James McLeroy - Bait: The Battle of Kham Duc

THE BATTLE OF KHAM DUC

James D. McLeroy
and Gregory W. Sanders

AN AUSA BOOK

Association of the United States Army

2425 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia, 22201, USA

Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2019 by

CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

and

The Old Music Hall, 106108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK

Copyright 2019 James D. McLeroy and Gregory W. Sanders

Hardcover Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-812-7

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-813-4

Kindle Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-813-4

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

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James D. McLeroy dedicates this book

to the memory of

Special Forces Master Sergeant M. C. Windley,

SOG One-Zero, dedicated Bac Si, fearless warrior

and

Dr. Mary Lou Sherbon,

loving sister of a Vietnam warrior

and special friend of many others.

Gregory W. Sanders dedicates this book

to the memory of

Army First Lieutenant Dale Reising,

Advisory Team 92, MACV,

who gave his life for his country

in Go Cong Province, South Vietnam,

on May 29, 1970,

and

Professor Gordon Bakken,

California State University, Fullerton,

whose legacy lives on in his students.

The only visible remains of Kham Duc Special Forces camp was the battered concrete base and jagged steel stump of the flagpole. Knee-high grass hid the half-buried foundations of its buildings, and the only traces of its once-long airstrip were scattered patches of asphalt in a broad field of weeds. Standing on the flagpole base, I stared at the low hills on the northeast and southwest ends of the airstrip, then west at the tall, jungle-covered hill looming over the valley. My gaze drifted eastward past the new town where a little village used to be, past the overgrown airstrip, past the hidden camp site, past the heavily vegetated river gulch behind it to the taller hills overlooking the valley on the other side of the river.

The last time I saw that valley, it looked like a war movie. Once I lived and nearly died there, and for me it is a valley of ghosts. They are the ghosts of the many hundreds of soldiers we killed there and the ghosts of almost two hundred Vietnamese civilianswomen, children, and old men of the villagekilled by those NVA soldiers. As I surveyed the peaceful scene in June 1998, memories of the way it looked thirty years before in May 1968 slowly drifted back in a lurid collage of sights, sounds, and sensations:

a desperate voice in the night, shouting on the radio over the noise of firing, begging for air support for his indigenous company, about to be overrun by an NVA battalion

flashes of firing and explosions in the darkness, where small squads on isolated hilltop outposts were being overrun and killed by NVA shock troops

helicopters crashing and burning; planes crashing and burning

the throbbing whine of a piston-engine attack plane, trailing smoke, straining to climb high enough for the pilot to bail out before it burned up and plunged to earth

the shrieking howl of jet fighter-bombers streaking by so low and close that I could glimpse the pilots helmets

the shattering blasts of high-explosive bombs; the crackling ripple of cluster bombs; the rasping growl of automatic aircraft cannons and multi-barreled aircraft machine guns

enemy bodies hurled through the air like rag dolls from a bomb hit on an anti-aircraft gun

the pitiful face of a doomed North Vietnamese Army soldier, wide-eyed and ashen with terror, stumbling toward me like an obedient robot through a maelstrom of bullets and shrapnel, as his comrades were falling all around him, knowing his wretched life was measured in seconds

the chilling sound of Special Forces commandos, determined to fight to the death against the onrushing horde of NVA soldiers, saying terse farewells to each other

the thunderous boom and roiling mushroom cloud of the camps exploding ammunition dump; the roar of huge black rubber fuel bladders along the airstrip erupting in red fireballs

the greasy feel and acrid smell of my damp, salt-encrusted fatigues under a heavy flak jacket, sweat-soaked, dirt-smeared, and re-soaked in three days of heat, humidity, and tension

flashes of sheet lightning inside a dark, towering monsoon cloud moving toward the valley, threatening to envelope it and cancel our close air support, the only thing keeping us alive

I thought then that I would never return to that haunted valley. When I finally did thirty years later, it was with a U.S. military casualty recovery team searching for the scattered remains of long-abandoned American soldiers and Marines. More U.S. missing-in-action cases resulted from the battle of Kham Duc Special Forces camp and a temporary camp site south of it called Ngok Tavak than from any other battle in seven years of major U.S. combat in the Vietnam War.

As soon as I returned to Kham Duc, I began to sense a deep, vague awareness that some important part of me had never fully left that morbid killing groundand probably never will.

James D. McLeroy

I first saw Kham Duc in July 1970, when it was reoccupied for six weeks in a joint operation by a battalion of the Americal (23rd) Division and a South-Vietnamese battalion. The brief 1970 operation, in which I played a very minor role, was a walk in the sun, as the grunts used to call an easy patrol, compared to the battle there two years before. I returned to Kham Duc in 2006, searching for answers to lingering questions about those who fought there in May 1968.

As we entered the Kham Duc valley, the air seemed heavy with the specter of the missing American soldiers abandoned there and at Ngok Tavak five miles to the south. Most of the men who were at Kham Duc in 1970 had no knowledge of those missing-in-action from the 1968 battle. I did. Before flying to Kham Duc from the Americal Division base camp at Chu Lai on July 12, 1970, I learned of the abandoned bodies of those poor souls. Privately, I believed the Army had betrayed not only those men, but their families as well, leaving them to grieve with a lifetime of unanswered questions about their fate.

Decades later, retired Major General (MG) A. E. Milloy, the Americal Division commander when Kham Duc was reoccupied, told me that nearly all those men who were missing-in-action from the 1968 battle didnt stand a chance. In an unusual departure from his normal gentlemanly manner, he spared no unkind words for the officers he felt were responsible for their deaths, including General William Westmoreland.

Such a harsh condemnation from General Milloy was unexpected, because I knew his reputation. He was as aggressive a senior commander as ever served in South Vietnam, but he did not tolerate recklessness, especially with the lives of those he commanded. He was an up-from-the-ranks soldiers general, who knew from his own battlefield experiences in World War II and Korea the kind of missions that unnecessarily waste the lives of American soldiers. His comments gave me a new perspective on the Kham Duc missing-in-action cases. Reconciling what happened there in May 1968 was ultimately a question of accountability.