In 1968, The NVA Surrounded Firebase Kate. It Was Their Worst Decision.

Added: 2026-05-03

[00:00:08]October 1969, a bald red dirt hilltop 3 miles from the Cambodian border.

[00:00:16]27 American soldiers and about 150 Montagnard 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 4 and 6,000 enemy fighters.

[00:00:37]That's roughly a 40 to 1 disadvantage.

[00:00:41]Their water trailer had been destroyed.

[00:00:43]Their howitzers were getting knocked out one by one.

[00:00:47]And the South Vietnamese command had refused to send reinforcements. The men on Fire Base Kate had every reason to believe they were going to die there.

[00:00:56]What nobody knew yet was that the North Vietnamese had just made one of the worst tactical decisions [music] of the entire war.

[00:01:04]To understand what happened at Fire Base Kate, you need to understand why it was built in the first place.

[00:01:12]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 Quang Duc province, right along the Cambodian border. They were called Kate, Susan, and Annie.

[00:01:29]Soldiers nicknamed them the Scarlet Sisters.

[00:01:34]Each base held just a handful of artillery pieces and a small garrison.

[00:01:38]Kate sat roughly 5 km east of Cambodia, overlooking a tea plantation that NVA forces were using as a staging area. The tactical premise behind [music] Kate was simple.

[00:01:50]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.

[00:02:06]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.

[00:02:19]The difference was that this time, under Nixon's new Vietnamization policy, the South Vietnamese military was supposed to take the lead.

[00:02:28]The ARVN 23rd 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 Fire Base Kate.

[00:02:49]The men on that hilltop were on their own.

[00:02:52]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.

[00:03:01]His name was William Albracht. And this was about to become the defining five days of his life.

[00:03:10]Captain William Hawk Albracht was at the time the youngest Green Beret captain in all of Vietnam.

[00:03:17]He arrived at Kate on October 28th, 1969, replacing Captain Barham, who had rotated out for R&R.

[00:03:25]What Albracht found when he landed was not encouraging. The Montagnard troops were playing volleyball. Defenses were relaxed. The perimeter wasn't properly fortified. Alongside him was Sergeant Daniel Pierelli, 22 years old, a weapon specialist from Detachment A-233 at Ban Don.

[00:03:45]Pierelli had arrived the day before, taken one look at the situation, and immediately canceled the volleyball.

[00:03:53]The garrison itself was a patchwork.

[00:03:55]Elements from three different artillery battalions. Two 155-mm howitzers and a single 105-mm.

[00:04:05]That's three gun tubes to defend against three regiments. The infantry perimeter was held by roughly 156 Montagnard fighters from the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, indigenous highland tribesmen who fought alongside US Special Forces. Two Vietnamese LLDB Special Forces soldiers rounded out the force.

[00:04:28]Among the Americans were First Lieutenant Mike Smith, running the guns for the 192nd Artillery, and First Lieutenant Ronald Ross from the 522nd Artillery, who had just learned he'd become a father.

[00:04:41]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.

[00:04:59]These were the same soldiers who had fought the First Cavalry Division at the Ia Drang Valley in 1965.

[00:05:08]They had fought at Dak To in 1967.

[00:05:11]They were battle-hardened, well-supplied, and they had been rehearsing this attack from the safety of Cambodia for weeks.

[00:05:19]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 Montagnard ambush patrol on a nearby rise called Ambush Hill ran straight into the lead elements of the 66th Regiment moving toward Kate. AC-47 Spooky gunships roared in overhead.

[00:05:42]Kate's howitzers fired defensive salvos into the darkness. The siege of Fire Base Kate had begun.

[00:05:49]By dawn on October 29th, the full bombardment opened up. Mortars, recoilless rifles, B-40 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.

[00:06:14]The water trailer, the only water source on the hill, was destroyed. Albracht took shrapnel in his left arm while standing in the open directing a medevac helicopter. He refused evacuation.

[00:06:27]That same day, Albracht, Pierelli, and about 40 Montagnards patrolled out to Ambush Hill to assess the previous night's contact.

[00:06:37]They followed blood trails and pith helmets up the slope.

[00:06:41]At about 30 m, they walked into heavy fire.

[00:06:46]The Montagnard point man was shot in the head. Albracht, covered by Pierelli firing M-79 grenades, ran into the fire with three Montagnards and carried the wounded man back.

[00:06:58]The soldier died on the way to Kate, but Albracht had won something no amount of rank could buy, the absolute loyalty of his Montagnard fighters. That loyalty was about to be tested. The next morning, roughly 500 NVA soldiers launched a battalion-sized ground assault directly at the fire base.

[00:07:21]It was the first major human [music] wave attack.

[00:07:25]Montagnard small arms fire, the surviving howitzers firing at point-blank range, F-100 Super Sabre jets dropping 500-lb bombs, and helicopter gunships from the 48th Assault Helicopter Company, all combined to break the assault, but not without cost. A UH-1B gunship took a B-40 rocket [music] to the tail boom and crashed within sight of Kate.

[00:07:53]All four crewmen were killed. Chief Warrant Officers Nolan Black and Mori Hearn, Specialist 5 Douglas Lott, 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.

[00:08:14]That afternoon, in one of the most remarkable moments of the entire battle, a CH-54 Flying Crane helicopter sling-loaded a replacement 105-mm howitzer onto the fire base while under direct enemy fire.

[00:08:29]Albracht then improvised something new.

[00:08:32]He fired M-16 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.

[00:08:56]But the NVA weren't done.

[00:08:59]Not even close.

[00:09:02]By Halloween, Fire Base Kate [music] was being pounded from 360°.

[00:09:08]Both 155-mm howitzers were destroyed. The single 105-mm could only fire at restricted elevation.

[00:09:17]The artillerymen 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 ft dropped more than 300, [music] 500, and 750-lb bombs on NVA concentrations surrounding the base.

[00:09:39]The strike landed danger close. Hot shrapnel rained down on the Americans, but it disrupted NVA attack preparations [music] and bought critical time.

[00:09:51]I put in a request, put in code, sent the request to headquarters, request to abandon Fire Base Kate.

[00:09:58]Didn't take long, came back and said, "Permission denied."

[00:10:02]I said, "Hmm."

[00:10:04]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 and then and we had to do this uh very low-profile was because the NVA were were all I mean, they were looking right at us. They could see us. So, we had to do this very surreptitiously.

[00:10:33]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 were starting their assault where you could hear them clipping the wires and uh and there was a very steep assault. You could hear their little sandals >> [music] >> rustling 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 Ambush Hill. That same day, running between bunkers with Albrecht, First Lieutenant Ronald Ross was struck by B-40 rocket shrapnel.

[00:11:05]He died in Albrecht's arms. Ross was the only American killed on Firebase Kate itself during the siege. The father who would never hold his child.

[00:11:17]Overhead that night, USAF Captain Al Dykes, aboard an AC-47 [music] Spooky gunship, told Albrecht over the radio that Kate was taking more incoming fire than any other American outpost in all of South Vietnam.

[00:11:33]By November 1st, 1969, Albrecht had reached his limit. Not of courage, of physics. The base had become, in his own words, an impact area. Not a functioning Firebase. 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.

[00:12:00]His second transmission was not a request. It was a statement of intent.

[00:12:05]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.

[00:12:18]The plan was audacious and desperate in equal measure. Two Mike Force companies would be airlifted from Pleiku to a landing zone northwest of Kate to form a link-up point.

[00:12:30]A C-47 Spooky and AC-119 Shadow gunships would orbit the Firebase firing continuously to trick the NVA into thinking the base was still defended.

[00:12:42]Meanwhile, the entire garrison would slip off the hill into the darkness.

[00:12:47]The artillerymen spiked their gun tubes with thermite. They destroyed remaining ammunition. They burned codebooks and smashed radios. Everything that couldn't walk out of Kate would be left behind.

[00:13:00]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.

[00:13:10]Kate survivors would have to come to them, not the other way around. Spooky was delayed by mechanical trouble. And as Albrecht 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.

[00:13:29]150 people, many of them wounded, frozen in the light expecting to die. The flare malfunctioned and sputtered out.

[00:13:40]At roughly 2200 hours the column moved down the north slope through the wire.

[00:13:46]Someone tripped a trip flare. The entire column dropped flat. Another malfunction. Another miracle.

[00:13:54]Albrecht took the point himself when the Montagnard lead scout froze at the approach to Ambush Hill.

[00:14:01]The point man then instinctively veered right around the hill instead of taking the planned left route.

[00:14:08]That instinct saved every life in the column. An V A.51 caliber heavy machine gun was dug in on the originally planned path.

[00:14:20]When the machine gun finally opened up, it shot high in the confusion and scored no hits. Spooky, now on station overhead, raked the hilltop and drove the gun crew into cover.

[00:14:32]In the panic, roughly half the Montagnards scattered into the jungle.

[00:14:37]One American artilleryman went with them. That group would eventually reach Bu Prang safely by a different route.

[00:14:45]But Private First Class Michael Norton became separated during the chaos. He was never seen again.

[00:14:52]Norton was declared dead in 1978.

[00:14:56]He remains on the POW/MIA rolls to this [music] day. The remaining column, now down to about 70 people, pushed through pitch-black triple canopy jungle.

[00:15:09]Pirelli stopped the column when [music] it split in the darkness. Enforced total silence, had each man grip the [music] web gear of the soldier in front and reconnected the group without a sound.

[00:15:21]Major George Latin, the Air Force forward air controller orbiting overhead, guided the column northwest, then west, then south while A-1 Skyraiders strafed the ground behind them to mask their trail.

[00:15:35]At one point, Latin's route took them briefly across the Cambodian border.

[00:15:40]One of reportedly two international incidents from Kate that landed on President Nixon's [music] desk.

[00:15:47]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.

[00:16:00]By noon, they walked into Bu Prang Special Forces Camp.

[00:16:05]Later that day, F-4 Phantoms dropped 2,000-lb bombs on the abandoned Firebase Kate.

[00:16:12]The other two Scarlet sisters, Susan and Annie, were evacuated the same day.

[00:16:18]The hilltop was gone. But nearly everyone who had been on it was alive.

[00:16:23]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 Khe San. Over 5 days, Major Latin ran continuous tactical air around the clock. F-4 Phantoms, F-100 Super Sabres, A-1 Skyraiders, 37 Dragonflies, a C-47 Spooky and AC-119 Shadow gunships orbited nearly every night. Their miniguns firing 6,000 rounds per minute into the jungle below.

[00:17:04]At least two B-52 Arc Light strikes hammered NVA assembly areas at danger-close range.

[00:17:12]US estimates placed several hundred NVA killed around Kate alone.

[00:17:17]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.

[00:17:35]The NVA's entire fall 1969 Central Highlands Offensive collapsed.

[00:17:42]They had planned to destroy the firebases, overrun Bu Prang and Duc Lap, and drive on Ban Me Thuot to cut South Vietnam in two.

[00:17:51]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.

[00:18:20]One was lost forever in the jungle.

[00:18:23]About a third of the Montagnard defenders were killed or wounded. Their dead had to be left behind on the hilltop.

[00:18:31]Every American survivor received a decoration for valor.

[00:18:35]Except, at the time, the man who led them. Albrecht's award ceremony was never rescheduled after he diverted his pickup helicopter to medevac four wounded Mike Force soldiers instead.

[00:18:49]His first Silver Star for Kate came 43 years later in December [music] 2012.

[00:18:55]As of the most recent reporting, a campaign to award Albrecht the Medal of Honor continues. The Army has twice declined to upgrade his decoration.

[00:19:04][music] Firebase Kate is often called a defeat. A base abandoned.

[00:19:11]Guns spiked. A hill given up. But the men who were there know the truth. And now so [music] do you.

[00:19:19]The North Vietnamese surrounded Firebase Kate. They outnumbered its defenders [music] 40 to 1.

[00:19:25]And when it was over, it was the NVA, not the Americans, who lost. They just happened to capture the hill. If you want to hear another story like this one, click the video on screen now.