mines. The sappers moved from bunker to bunker, dropping knapsack charges and tear gas into the battalion command bunker.  That bunker was built of wood and tarred, so it burned down quickly. Inside, a box of phosphorus grenades caught fire .

  The battalion commander , Lieutenant Colonel William Doyle, shot the sapper in the hallway with his .45- caliber pistol. The man was wearing nothing but shorts, a gas mask, and camouflage covering his entire body.  Near the bunkers, the commander of Charlie Company , Captain Richard Knight, was killed in the first minutes. First Lieutenant Barry McGee, with a fractured skull, fought the sapper with his bare hands and strangled him.

  When his men found McGee, he was dead, lying on top of the enemy he had killed , with a bullet in his back. Spielberg went on the radio and called in artillery to a distance of 50 meters around the entire base. Then he ordered the gunners: “On my command, prepare to open fire on the base.”  On your own hill.  On the perimeter, the air defense crew continuously fired from a four-barreled .

50-caliber machine gun until dawn, until the barrels burned out. Doyle had already called in artillery, a search and rescue aircraft , gunships, and recovery helicopters, and by 3:30 a.m., the division’s Nighthawk cavalry squadron was circling overhead.  Data on how long the attack itself lasted varies from half an hour to a full hour.

  The final death toll for Americans was 30 .  The virtual wall, created based on the Kofelt victim database, contains the names of all 30 victims , 20 of whom were from Charlie Company.  In some books, including Shelby Stanton’s history of the Army in Vietnam, you will encounter the number 33, and this discrepancy has never been clearly explained.

  The number of wounded varies from 76 to 83, depending on the source. The defenders found 15 enemy bodies, as well as blood and drag trails leading into the jungle.  At 11:00 that morning, Delta Company arrived to take over the defense of the hill from what remained of Charlie Company.  Army investigators did not limit themselves to just the line of bunkers.

    The American division’s own inspector general limited himself to recommending increased control over the security of the firing base.  A high-level review by the Inspector General of the Military Assistance Command in Saigon revealed miscalculations down to the division level. Major General James Baldwin left command of the American that July.

  Newspapers reported that he was fired, while army documents called it a transfer , and he received a letter of reprimand.  Hathaway was removed from the list for promotion to brigadier general, and Doyle was reprimanded by the Army Chief of Staff , General William Westmoreland , the following April. In total, the Minister of the Army disciplined six officers.

  And on April 24, less than a month after the attack, the Army finally closed the Mary Ann base.  So be careful the next time you hear that the tragedy on the Mary Ann is blamed on just a few careless guards. The army’s own investigators placed responsibility on much higher-ranking officials.  And the company that suffered the most casualties had been there too short a time to become careless.

  Two days.  This is the side of a month-long stay at a fire base that no one warns about. The infantry changed every few weeks, but the hill remained, and each new company inherited everything their predecessors had started. Missing sights, unreplaced flares, holes in the fence that no one has patched.  To survive there for 30 days, you had to fix what you inherited on your own.

  And Charlie Company simply didn’t have time for that .  Years later, Spielberg still remembered that growling dog.  “It tormented me for years and years,” he said. “This was my second term.”  “I should have known.”  If you want to see what the first 30 days were like for a newly arrived soldier in Vietnam, this video is on screen now .