My Vietnam War - Part 5

From LZ Sharon, we moved to Firebase Barbara on a mountaintop west of Quang Tri, close enough to Laos that we could shell the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran along the border. At Barbara we had two eight-inch howitzers and two 175-mm guns. The eight-inchers could fire about ten miles, and the 175s about twenty miles, but less accurately. They gave us pretty long coverage up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We also did more close support of American troops than we had done since we had parted from the 101st division. I never knew who we were shooting for, but they sounded like Special Forces, if only because they were so calm in combat. We would be adjusting fire for them, walking the rounds in closer, and they would very calmly say something like, “They are in the wire, too close for you to shoot at now; you’ll have to wait awhile.” I only learned from a Time magazine subscription I had that an American Special Forces base at Mai Loc had been overrun. I recognized the name because it was marked on our charts as a no-fire zone. I wondered why we had not been asked to shoot support for them, but I realized that they were east of us and our battery was designed to shoot west, terraced down the western side of the mountain. If we had tried to shoot east, we would probably have blown off the top of the mountain. Somebody on the internet says that former Secretary of Veterans Affairs General. Eric Shinseki (then Captain Shinseki) was sent to relieve Mai Loc, but obviously didn’t make it in time.

One night we received a warning from our battalion headquarters back in Dong Ha that intelligence (probably infra-red sensors) showed a large group of enemy soldiers assembling at the bottom of our mountain. At Barbara, we had swapped our old anti-aircraft quad-50 machine gun at Sharon for a pair of “dusters,” old anti-aircraft tracked vehicles that fired twin forty-mm cannons, again a steady stream of tracers. Because these anti-aircraft artillery units were almost always stationed in the “boonies” in somewhat dangerous locations, they had a reputation as “space cadets,” who didn’t pay much attention to doing stuff by the book. They were our main defense, although in theory we also had Vietnamese infantry to defend us. After the attack warning, our battalion supply officer in Dong Ha came on the radio to tell us not to give any gasoline to the dusters. We had gasoline to run our fire direction center generators. He said it was too difficult to resupply us, and the dusters were notorious for not maintaining their supplies. However, we decided that if the dusters were our main line of defense, we were going to give them all the gas they needed. The dusters blew away a grid square (a square kilometer) or more where the intelligence said the enemy was forming, and no attack occurred. We never knew whether we had averted an attack or the intelligence had just picked up a herd of deer grazing at the bottom of the mountain. I think Barbara is the only place I remember seeing an air strike by Phantom jets. They bombed one of the mountains nearby, but we never knew why.

On April 29, 1970, while we were firing at something on the Ho Chi Minh trail, the breech blew out of one of the 175-mm guns, killing two of the crew and wounding several others. The names of those who died, Paul Kosanke and Willie Austin, are listed on the wall of the Vietnam memorial.

A more pleasant memory was when a helicopter flew out a huge bladder of water, which it tried to drop on the mess hall, a bunker. He dropped it from too high up. It bounced off the roof of the mess hall and rolled down the mountain. Later, a flatbed truck made it all the way to the base along the dangerous, often-mined road back to the coast, carrying a new “tube” (barrel) for one of the 175-mm guns. He was almost at the top of the steep, winding road up the mountain, when the tube began to slip off the back of the truck, and it too rolled down the mountain. Since it weighed several tons, it’s probably still there.  Barbara is also the only place where I ate C-rations on a regular basis.  Although in theory we had a mess hall, it did not get used much.

©