Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  As they approached the DMZ, something unexpected happened. The monitors in front of the crows and Hambleton began blinking. Amber lights. Enemy radar sites were turning on and tracking the planes, and the amber lights in front of the crows were flashing. The B-52s started to jam the enemy radar, throwing an electronic smokescreen up around the formation.

  As they got closer to their target, two Fan Song radar systems to the west came up on their screens. The green lights blinked on. The crows onboard the B-52s turned on their jamming equipment and waited for red.

  Red signal. Four SAMs launched into the air.

  The other EB-66 was closer to the launch sites, on the opposite side of the formation, and the SAMs locked on it. The pilot counted off one thousand one, one thousand two . . . When he reached one thousand five, he rolled and dove for the earth, spraying chaff as he went. The missiles couldn’t turn with the craft and exploded harmlessly in midair.

  Hambleton heard a voice on his UHF radio. It was the pilot aboard the other EB-66, Bat 22. “SAM uplink, vicinity of DMZ, Bat 22.” Six more SAMs hissed into the air and the planes dove and turned to avoid the rockets. The missiles shot up through the formation and exploded, but the bursts of shrapnel missed the diving airplanes.

  To the northwest, a North Vietnamese SAM unit—Detachment 62—was in an “alert posture.” The soldiers were expecting American aircraft to pass over them on the way to delivering airstrikes farther north. The telephone in the command post rang; an officer picked it up, listened, then announced that enemy airplanes were approaching from the southwest. “Avenge our murdered compatriots!” the commander cried. The men of Detachment 62 watched the skies for contrails.

  The American planes had regained their altitude and were streaming toward the target area at about 530 mph. Tracer bullets arced up at them from antiaircraft artillery—AAA—batteries on the ground, leaving puffs of white smoke in hollowed-out circles drifting in the air. The F-105Gs spotted the missile sites and dove to bomb them.

  One of the men from Detachment 62 spotted the American planes above. “Target acquired!” he shouted in Vietnamese. Bat 21, Hambleton’s plane, was the farthest out on the northwest edge of the formation. It was now between Detachment 62 and the B-52s.

  The sky was thick with the white contrails of newly launched missiles soaring toward the glints in the sky. “Oh shit,” shouted the pilot of Bat 22. He jinked the aircraft away from the SAMs, which began exploding one after the other, the concussions sending pressure waves through the thin aluminum skins of the American planes.

  Hambleton was studying his instruments and glancing at his maps. In the belly of the aircraft, the crows were bent over their equipment, tracking the SAM launches. The air was now filled with a collection of dodging aircraft, Soviet missiles, and heavy flak. With so many SAMs in the air, you could jink away from one and veer right into the path of another. But Hambleton’s lights were still dark; no amber or green lights had come up, which meant that no radar had locked on to his plane and no SAM sites were tracking it.

  The men of Detachment 62 had purposefully not turned on their radar or guidance systems. They’d decided on an optical-only launch, something that Hambleton and the other crews had never experienced before. When the American planes came into range, the Vietnamese commander yelled “Fire!” Three SAMs leapt off their launchpads in a boiling mist of orange smoke.

  Aboard Bat 21, the amber and green lights remained dark.

  The solid boosters pushed the missiles skyward, the SAMs quickly attaining Mach 3. The boosters cut out and the liquid fuel ignited, a red fuming nitric acid acting as the oxidizer to the pure kerosene fuel. The wings on the tail stabilized the missiles as they rocketed upward at 2,600 mph, while the fretted surfaces of their metal fins prevented them from rolling over and exploding.

  One SAM soared toward Bat 21, flying thousands of feet above. The North Vietnamese controller on the ground guided the missile by sight alone, maneuvering it by radio signals sent to two sets of small antennas placed just ahead of the forward fins. As the nose of the missile cut through the warm air, just behind it lay the fragmentation warhead, lethal within a radius of 820 feet.

  Finally, the controller switched on the guidance system. The missile “found” the American plane and darted toward it.

  Red lights flashed inside Bat 21. “SAM on scope!” a voice shouted in Hambleton’s earpiece. Hambleton was bewildered. What had happened to the amber and green? The red warning signal was beeping furiously. The pilot, Bolte, began counting to himself. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand . . . But his margin of error had been cut in half. “We were five seconds late,” Hambleton recalled, “and we didn’t know it.”

  “Move right!” one of the crows said on the interphone. Bolte whipped the plane to the right, toward where he thought the missile was. He would dive under it and the SAM would roll and explode. The EB-66 began to turn into the break.

  Another voice broke in. “Negative, negative, negative, move left, move left!” One of the crows had calculated the path of the SAM and shouted out a new heading. Bolte jammed the stick left, losing time. As the plane began righting itself and Bolte started to tip the wing left, Hambleton glanced out his window and saw a white shape rising from behind the aircraft at astonishing speed. Bolte pushed the plane left and the shape disappeared.

  At that moment, the warhead detonated beneath Bat 21, instantly transforming the heavy chain wrapped around its cone into a white-hot bloom of molten metal, which then radiated out at supersonic speed and struck the underbelly of the aircraft. Had Bolte stayed with the rightward jink, the missile would have made impact near the navigator’s window and Hambleton would have been incinerated.

  5

  The Time of Useful Consciousness

  Things began happening very quickly inside the cockpit. Hambleton heard a “tremendous noise” and a flash turned the sky above him orange with fire. His windscreen melted away and bits of metal shrapnel shot through the now-open frame and smacked into the front of his flight suit. He looked down and saw that the metal floor between his feet had disappeared; clouds drifted by beneath his jungle boots.

  Something was beeping in his ear. It was the bail-out signal, triggered by Bolte, and it sounded to Hambleton like “the impatient jangle of a doorbell.” The navigator immediately reached down, gripped the D-ring on his ejection seat, and pulled it. The canopy above his head lifted away and the compressed-air cylinder beneath the seat shot Hambleton out the top of the plane with gut-wrenching force.

  As he spun away from the airplane, Hambleton found himself looking back and down at Bolte as the pilot leaned forward in his seat. Bolte’s gaze was fixed on the dark visor of Hambleton’s helmet, and the two men stared at each other for a few milliseconds. Why was Bolte leaning forward like that, Hambleton thought. Perhaps he’d been wounded by shrapnel in his legs or stomach and was bent over in pain. Or perhaps—and this was in some ways a more disturbing thought—he was holding his D-ring trigger and waiting for Hambleton to clear the jet, in order to avoid a midair collision. It was the equivalent of a ship’s captain being the last man to leave the vessel; there was a code of the sky as there was of the sea.

  It was impossible for Hambleton to say. Because as he rotated away from the aircraft, another explosion—perhaps the aircraft’s fuel tanks going up or the impact of a second SAM—shook his body with tremendous force. When he swung back around, Hambleton looked for the plane and saw nothing. “It’s gone,” he thought to himself, “it’s completely gone.”

  The navigator began gyrating wildly in the air, whipping in a flat circle. The compressed-air cartridge was supposed to launch him into a stable descent; after several minutes, his parachute was supposed to open automatically at a comfortable fourteen thousand feet. But the force of the blast had pushed him into a hard horizontal spin, gasping for breath in air that no human was supposed to breathe. The temperature was thirty degrees below zero.

  The first darts of panic ne
edled Hambleton’s brain. Something was wrong.

  But he needed to find the plane before he fixed the problem. He scanned the horizon as it whipped past in dizzying circles. Around him he saw dark shapes, moving almost lazily through the air. He stared and stared at the objects before he recognized them as seat cushions and other materials blown out of the EB-66 and now drifting earthward. But where was the aircraft?

  His mind was going black. Breathing hard, Hambleton wrenched his head left, then right. There. Thousands of feet beneath him, a tiny black shape against white clouds, the EB-66C was on fire, out of control and corkscrewing downward. Hambleton watched helplessly as the plane tumbled toward a bank of cumulus, then shot into the mist and disappeared.

  Parachutes, then. He wanted to see parachutes. He scanned the sky for dots of green nylon against the miles of white beneath him. But the blue was clear of anything except a dusting of clouds far below. The day was innocent, soundless. In the west, he could see the soft orange and purple glow of the horizon. Dusk.

  This meant that the four Americans who’d sat in the belly of the plane—Giannangeli, Serex, Gatwood, and Levis—were probably dead or about to die. Bolte, too. The shock of this thought numbed Hambleton’s body. He tried to imagine that these men he’d been bullshitting with just minutes before had been torn apart by a Soviet missile or were at that moment strapped into their seats approaching their deaths as the aircraft tumbled the final few hundred yards toward the earth.

  By this time, Hambleton had achieved terminal downward velocity of 122 mph. If he didn’t slow his descent, he would slam into the earth, punching a crater into a Vietnamese rice paddy, which some farmer would most likely discover in the morning along with his mangled body. Hambleton was suffering the first stages of hypoxia; his brain was being starved of oxygen, causing him to grow increasingly disoriented. Something called the Time of Useful Consciousness was coming into play. At this height, he had between 60 and 120 seconds before his brain shut down and he fell to earth.

  Hambleton thought back to the parachutists he’d watched jump out of Air Force planes during his mandatory training sessions. When they got locked into a spiral like the one he was in, they executed a series of maneuvers to get out of it. They would contort their bodies and, almost magically, the gyrating motion would stop. Now Hambleton tried to re-create the movements as he remembered them, one after the other, twisting his body this way and that to slow the whirling. But nothing worked; in fact, things only got worse. “Everything I did made me spinfaster.”

  His vision was going dark; it was difficult to breathe. “I thought, I’m going to black out.” He closed his eyes and saw pinpricks of light. Finally, the answer came to him. Hambleton reached up and pulled the ripcord on his harness. The parachute shot out above him with a silky fffffftttt, then snapped open. It immediately slowed his descent.

  It’s a remarkable and little-known fact that when you descend from five miles above the earth at the end of a parachute, you often experience no sense of falling. As you hang by the nylon straps in the wide blue vault of the sky, everything seems still and picture-like, as if you were pinned to a child’s bulletin board waiting for him to return home from school. “My God,” Hambleton thought after deploying the chute. “I’m going to hang here the rest of my life.” The spinning had stopped, and his dizziness was replaced with a sense of disbelief. The wind ruffled his flight suit, but for all he could tell, he was dangling, perfectly still, in the middle of the darkening sky.

  His vision was still blurry and his brain was going black. Hambleton clawed at his chute pack, his numbed fingertips feeling for the tip of the oxygen hose. He found it and pulled it free. He stuck the cold rubber between his lips and reached down to find the oxygen bottle knob, called “the green apple.” He pulled it. Oxygen hissed through the hose and his thoughts bloomed back into deep color. He gulped the cold air and his vision slowly cleared.

  The airman spotted something below him, a speck of gray that was gradually growing larger. It wasn’t a cloud. It wasn’t a stream or a rock formation on the ground. It couldn’t be, but it was—an American aircraft, circling just below him. He recognized it as an O-2, a propeller-powered spotter plane flown by two forward air controllers—FACs. Hambleton reached into his vest and pulled out his survival radio from one of the pockets.

  Inside the plane sat First Lieutenant Bill Jankowski and a second FAC. A few minutes before, Jankowski had spotted the SAM from Detachment 62 shooting upward from its mobile launching site into the sky. He’d seen the smoke from the explosion far above him and watched as, seconds later, the EB-66C came tumbling silently through the air, burning brightly and trailing a tail of thick black vapor. The plane had sliced through the blanket of clouds below, cutting a hole in the mist. Then, seconds later, a puff of gray smoke rose from the earth and filled in the hole.

  Now Jankowski heard something on his radio: a loud beeping noise followed by what he thought was a voice identifying itself as “Bat 21 Alpha.”

  Alpha would be the pilot. “Beeper, beeper, come up voice!” Jankowski said. But there was no response from the pilot. Static.

  About forty seconds later, another sound crackled on the radio. A voice calling, “This is Bat 21 Bravo.” Bravo was code for the number-two man on any EB-66 flight, the navigator. Though Jankowski didn’t know his name, it was Gene Hambleton.

  The voice repeated the call sign. Jankowski was astonished. He found it hard to fathom that anyone had survived the explosion and the crash. “Do you see us?” he asked.

  The voice came back. “Yes, I see you.”

  Jankowski stared down but couldn’t make out the ground through the clouds. He rocked his wings, a standard recognition signal, and asked Bat 21 Bravo if he’d seen the maneuver. The voice confirmed. Now Jankowski was completely dumbfounded. He peered down at the landscape through his side window but could see only gauzy white below him. “You must have damn good eyes to spot me all the way from the ground,” he said.

  “Look up,” Hambleton said. “I’m in the parachute at about twelve grand. Coming down in the middle of your orbit.”

  Jankowski rolled his aircraft and peered upward. He quickly spotted the olive-green chute above him. “It about blew my mind,” Jankowski said. He gunned his engine and flew toward Hambleton, floating at the end of his nylon parachute, then circled around him.

  It was an excellent thing that even a lone airman had survived the SAM attack, but Jankowski knew the situation was far worse than Hambleton could have imagined. The navigator wasn’t falling toward anything that resembled a demilitarized zone. Three days before, the North Vietnamese had launched what the Americans would name the “Easter Offensive” and the Vietnamese would refer to as mua he do lua, the “red fiery summer.” Thousands of feet below, hundreds of Soviet tanks, missile batteries, and heavy artillery threaded through the normally half-empty landscape of rice paddies and jungle roads as they rolled toward the cities and firebases of South Vietnam. Along with them were thirty thousand NVA troops. It was Hanoi’s all-out push to demolish Richard Nixon’s strategy of Vietnamization, humiliate the regime of Nguyen Van Thieu, and win the conflict once and for all. “The great opportunity to end the U. S. war of aggression has come!” read one bulletin handed out to all Vietcong troops just before they streamed across the Z. “Kill the enemy, annihilate tyrants, break the enemy’s oppressive control.” Hambleton was falling into the midst of the largest enemy invading force of the war.

  It was an almost ludicrously awful place to be rescued from.

  Jankowski was aware of what awaited the airman below. He had an idea: What if I tried to grab him now? If he slowed down, waited for Hambleton to descend to his altitude, then cruised by him and snagged the parachute on his wing, he might be able to save the navigator. Then he could open the O-2’s cockpit door and pull Hambleton inside. Was it dangerous? Hell, yes, it was dangerous. Was it more dangerous than attempting to evade thousands of highly motivated NVA troops? Maybe not.

&
nbsp; Jankowski and his co-pilot talked the maneuver over. They decided it just wasn’t possible. Hambleton would have to take his chances on the ground.

  The American airman dropped past Jankowski’s plane. Below, the mist had cleared and the airman saw a bright landscape crossed by the shadows of small trees and hillocks in a countryside as indecently green as the fields of southern Ireland. Sounds began popping in his ears, startling after so many minutes of hissing near-silence. He recognized the sound of heavy mortars and above it the tak-tak-tak of AK-47s. Clearly, someone down there was shooting. With his green chute stark against the blue sky, Hambleton thought, there was a chance the enemy might kill him before he even landed.

  Just then, the blue vault in front of Hambleton’s eyes disappeared as if by a magician’s trick and was replaced by a wall of white. He stared into it, realizing after a few seconds that he’d sunk into a bank of cumulus. In the cloud, he would be invisible to the gunners. It was a stroke of luck.

  The navigator broke out below the clouds at sixty feet. “I could see troops all around me,” he said. The ground rushed up at him and his boots slammed into a green field. Hambleton pitched forward, then steadied himself and released the chute. He looked around. He was crouched in a rice field. Tracers whined above his head, and he could hear the crump of heavy guns in the near distance. The enemy was out there in the deepening dusk.

  As he crouched in the furrows of the rice paddy crossed by clouds of mist, scanning the nearby fields for the enemy, Hambleton found himself paralyzed by successive waves of fear and self-doubt. “I said to myself, ‘Don’t breathe, don’t cough, don’t move.’ I was scared to death.” Was he really, as he’d told himself for so many years, a brave man? Could he handle himself behind enemy lines? Was he even physically capable of surviving on the ground in the middle of a shooting war? He had known once. He didn’t feel confident that he knew now.