October 1969, a bald red dirt hilltop 3 miles from the Cambodian border.

27 American soldiers and about 150 Montineyard tribesmen crammed onto a patch of ground no bigger than a football field.

Around them, closing in from every direction, were three North Vietnamese Army regiments.

Somewhere between four and 6,000 enemy fighters.

That’s roughly a 40 to1 disadvantage.

Their water trailer had been destroyed.

Their howitzers were getting knocked out one by one and the South Vietnamese command had refused to send reinforcements.

The men on Firebase Kate had every reason to believe they were going to die there.

What nobody knew yet was that the North Vietnamese had just made one of the worst tactical decisions [music] of the entire war.

To understand what happened at Firebase Kate, you need to understand why it was built in the first place.

And the answer to that question is uncomfortable.

In September 1969, the US Army carved three tiny fire support bases out of the jungle in Kang Duk province right along the Cambodian border.

They were called Kate, Susan, and Annie.

Soldiers nicknamed them the Scarlet Sisters.

Each base held just a handful of artillery pieces and a small garrison.

Kate sat roughly 5 kilometers east of Cambodia overlooking a tea plantation that NVA forces were using as a staging area.

The tactical premise behind [music] Kate was simple and it was cynical.

These fire bases were bait.

The idea overseen by Colonel Francis Bowers of the First Field Force Vietnam Provisional Artillery Group was to dangle small isolated American positions in front of the North Vietnamese Army, draw them out of their Cambodian sanctuaries and then destroy them with air power.

The same tactic had worked earlier that year at Ben Het.

Command figured it would work again.

The difference was that this time under Nixon’s new Vietnamization policy, the South Vietnamese military was supposed to take the lead.

The ARVN23rd Division held operational control of the entire area.

There was just one problem.

When the bait worked and the NVA actually showed up in force, the ARVN 23rd Division refused every single American request to reinforce Firebase Kate.

The men on that hilltop were on their own.

And the man who would have to figure out how to keep them alive was a 21-year-old captain who had been on the base for less than 48 hours.

His name was William Albra.

And this was about to become the defining five days of his life.

Captain William Hawk Alrech was at the time the youngest Green Beret captain in all of Vietnam.

He arrived at Kate on October 28th, 1969, replacing Captain Barum, who had rotated out for R and R.

What Alrech found when he landed was not encouraging.

The Montineyard troops were playing volleyball.

Defenses were relaxed.

The perimeter wasn’t properly fortified.

Alongside him was Sergeant Daniel Pierlli, 22 years old, a weapons specialist from Detachment of 233 at Bandon.

Pirelli had arrived the day before, taken one look at the situation, and immediately cancelled the volleyball.

The garrison itself was a patchwork.

elements from three different artillery battalions.

Two 155 millimeter howitzers and a single 105 millimeter.

That’s three gun tubes to defend against three regiments.

The infantry perimeter was held by roughly 156 Montineyard fighters from the civilian irregular defense group, indigenous highland tribesmen who fought alongside US special forces.

Two Vietnamese LLDDB special forces soldiers rounded out the force.

Among the Americans were First Lieutenant Mike Smith, running the guns for the 192nd Artillery, and First Lieutenant Ronald Ross from the 52nd Artillery, who had just learned he’d become a father.

Ross would never meet his child.

Now facing this tiny garrison across the border were the 66th, 28th and 32nd infantry regiments of the first NVA division.

The 66th regiment was no ordinary unit.

These were the same soldiers who had fought the first cavalry division at the EA Drang Valley in 1965.

They had fought at Daktu in 1967.

They were battleh hardardened, well supplied, and they had been rehearsing this attack from the safety of Cambodia for weeks.

The trap was set.

The NVA just didn’t realize they were the ones walking into it.

The first shots came at 11:00 at night.

A Montigard ambush patrol on a nearby rise called Ambush Hill ran straight into the lead elements of the 66th Regiment, moving toward Kate.

A C-47.

Spooky gunships roared in overhead.

Kate’s howitzers fired defensive salvos into the darkness.

The siege of firebase Kate had begun.

By dawn on October 29th, the full bombardment opened up.

Mortars, recoilless rifles, B40 rockets, and from inside Cambodia, 85 mm and 130 mm artillery shells that the Americans couldn’t legally strike back at.

One of the 155 mm howitzers was knocked out.

The 105 mm was hit.

The water trailer, the only water source on the hill, was destroyed.

Alrach took shrapnel in his left arm while standing in the open, directing a medevac helicopter.

He refused evacuation.

That same day, Alra, Pirelli, and about 40 Montine yards patrolled out to Ambush Hill to assess the previous night’s contact.

They followed blood trails and pith helmets up the slope.

At about 30 m, they walked into heavy fire.

The Montineyard point man was shot in the head.

Alra, covered by Pierlli firing M79 grenades, ran into the fire with three Montine yards and carried the wounded man back.

The soldier died on the way to Kate, but Alra had won something no amount of rank could buy.

The absolute loyalty of his Montineyard fighters.

That loyalty was about to be tested.

The next morning, roughly 500 NVA soldiers launched a battalion-sized ground assault directly at the firebase.

It was the first major human [music] wave attack.

Montineyard small arms fire.

The surviving howitzers firing at pointblank range.

F100 Super Saber jets dropping 500 pound bombs.

And helicopter gunships from the 48th Assault Helicopter Company, all combined to break the assault, but not without cost.

A UH1B gunship took a B40 rocket [music] to the tailboom and crashed within sight of Kate.

All four crewmen were killed.

Chief warrant officers Nolan Black and Mory Hearn.

Specialist five Douglas Lot, Specialist 4 Clyde Canada.

Their deaths effectively ended daylight helicopter gunship support for the rest of the siege.

Only jets would dare the airspace after that.

That afternoon, in one of the most remarkable moments of the entire battle, a CH54 flying crane helicopter slingloaded a replacement 105 mm howitzer onto the firebase while under direct enemy fire.

Alra then improvised something new.

He fired M16 tracers to mark enemy gun positions, then walked the 105 mm direct fire onto those positions.

He scored a direct hit on an NVA field piece, triggering secondary explosions.

The tracer technique became standard procedure for the rest of the siege.

A 21-year-old captain was literally inventing tactics on the fly.

But the NVA weren’t done.

Not even close.

By Halloween, Firebase Kate [music] was being pounded from 360°.

Both 155 millimeter howitzers were destroyed.

The single 105 millimeter could only fire at restricted elevation.

The artillery men had no guns left to crew, so they picked up rifles and fought as infantry.

At around 1,000 hours, with defenders warned to take extreme cover, B-52 bombers flying at 30,000 feet dropped more than [music] 300, 500, and 750lb bombs on NVA concentrations surrounding the base.

The strike landed danger close.

Hot shrapnel rained down on the Americans, but it disrupted NVA attack [music] preparations and bought critical time.

I put in a request, put in code, sent the request to headquarters, request to abandon Firebase Kate.

Didn’t take long.

Came back and said, “Permission denied.

” I said, “Give me a piece of paper.

” So, I wrote another one.

We are leaving Firebase, Kate.

And uh and I sent this one in.

And I didn’t even wait for a reply.

I started making preparations and getting everybody.

We’d spike the tubes with thermite grenades.

We started destroying all the documents uh smashing all the radios we had then and we had to do this uh very low profile was because the NVA were were I mean they were looking right at us.

They could see us.

So we had to do this very serreptitiously.

I’m starting to hear things at the other end.

So I ran to the other end of the south end of the camp and the NVA was starting their assault where you could hear them clipping the wires and uh and there was a very steep assault.

You could hear the little sandals [music] ruffling through there.

So I came back and I said, “Boys, we’re going and we’re going now.

” So we had to leave without any kind of air support whatsoever.

And uh right down Amboy Shell.

That same day, running between bunkers with Alra, First Lieutenant Ronald Ross was struck by B40 rocket shrapnel.

He died in Albra’s arms.

Ross was the only American killed on Firebase Kate itself during the siege.

the father who would never hold his child.

Overhead that night, USAF Captain Al Dykes aboard an AC-47 [music] spooky gunship told Alra over the radio that Kate was taking more incoming fire than any other American outpost in all of South Vietnam.

By November 1st, 1969, Alra had reached his limit, not of courage, of physics.

The base had become, in his own words, an impact area, not a functioning fire base.

Air Force reconnaissance had intercepted NVA radio traffic announcing a massive force assembling to overrun Kate completely.

His first request to abandon the position was denied by command.

His second transmission was not a request.

It was a statement of intent.

He was leaving and he was taking his men with him.

Only then did Fifth Special Forces Group approve the breakout.

The question was whether any of them could actually make it out alive.

The plan was audacious and desperate in equal measure.

Two Mike Force companies would be airlifted from Pleu to a landing zone northwest of Kate to form a linkup point.

A C47 Spooky and AC 1119 Shadow Gunships would orbit the firebase, firing continuously to trick the NVA into thinking the base was still defended.

Meanwhile, the entire garrison would slip off the hill into the darkness.

The artillerymen spiked their gun tubes with thermite.

They destroyed remaining ammunition.

They burned code books and smashed radios.

Everything that couldn’t walk out of Kate would be left behind.

And then things started going wrong.

The Mike Force relief column ran into heavy NVA contact about a kilometer from Kate and had to dig in.

Kate’s survivors would have to come to them, not the other way around.

Spooky was delayed by mechanical trouble.

And as Alrech made his final rounds, the NVA walked another mortar barrage across the firebase and popped an illumination flare that lit the entire hilltop in the middle of their preparations.

150 people, many of them wounded, frozen in the light, expecting to die.

The flare malfunctioned and sputtered out.

At roughly 2,200 hours, the column moved down the north slope through the wire.

Someone tripped a trip flare.

The entire column dropped flat.

Another malfunction.

Another miracle.

Alra took the point himself when the Montineyard lead scout froze at the approach to Ambush Hill.

The point man then instinctively veered right around the hill instead of taking the planned left route.

That instinct saved every life in the column.

I NVA.

51 caliber heavy machine gun was dug in on the originally planned path.

When the machine gun finally opened up, it shot high in the confusion and scored no hits.

Spooky, now on station overhead, rad the hilltop and drove the gun crew into cover.

In the panic, roughly half the mountains scattered into the jungle.

One American artilleryman went with them.

That group would eventually reach Buprang safely by a different route.

But private first class Michael Norton became separated during the chaos.

He was never seen again.

Norton was declared dead in 1978.

He remains on the POW/MIA rolls to [music] this day.

The remaining column now down to about 70 people pushed through pitch black triple canopy jungle.

Pirelli stopped the column [music] when it split in the darkness, enforced total silence, had each man grip [music] the web gear of the soldier in front, and reconnected the group without a sound.

Major George Latin, the Air Force forward air controller, orbiting overhead, guided the column northwest, then west, then south, while A1 Sky Raiders strafed the ground behind them to mask their trail.

At one point, Latin’s route took them briefly across the Cambodian border.

One of reportedly two international incidents from Kate that landed on President Nixon’s [music] desk.

At approximately 0300 on November 2nd, after 5 hours of movement covering 7 miles through enemy held jungle, the Kate survivors reached the Mike Force perimeter.

By noon, they walked into Bang Special Forces Camp.

Later that day, F4 Phantoms dropped 2,000 lb bombs on the abandoned firebase.

Kate, the other two Scarlet sisters, Susan and Annie, were evacuated the same day.

The hilltop was gone.

But nearly everyone who had been on it was alive.

So why was surrounding Firebase Kate the NVA’s worst decision? Because by concentrating three full regiments around a single hilltop, the North Vietnamese handed American air power the densest, most concentrated target it had been given since Kesan.

Over 5 days, Major Latin ran continuous tactical air around the clock.

FE4 Phantoms, F-100 Super Sabers, a one Sky Raiders, a 37 Dragonflies, a C47 Spooky and AC-119 Shadow Gunships orbited nearly every night.

Their miniguns firing 6,000 rounds per minute into the jungle below.

At least two B-52 arc strikes hammered NVA assembly areas at danger close range.

US estimates placed several hundred NVA killed around Kate alone.

The broader campaign killed well over a thousand more.

The 66th, 28th, and 32nd regiments were mauled so badly that the NVA had to bring in replacement units, which were themselves chewed up by ARVN forces.

In the following weeks, the NVA’s entire fall 1969 central highlands offensive collapsed.

They had planned to destroy the fire bases, overrun Boo Prang and Duke Lap, and drive on Banme Thuat to cut South Vietnam in two.

Instead, they captured an empty hill, a hill they themselves had blasted into rubble, and then American jets turned what was left into a crater.

The bait had worked.

The NVA took it and they paid for it with the combat effectiveness of an entire division.

Of the 27 Americans on Firebase Kate, 15 were wounded.

A 55% casualty rate.

One was killed on the hill.

One was lost forever in the jungle.

About a third of the Montineyard defenders were killed or wounded.

Their dead had to be left behind on the hilltop.

Every American survivor received a decoration for valor, except at the time the man who led them.

Alra’s award ceremony was never rescheduled after he diverted his pickup helicopter to medevac four wounded Mike Force soldiers instead.

His first silver star for Kate came 43 years later in December [music] 2012.

As of the most recent reporting, a campaign to award Alrach the Medal of Honor continues.

The army has twice declined to upgrade his [music] decoration.

Firebase Kate is often called a defeat, a base abandoned, guns spiked, a hill given up, but the men who were there know the truth.

And now [music] so do you.

The North Vietnamese surrounded Firebase Kate.

They outnumbered its defenders [music] 40 to1.

And when it was over, it was the NVA, not the Americans, who lost.

They just happened to capture the hill.

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