In 1969, The North Vietnamese Army Attacked Firebase Kate. It Was TERRIFYING 

In 1969, The North Vietnamese Army Attacked Firebase Kate. It Was TERRIFYING 

On the night of November 1st, 1969, roughly 180 men walked off a hilltop in the central highlands of South Vietnam and straight into the jungle where several thousand North Vietnamese soldiers were waiting. They had no artillery cover, no helicopters overhead, and no  aircraft that could pick them out in the dark.

 The men on that hill had spent 5 days being shelled by guns, firing from across the Cambodian border. Almost every one of them expected to die in the treeine. Almost every one of them lived. You have probably seen this battle described as a 1968 ambush where the North Vietnamese army surrounded an American firebase and got annihilated for it.

 At least that is the version that keeps circulating. The real record says something different and it starts with the year being wrong. This is fire support base Kate and the story is far stranger than the one the content farms are telling. Kangdu Province, South Vietnam, September 1969. American engineers cut a landing zone into a hilltop about 2 m from the Cambodian border.

 A red scar of bulldozed clay surrounded by triple canopy jungle. They called it Kate. Nearby, they built two more, Annie and Susan. According to artillery officer Reginald Brockwell, who later documented the battle from unit afteraction reports,  the three bases were nicknamed the Scarlet Sisters, named for the daughters of a colonel in First Field Force  Vietnam artillery.

Their job was to put howitzer fire over two special forces camps at Buang and  Duke Lap and to shoot at the infiltration routes where the Hochi men trail  spilled out of Cambodia into the highlands. Brockwell records that the artillery group commander said plainly, “These  positions were never designed as permanent locations.

” That phrase matters. A firebase parked 2 mi from an enemy sanctuary  inside range of guns the Americans were forbidden to chase across the border is not a fortress. It is a lure. It exists  to make the North Vietnamese come out of the trees and mass in the open where American  air power can find them.

The men sent to sit on Kate were the bait in that trap,  and most of them did not know it. By the autumn of 1969, the political ground had shifted underneath them. Richard  Nixon had begun Vietnamization. The policy of handing the ground war to the South Vietnamese  and pulling American infantry out.

 There were no American rifle battalions left in that corner of the Highlands to come running. Whoever was on Kate when the shooting started  was going to be on Kate for the duration. So, who was actually up there? By the last week of October, the garrison numbered somewhere between  150 and 180 people.

 On the  American side, roughly 26 to 27 artillery men drawn from the fifth battalion. 22nd artillery.  the first battalion 92nd artillery and Charlie Battery of the  fifth battalion 27th artillery. Alongside them were two green berets from the fifth special  forces group and somewhere between 100 and 167 Montineyard soldiers of the civilian Irregular defense group.

 Those Montineyard troops deserve more than a passing mention. They were indigenous highlanders recruited and trained by American special forces, fighting for their own mountains rather than  for Saigon. At Kate, they did the majority of the infantry work. And the story does not end the way it does without them.

 The senior American on the ground was Captain William Albra. He was 21 years old. He arrived on October 28th  to relieve an officer heading out on leave, which means he took command of the position roughly one day before it was surrounded. His weapons sergeant was Daniel Pirelli, a special forces adviser from New Haven, Connecticut.

 Their firepower amounted to three howitzers, two 155 mm guns,  and one 105. Remember that number because within 72 hours,  all three of them would be scrap. The first contact came just after midnight on October 29th when a Montineyard ambush patrol on a rise northwest of the base ran into the lead elements of a large North Vietnamese force moving in the dark.

 A gunship was called in. At first light, the rockets and mortars started. Alrech  and Purelli took a patrol back toward the ambush site and were ambushed themselves. Several men were wounded.  One Montineard was killed and Albra took shrapnel in the arm while standing in the open directing a medevac helicopter.

That same  day, one of the 155 howitzers and the 105 were knocked out by incoming  fire. Also that afternoon, fire support base Helen, part of the same cluster, was evacuated. The clock had already started. Nobody  on Kate could hear it yet. October 30th is the day the battle stopped being a harassment and became a siege.

 Incoming fire opened up around 6:30 in the morning. At roughly 9:30, a ground assault estimated at 500 North Vietnamese infantry came up the slope. It was broken by Montineyard riflemen in the perimeter trenches, by howitzers firing directly down the hillside over open sights, and by helicopter gunships working the tree line.

 During that fight, a Huey gunship from the 48th Assault Helicopter Company, tail number 6308587,  was shot down within sight of the firebase. All four crewmen were killed. The Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association incident record  names them as Chief Warrant Officer Nolan Black, Chief Warrant Officer Mory Hearn, Specialist Clyde Canada, and Specialist Douglas Lot.

 It is worth noting a small disagreement in the sources here. The Pilots’s Association record attributes  the fatal hit to small arms fire into the engine compartment, while Brockwell’s account says a rocket propelled grenade struck the tail boom. Three more  gunships and a Chinook were hit the same day. After that, daylight helicopter support to Kate effectively ended.

 A resupply run in daylight was now a suicide mission, which meant ammunition, water, and  wounded all had to move at night, or not at all. Air Force Captain Al Dykes, a navigator aboard an AC-47 spooky gunship, told Alra over the radio that Kate was taking more enemy fire than any other American position in South Vietnam.

Those radio exchanges were recorded and the audio still exists. On October  31st, a B-52 Ark light strike went in around 10:00 in the morning, dropping heavy bombs on suspected North Vietnamese concentrations near the base. By that point, both 155 Howitzers were dead. A replacement 105 had  been flown in the day before and was only partly usable.

 Artillery men who had trained to service guns were now fighting as infantry with rifles in  the trenches. That was the day first lieutenant Ronald Allen  Ross of the fifth battalion. 22nd artillery was hit by shrapnel from a rocket propelled grenade and killed. He was 25 years old from Moskego, Wisconsin. He had recently learned that he had become a father.

Alra’s account says Ross died in his arms. Ross was promoted postumously to captain and awarded the Silver Star and his name is on panel 16 west of the Vietnam Veterans  Memorial. If this is the kind of history you want more of, the sourced kind rather than the algorithm kind, subscribe. It genuinely decides whether these videos get made.

 Now, while all of this was happening on  the hill, something was going wrong in the historical record that still  has not been fixed. Almost every retelling of Firebase Kate, you will find online leads with a number. 5,000 North Vietnamese or 6,000 outnumbered 40 to1. Those numbers need a warning label.

 The attacking force is reasonably well identified at the regimental level. Sources point to the 66th and 28th North Vietnamese Infantry Regiments supported  by elements of the 40th Artillery Regiment and a battalion designated K394, all operating under the B3 front in the Central Highlands. That much holds up. The parent division is genuinely contested.

 American artillery and aviation participants identify it as the first North Vietnamese division. Historian Shelby Stanton instead names the third division. The North Vietnamese routinely renumbered formations specifically to confuse American analysts, so treat the division number as unresolved. The headcount is shakier still.

 Arthur Sharp’s book on the siege says approximately 5,000. The jacket copy on Alra’s own memoir says some 6,000 across three regiments. A review of that same book in Publishers Weekly cites 4,000. Those figures are American estimates of the total enemy force in the region, not a count of men in the wire at Kate, and they do  not agree with each other.

 And here is the part that almost every content on video gets wrong. There is no reliable figure for North Vietnamese killed at Firebase Kate. None. Brockwell says only  that American air power inflicted heavy casualties with no number attached. If a video tells you that 2,000 or 3,000 North Vietnamese died on that hillside, that number was invented somewhere between the archive and the upload, there is a wider reason to distrust those figures.

 Take the Ayadrang Valley in 1965 fought against the same 66th regiment. American estimates put North  Vietnamese dead at roughly 3 and a half thousand. A Central Highlands Front report from the North Vietnamese side admitted 559 killed and 669 wounded. That is a gap of roughly 6 to1. Body counts from Vietnam are the least reliable numbers in the entire war and anyone quoting them as hard fact is not reading the sources.

 You will also see a figure of 746 enemy killed attached to  this battle. That number comes from Operation Dan Tien, 33D, a provincewide South Vietnamese operation across all of Kangduk. It is not a Kate figure, and it is a self-reported body count of exactly the type historians treat with suspicion. By the small hours of November 1st, an emergency night resupply flown by the 155th Assault Helicopter Company got a handful of gunships and slicks into Kate. It was not enough.

 North Vietnamese artillery, including guns firing air burst rounds from inside Cambodia, where American ground forces could not follow, now had the hilltop precisely registered. In Alrock’s words, Kate had become an impact area and was no longer a functioning firebase. The South Vietnamese Army had again declined to send a relief force.

 And here was Vietnamization in practice. While Stars and  Stripes was running stories about the policy working at Bang, the men on Kate  could not get a battalion to walk toward them. Permission to abandon the position  came through. What happened next is the part of this story that deserves to be famous.

Air Force Major  George Latin, the forward air controller who had been orbiting Kate for days directing strikes, plotted the escape route. It did not run toward safety. It ran northwest toward Cambodia and into the ground the North Vietnamese owned, then  west, then south toward Bang. The logic was that the enemy would be watching the obvious line of retreat, so the column  would go the direction nobody sane would pick.

Sometime between 8:00 and 10:00 in the evening on November 1st, the garrison went over the wire in single file.  Weapons were taped and packs padded to kill noise. Aircraft worked the surrounding jungle to mask the sound of the movement.  Alra led. Pirelli held the tail of the column, which is the worst job in a night withdrawal because if the enemy  closes in, the rear is where they arrive.

 In the dark under triple canopy,  the column broke apart. Part of it took a wrong bearing and started drifting. Pirelli stopped the movement, reoriented the men, and got them back onto the route. That single decision is  the difference between an escape and a massacre. They walked roughly 2 and 1/2 miles through and around North Vietnamese positions.

Around 3 in the morning on November 2nd, they made contact with a  special forces Mike Force relief element moving out to meet them. Sergeant Firstclass Loel Stevens took Alrech by the arm  and told him to bring the rest of his people in. By midday, they had reached Bang  about 7 mi from where they started.

 One man did not arrive. Private First Class Michael Robert Norton of Charlie Battery Fifth Battalion 27th Artillery from Esdale, West Virginia went missing during the withdrawal. He was not declared dead until May of 1978. His remains have never been recovered. He is on panel 16 West, 23 lines below Ronald Ross.

 American Four Phantoms then bombed Firebase Kate Flat to destroy the guns and equipment left on the hill. Susan was evacuated the following morning. Annie was gone by that evening. So, was this the North Vietnamese Army’s worst mistake? Tactically, no. They set out to force those fire bases off the border and they did it. Kate fell.

 The hill was theirs. The larger campaign is a different question. The offensive in Kuang Duke was aimed at rolling up the Bang and Duke lap camps and opening the road toward Banmethoot. That failed. The siege of Bang was broken by South Vietnamese forces on December 16th, 1969.  After roughly 45 days, the border camps held.

 But calling that a catastrophe for the North Vietnamese is a story imposed on the evidence rather than drawn from it. And there is no Hanoi source in the English language record to tell us what they thought they had won  or lost. One more correction because it is the most repeated error after the date. William Alrech did not receive the Medal of Honor.

 A congressional recommendation was submitted in 2011  and downgraded. He holds three silver stars, the third awarded at Rock Island Arsenal in December of 2012 and formally tied to his actions at Brang on November 2nd rather than to Kate itself. He went on to spend 25 years in the United States Secret Service. Daniel Purlli received a bronze star for valor and died in February of 2025.

Go back to that column of men walking off the hill in the dark into the direction that made no sense toward an enemy that outnumbered them beyond counting. Nobody won at  Firebase Kate. A position was lost. A lieutenant was killed. A helicopter crew died within sight of the men they were trying to save.

 and a private from West Virginia is still out there  somewhere. What actually happened on that hilltop was 180 people deciding that the only way out was through and being right. That is a better story than the one the algorithm is telling. It  just requires reading the sources. If you want the other end of this argument, watch our video on the siege of Firebase Ripcord, where the numbers were bigger and the outcome was uglier.

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