Intrepid pilots maneuvered planes through gunfire and wreckage to land and pick up troops being overrun by enemy forces.
In early May 1968, the U.S. Army Special Forces at Kham Duc seemed far removed from the war zone. Established in 1963 as Camp A-105 on the extreme western fringe of Quang Tin Province southwest of Da Nang to maintain surveillance of the Laotian border, 10 miles away, it was normally peaceful and quiet. The mile-wide bowl surrounding Kham Duc had at one time been a destination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who liked to hunt tiger and other big game in the jungle-covered hills that rose to more than 2,000 feet. To go along with his private hunting lodge, Diem had a 4,800-foot airstrip constructed there in the mid-1950s for his presidential aircraft.
But in 1968, big game of a different kind lurked around Kham Duc. U.S. Air Force reconnaissance flights had discovered a North Vietnamese Army division and a Viet Cong regiment in the area. By February the camp was placed on alert. In mid-March, the 11th Mobile Strike Force Company (Mike Force or Strikers) secured a forward operating base 4 miles south at the old French fort of Ngok Tavak, near where intelligence revealed the NVA was trying to link the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Highway 14. A month later, Alpha Company of the 70th Engineer Battalion arrived to upgrade Diem’s old asphalt airstrip for use by fighter-bombers and C-130 Hercules transport aircraft so U.S. forces could stage troops and equipment. By May, the Air Force had lifted hundreds of tons of equipment and materiel into Kham Duc.
Then on May 12, something more threatening arrived. Kham Duc was under siege. I was a reporter for the Seventh Air Force Combat News Unit in Da Nang, and my boss, Major Brian Peterson, the chief public information officer, told me at 0800 hours, “[General William]Westmoreland has ordered that it be evacuated immediately by choppers, C-123s and C-130s.”
The NVA had eliminated all U.S. Special Forces camps along the I Corps-Laotian border except Kham Duc. Commanded by Captain Christopher J. Silva, it was garrisoned by 13 Green Berets of Special Forces (SF) Detachment A-105, 573 Vietnamese SF officers and about 1,000 indigenous Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) troops, along with their families, and advisers from the 5th Special Forces Group.
Two days earlier, Ngok Tavak had come under heavy attack. Captain John White of the Royal Australian Army, along with two other Australian army advisers, commanded the Striker team of some 130 Chinese Nung commandos and three U.S. Special Forces advisers. A CIDG mortar platoon of 30 Montagnards provided local security for the garrison when the Striker company was on patrol, and U.S. Marine artillery men from Company D, 2nd Battalion, 13th Marine Regiment (artillerymen), had been inserted on May 4, along with two 105mm howitzers, for added security. Each day, recon patrols would scout for the Communist forces but had produced only deer for barbecues and hair-raising stories of tiger encounters.
In the early morning hours of May 10, however, a group claiming to be CIDG approached the Marine and Nung sentries manning .50-caliber machine guns on the perimeter. “It’s only us, CIDG, don’t shoot,” the men said. The sentries let the group approach, but when they saw the men suddenly throw satchel charges and grenades at the machine gun positions, they realized they had been double-crossed. The machine guns were knocked out, and an estimated two companies of NVA raced through the gap, led by two teams of flamethrowers who set fire to a stockpile of mortar ammunition before being killed.
The North Vietnamese spread out within the fort, and close-quarter fighting began. Within minutes of the first explosion, half the fort was lost. Throughout the night, the enemy continued to enter the camp, despite the Marines’ efforts to stop them.
The force charging Ngok Tavak’s helicopter landing zone was stopped by a minefield, however, and troops attacking the lower portion of the command post could not breach its defenses. Only the force assaulting the command post itself got through and, with assistance from the 1st VC Regiment and a company of the 2nd NVA Division, continued its push into the base. A ferocious defense, though, prevented the NVA from taking control of the battlefield.
“We repulsed their attack up the front of the hill,” said Marine Pfc Dean Parrett, according to Bruce Davies’ book The Battle of Ngok Tavak. “More of the NVA came up the road toward our guns. We killed as many as we could. I do not know what the body count was, but there were dead NVA lying all over the place.”
Douglas AC-47 gunships, nicknamed “Spookies,” began to arrive at 0420 and fired relentlessly, making run after run along the wire and in the brush beyond. F-4 Phantoms followed up with 500-pound bombs, napalm and cannon fire at 0830.
Even while being pelted with airpower, the NVA brought heavy machine guns forward and bombarded the fort with mortar and rocket fire, inflicting heavy casualties.
White sent urgent messages to request support and medevac helicopters, and at 0930 two Marine CH-46As (Sea Knights) of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 265 arrived to drop off 45 replacements from Kham Duc—12th Mobile Strike Force—and remove the wounded. The Strikers were inserted, but both Sea Knights were shot to pieces, one wrecking Ngok Tavak’s small helipad. Americal Division medevac pilots in the area requested permission to evacuate the wounded. White directed them to the northern edge of the fort where his men were taking the least fire. The first Americal Division chopper came, a large red cross painted on the side, and all enemy fire ceased, White said. Once the wounded were loaded and the helicopter pulled away, the enemy began firing again. Each time there was a dustoff, the North Vietnamese ceased firing.
“Having got the wounded out, I now worried about getting ourselves out,” White noted in “Venison and Valor,” a paper he wrote. “To remain there that night would guarantee annihilation, so I informed headquarters at about 1200 hours that we intended, somehow, to withdraw. We were very low on ammunition and couldn’t get resupplied.”
Preparing to abandon the fort, White destroyed the arms and equipment. “We put all the weapons in my bunker, which had all the spare ammunition and a couple of cases of beer and my Scotch whiskey, and just as we were leaving, we blew it up,” he said. White also blew up the wrecked Sea Knight on the helipad.
White evacuated using a route the North Vietnamese would least expect—the path the enemy had taken to attack the company. He arranged for Phantoms to drop napalm on their perimeter. “They dropped it in a line, one after another, through our escape route, and we followed it out.”
The tail end of White’s line received casualties from a mortar as the men were leaving the position. One of the U.S. Special Forces medics remained behind to care for those men. White heard later that the medic had been captured along with the wounded.
“We moved east for about seven kilometers until I felt we were safe enough for pickup,” White said. They chopped a landing zone out of the jungle and called for helicopters, and Sea Knights arrived to airlift them to Kham Duc. By 1900 on May 10, their rescue was complete.
Kham Duc was under attack from mortars and recoilless rifle fire when White’s shattered company and the Marines arrived. The previous day the camp had been reinforced with members of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade flown in from their base in Chu Lai to protect the 70th’s combat engineers. “Upon their arrival, the groundfire and air fire became very heavy as planes and helicopters were being shot down,” recalled engineer Private Gerald Ebbing. “As the day went on, the groundfire became more intense and we took to the trenches inside the compound, and the shooting continued through the night.”
On the morning of May 11, the Marine artillery section and the Strikers were evacuated from Kham Duc by air to Da Nang. By nightfall, C-130 Hercules transport planes began bringing Americal Division reinforcements and 600 South Vietnamese troops, despite enemy shells raining down on the Kham Duc runway. A three-man Air Force combat control team was also brought in to direct airstrikes against anti-aircraft guns.
The enemy began a ground attack that night. “It seemed like we had ‘Puff the Magic Dragons’ [AC-47s] on station half the night firing their cannons and dropping flares,” recalled Lieutenant William Schrope, one of the platoon leaders with the 70th Combat Engineers. “At about 0300 [May 12] the mountain outposts occupied by the Americal on each of the nearby mountains came under attack. The fight didn’t last long, and soon the NVA owned all the high ground around Kham Duc as other outposts fell. Soon after daylight on the 12th, shortly after the Americal outposts had been overrun in the mountains, the NVA launched numerous mortar attacks, and casualties began to mount.”
Around 0100 on May 12, Westmoreland told commanders to abandon Kham Duc and evacuate by air, even though the airstrip, damaged by the shelling, was about to fall into enemy hands. CH-47 Army Chinooks arrived at Kham Duc to begin the airlift.
“The lead Chinook took heavy groundfire and burst into flames as they tried to land,” Schrope said. “Amazingly, the crew survived, but the debris blocked a significant portion of the runway, and no C-130s would be able to land if the wreckage was not moved. Under fire, two of our guys took our heavy-duty front-end loader out to the runway, and they shoved most of it off to the side, but the debris was still too hot and the loader caught fire.”
Schrope’s men used a bulldozer to finish clearing the airstrip so that by 1000 the mass evacuation could begin.
In Da Nang on May 12, when the Seventh Air Force Combat News Unit informed me of the evacuation, Peterson, the chief public information officer, said the operation would be coordinated by a command-and-control C-130 orbiting high above the base. “It’ll be leaving Da Nang in one hour,” Peterson said. “I want you on that plane to monitor the evacuation. Plug your tape recorder into the intercom.”
I had been on a C-130 before when I flew into Khe Sanh in January 1968 to report on the siege. But I had not been on a mission of the magnitude and complexity of this one, when so many lives were hanging in the balance. I was nervous about whether such a complicated and dangerous evacuation could be executed without casualties.
On the control plane, I explained my mission to the pilots and the crew chief. They provided me with a radio headset, and the tape recorder was plugged into it so I could capture transmissions between the command plane and those involved in the evacuation.
While monitoring the transmissions, I learned that one of the first cargo-laden C-130s to go into Kham Duc, at around 1000 hours, arrived not knowing anything about the evacuation. It was hit by groundfire while landing and then was rushed by hysterical Vietnamese civilians desperate to gain a place onboard. Overloaded and suffering ruptured fuel tanks and a flat tire, the transport, piloted by Lt. Col. Daryl Cole, was unable to take off and passengers had to be offloaded. Finally, about two hours later, carrying only the three Air Force combat controllers, the transport took off. When the plane landed at Cam Ranh Bay, the crew counted at least 85 bullet and shrapnel holes in the aircraft.
Just after Cole’s plane left Kham Duc, a C-123 flown by Major Ray D. Shelton landed despite heavy automatic-weapons fire and several nearby mortar detonations. He picked up 70 Vietnamese people and 44 combat engineers who had to leave Cole’s aircraft and then hid in trenches. “There was so much gunfire and mortar fire that sulfur was about all we could smell,” recalled Ebbing. “The earth shook like an earthquake and flames shot up to what seemed to be 100 feet in the sky. I ran for the plane under fire, and just as it began to lift off, as the tailgate went up, I grabbed the rollers and rolled into the plane. Two soldiers who were running along with me were not so fortunate. They rolled off the tailgate just before the plane took off.”
The next aircraft, piloted by Major Bernard Bucher, took off from Kham Duc carrying 200 Vietnamese, mostly CIDG dependents, women and children, but anti-aircraft fire brought it down. It exploded, and all on board were killed. Despite witnessing this tragedy and being warned away by another fighter-bomber pilot—“Stay the hell out of Kham Duc, it belongs to Charlie now,”—Lt. Col. William Boyd Jr. flew his C-130 in. Twice. On the first attempt, an enemy rocket exploded less than 100 feet from the nose of his plane just as he was about to land. Undeterred, Boyd went around again, giving Charlie another shot. Though his plane sustained numerous hits, he got 100 troops out.
Then Lt. Col. John Delmore, who had also seen Bucher go down, went in. “It feels like somebody’s whackin’ us with a sledgehammer,” he reported when his C-130 started taking hits at about 300 feet. “Must be .50 cal.” There was smoke in the cockpit and holes all over the plane’s floor and roof. The cockpit windows had been shattered. When the aircraft landed on the Kham Duc airstrip, it plowed into the wreckage of a Marine chopper, glanced off and came to rest at the edge of the runway. The crewmen got out just before the plane went up in flames. A chopper managed to evacuate them from the airstrip. At around 1525, Communist troops penetrated the airfield and perimeter.
Not dissuaded by the loss of aircraft, pilots brought in three more C-130s that landed safely to withdraw more defenders, thanks to close-in airstrikes and fighters that took out enemy guns by laying down a barrage along both sides of the runway. Major James Wallace crossed the runway at right angles in his C-130 and made a 270-degree turn at maximum rate of descent with power off and gear down. He made a hard stop and was immediately swamped by 100 panicking Vietnamese. They dashed aboard, and Wallace took off safely.
All told, eight C-130s and C-123s flew into Kham Duc. Though two were destroyed (including Bucher’s with 200 civilians and crew), more than 600 civilians and military personnel were airlifted out, and the evacuation was thought to be complete. The command-control C-130 that I was in prepared to return to Da Nang, but then we learned that communications had become confused in the complex operation and the Air Force controllers who had been extracted by Cole’s C-130 were mistakenly reinserted at Kham Duc to direct airstrikes against anti-aircraft guns.
Stranded and surrounded by the enemy, the controllers—Major John W. Gallagher Jr., Tech. Sgt. Mort Freedman and Sergeant Jim Lundie—took cover in a ditch alongside the runway where, armed with M-16s, they exchanged fire with an NVA machine gun nest that had them pinned down. Lundie later described the situation:
“[A transport landed, but] the pilot didn’t see anyone left on the ground, so he took off. We figured no one would come back and we had two choices: either be taken prisoner or fight it out. There was no doubt about it. We had 11 magazines among us and were going to take as many of them as we could.”
A C-123 piloted by Lt. Col. Alfred Jeanotte Jr. was called in to try to extract the combat controllers again. He descended steeply at high speed using a sideslip maneuver. By positioning his aircraft at an angle almost perpendicular to the ground while diving in, he minimized the breadth of the target for enemy gunners.
The plane landed amid intense groundfire. Thick smoke was billowing across the runway from a blown ammo dump, making it difficult to spot the controllers, and Jeanotte was forced to take off without them. When the crew looked back, they caught a glimpse of the men rising out of the ditch and waving frantically as they tried to catch up to the plane. Jeanotte realized he was too low on fuel to go back, but he reported where the three men were last seen.
Another C-123 went in to get them out, and the pilot, Lt. Col. Joe Jackson, fell back on the skills that had earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross in the Korean War, when he was a fighter pilot. At 9,000 feet and rapidly approaching the airstrip, Jackson pointed the nose in a steep dive, and he too sideslipped in. Co-pilot Major Jesse Campbell reported that the plane creaked and groaned and rattled and shook as it dove. Jackson pulled back on the control column and broke the descent, leveling the plane at 100 feet, a quarter-mile from the runway. A burning helicopter blocked the runway just beyond the touch-down point. Jackson stood on the brakes and skidded to a stop just before reaching the chopper wreckage, maneuvering through the debris amid a blistering crossfire of bullets and mortars.
When Jackson finally stopped, he saw the controllers coming out of the ditch, M-16s blazing as they dashed to the plane and climbed in.
“As we were beginning to take off, a 122mm rocket came straight at us,” co-pilot Campbell later recalled. “But its trajectory was low, and it glanced off the tarmac and spun several times like a bottle before stopping just a few feet from the nose of our plane. Luckily it didn’t explode.”
Jackson went around the dud rocket, slammed the throttle forward, hit the jets and took off in a steep climb. While banking hard to the left to avoid groundfire, he looked back at the airstrip and saw mortars detonating on the exact spot the plane had occupied minutes earlier. He leveled off at about 10,000 feet and headed to Da Nang. Over the command plane’s radio, one of the Air Force combat controllers was heard to say simply, “We thought we were dead and then we were alive.”
When our command plane returned to Da Nang, I tried to find Jackson for an interview and was told that he was at the officers’ club. As an enlisted man, I wasn’t allowed in the club, so I called and had the colonel paged. I asked if he could come to my office for an interview.
“Got any beer there?” he asked.
We kept rusty cans of bitter-tasting Ballantine, the beer that made New Jersey famous, in a fridge we had procured for the photographer to store film.
I interviewed Jackson and was struck by his nonchalance about the feat he and his crew had accomplished. He would later be awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics. Co-pilot Campbell received the Air Force Cross. The rest of the crew got Silver Stars.
When I called Jackson in 2013 to see what he was doing now, I expressed my amazement at the maneuvering he had done with a lumbering C-123 cargo plane. He was just as nonchalant as he had been in 1968: “I knew we could do it.”
After the evacuation of Kham Duc, airstrikes demolished the camp. Out of the 1,800 military and civilians involved, 259 were lost, 200 of them in the crash of Bucher’s C-130. Some of the crew were recovered and identified in 2007 and 2008 (see sidebar below). The U.S. Army lost 25 men and two Chinooks. Two Marine CH-46 Sea Knights and two C-130s were also destroyed. Eleven Marine artillerymen, one Navy medic and one Special Forces sergeant were declared MIA at Ngok Tavak; all except the medic, Thomas Perry, were identified and returned to their families in 2005. The battles of Ngok Tavak and Kham Duc were a total North Vietnamese victory, one of the few before the Americans withdrew from South Vietnam in 1973.
After his discharge from the Air Force in 1970, Mike D. Shepherd attended college on the GI Bill and became a public information officer and speechwriter for the state of Illinois. Now retired, he writes about his experiences in Southeast Asia during the war. His latest book, From Ban Xon to Wardak, was published in 2013.
Originally published in the June 2014 issue of Vietnam. To subscribe, click here.
