But the order was clear. Brookbank brought it to another American on the base, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Turley, a tough-minded Marine who had just arrived in Vietnam. “You’ve got to shut it down,” Brookbank told him. Turley looked at the directive and he, too, was taken aback. “We were deeply involved in a war,” Turley said. “I had tanks on a [nearby] bridge and I had a massive three-division attack coming at me. Total chaos.” Turley took a sketch of the sixteen-mile radius and laid it over a map. He realized he wouldn’t even be able to fire artillery in self-defense.
Word quickly got out to the Vietnamese soldiers. “My god, my god!” Brookbank heard someone cry out. One Vietnamese commander found the adviser and asked him, “Where are the American planes? . . . If they don’t come to our aid, we’re lost.” The bridge at Cam Lo, just two miles from Hambleton’s position, was a special concern. Another bridge farther upriver, the one at Dong Ha, had been destroyed by US Marine adviser John Ripley, who, in the face of withering enemy fire, had swung out on the beams beneath the structure carrying explosives and detonators and blown the overpass into the water. It was an act of almost lunatic bravery that saved many hundreds of South Vietnamese lives.
But NVA tanks had been redirected and were now rolling across the bridge at Cam Lo, close to Hambleton’s position, and heading straight toward the ARVN’s firebases. Could Brookbank get an airstrike on it, the South Vietnamese asked him, or a naval gun to target it? “People were just begging for artillery.”
Panic engulfed the towns just south of the DMZ as villagers streamed onto the roads by the thousands. The North Vietnamese dropped mortars on the escape routes and people fell unmoving to the ground, turning the roads bloody and littering them with severed limbs. The terrified Vietnamese villagers stepped over the dead who piled up on the roads; corpses were pushed into the ditches so that the flood of people could press on. “Mass hysteria,” Turley remembered. “It was the worst thing I’d ever seen.”
The commander of a South Vietnamese Marine regiment overheard a heated discussion between Brookbank and Turley and asked what was going on. The Americans explained there was an Air Force navigator down north of the Mieu Giang and the military was diverting all airstrikes to the rescue mission. The commander, seeking to understand, held up his index finger. “One?” he said. “Just one man?” In the first week of the invasion, the South Vietnamese would lose five thousand soldiers to death or surrender. The commander, like so many others that day, had trouble comprehending what he was being told.
As more shells came in, shrieking and then going silent before impact, Turley made a decision. He would disobey the order. “I said, Screw you, I’m not going to do it. We’re going to keep shooting.” The guns at Ai Tu never stopped firing at the human waves of NVA pouring down from the North.
But the Air Force controlled the airstrikes, and many were diverted to the search and rescue effort. As the battle continued to rage—some firebases later reported eleven thousand shells being fired at them in a single day—Brookbank got on the radio and called the USAF controllers. There was no answer; his fellow Americans wouldn’t respond. “This was the attitude—this is our war, we’ve got something going on, don’t bother us,” Brookbank said. Desperate to save his men, he found himself shouting into the radio: “This is important. Can’t you understand how important this is?!”
Ensconced in their base near Saigon, more than six hundred miles to the south of the DMZ, the intelligence officers of the Seventh Air Force still hadn’t confirmed that an invasion was under way. They had approved channels that provided them with raw intelligence; Marine officers at forward bases weren’t one of them. If they had known the long-awaited attack had launched, they might have pushed back against the no-fire order. But they didn’t know, just as Joker didn’t know.
Brookbank’s disbelief gave way to bitterness. He felt powerless, abandoned. There were Marine commanders who, if you told them you were canceling their air support in the middle of a major firefight, would have taken out their sidearm and executed you. “They would have killed you,” Brookbank said. “Then the general would have gone to the president and said, ‘This is asinine.’” But it was happening and Brookbank was unable to stop it. “They were running their own war for one guy. It was the most devastating thing I could ever imagine.”
In fact, the Air Force was hitting some of the targets that Brookbank wanted hit; it was just that they were doing it to save Gene Hambleton. The two missions occasionally overlapped. The problem for Brookbank and the ARVN was that the units being hit were a day or two behind the lead elements of the invasion. The South Vietnamese and their American advisers wanted the enemy soldiers directly in front of them, the ones coming through the wire and attacking their positions, killed first. That wasn’t being done.
Fierce arguments rang out up and down the chain of command, across service lines, in person and over radio links. Another Marine officer, Lieutenant Colonel D’Wayne Gray, read the order, found it “obscene,” and flew into a rage. “I was absolutely up the wall.” Gray approached an Air Force brigadier general who happened to be visiting his posting and confronted him about the no-fire zone. During the conversation, it became clear that the brigadier general thought there were two airmen down, not one. Gray, trying to maintain his composure, pointed out that their allies were being killed by the hundreds and that the enemy was forging a breakthrough that could lead to defeat.
The brigadier general was unmoved. “I would rather lose two ARVN divisions,” the man told Gray, “than those two US Air Force crewmen.”
As a highly decorated Marine who’d fought in Korea before being assigned to Vietnam, Gray wasn’t easily shocked. But the general’s statement took his breath away. Two ARVN divisions totaled twenty thousand men.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that, on that day in April, some Marines and Air Force officers came to the conclusion that the US leadership in Vietnam had lost its collective mind.
11
Yesterday’s Frat Boy
At about one in the morning of April 3, at the Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand, an airman shook Bill Henderson awake. The man told Henderson there was an American down and that he was needed to fly on the rescue. The pilot dressed quickly in his hooch and hurried to the briefing.
Tall, mustached, and handsome, Henderson was a prototypical Air Force pilot, a species that one pilot described as “yesterday’s college frat boy with a ten to one ratio of impulse to common sense.” The son of a World War II flight engineer, Henderson grew up athletic and highly competitive, a swimmer who, by the time he was fourteen, had risen to number three in the nation in the freestyle for his age group. There were people in Milwaukee who were even beginning to talk about the Olympics.
His father was his swimming coach. One day, the elder Henderson told him to skip practice; he wanted to take his son sailing instead. Bill eagerly agreed. They headed to Pewaukee Lake, a half-hour ride from Milwaukee, and sailed five miles from the west end to the east end, slipping across the dark blue water with bright sunshine overhead. Bill was enjoying the trip. About this time, his father caught his eye and said, “Get out.” Bill inquired what his father was talking about and what he got back was: “Not much of a wind. You’ll get your workout here.” So Bill took off his shirt and dove in the water and began swimming, and after two and a half hours he’d covered most of the length of the lake again, back the other way, with his dad leading him in the sailboat. That was how it was for Bill Henderson growing up.
Bill went to Dartmouth and became a music major. It was the late sixties by then, and the campus was pulsing with an anti-Vietnam vibe; at times it seemed the majority of the student body was at war with the country’s future military officers. Bill, however, was otherwise occupied. His girlfriend had become pregnant before his senior year; he’d married her, and so he was now a student, a husband, and a father all at once. He possessed neither the free time, the money, nor the psychological makeup to get involved with the anti-w
ar movement. Instead, he became the campus sandwich man, selling ham and cheese or liverwurst on wheat to leftists with deeper pockets than his.
After graduation, Henderson found himself without prospects. Nobody was hiring music majors in 1968. What to do? His dad, the former military flight engineer, had taught him that flying was something almost inexplicably special. The Air Force was hungry for young, vigorous bodies. Why not go along for the ride? It was his patriotic duty, and besides, he needed a job. Bill Henderson was a pragmatist down to the soles of his feet.
His young wife objected. She worried that he was going to end up in Vietnam and get himself killed. But even then, in his early twenties, Henderson was an unusually confident person, possessed of an unshakable belief that he could outthink almost any human being you cared to stand up against him. “I said, ‘Listen, my dear, I’m brilliant and you’re not. Let me tell you how it’s going to be.’” It was late 1968 and Richard Nixon had been elected on a promise to get America out of the war. Henderson took him at his word and did the math in his head. He would have to go to three months of officer training school, then a year of pilot training, then advanced training (which he did, in the gorgeous F-100 Super Sabre) for another six months. “I figured after two years, the frickin’ war’s going to be over. Shit, what the hell, I was a Dartmouth grad. I knew everything.” It would be many months before he realized how wrong he was.
Bill Henderson wasn’t a John Bircher. He didn’t hate the Vietnamese. He wasn’t particularly bloodthirsty. But he’d discovered the second great love of his life and he wished to pursue it in the defense of his country. “I found flying,” says Henderson, “was better than an orgasm.”
At the rescue mission briefing, Henderson learned he would fly over to Vietnam and join the ongoing effort to save Hambleton. In the vicinity of Dong Ha, he would connect with two long-range Sikorsky HH-53 Jolly Greens and at least two Douglas A-1 Skyraider attack aircraft that were about to take off from Da Nang. (The big choppers always traveled in pairs, as a precaution: the “low” bird retrieved the downed American; the “high” bird waited a mile or so back in the event of a crash, in which case it would swoop in and rescue the crew members.) Henderson would fill the role of spotter for the mission, diving beneath the clouds in his OV-10 aircraft to “zot”—slang for mark—Hambleton’s location with his LORAN laser beam so that the choppers could come in and pick the airman up. He would also draw the first rounds of fire and give the other guys an idea of how hot the zone was.
It wasn’t anything new for Henderson. On previous missions he’d flown escort for the 21st Special Operations Squadron—they were called the Knives—who went behind enemy lines to assassinate North Vietnamese mayors. “Every time the North killed one of ours, we killed one up there.” The insertions could be gnarly, and the passengers were something else. Assassins, real-life American killers who didn’t say much as they came and went. “Craaaaaaaaazy people,” Henderson said. After that, rescue missions were not something that made him unduly nervous.
Despite the Knives, Bill Henderson was having a fabulous war. “I killed guns,” he said, referring to North Vietnamese AAA, “and I killed a lot of ’em.” Henderson loved flying the OV-10 and sending a five-hundred-pound bomb rocketing toward the AAA sites, loved the moment the bombs hit in a bloom of smoke and fire, loved the Thais and their sweet-natured laughter, loved the action. Flying above Vietnam at night was magical: the meandering silver glint of the rivers, the black foothills folded back on one another in serried, ghostly rows gripped by thin fingers of mist. The country was lush even in darkness. The only signs of war from this distance were the innumerable bomb craters, now filled up with rainwater. The pilots looking down would see them flash with moonlight as they flew over.
Henderson hitched his six-foot frame into the cockpit of his OV-10, call sign Nail 38, and set to work. It was still pitch-black. Behind him, he could hear his navigator, First Lieutenant Mark Clark, settling in.
As he drew near Hambleton’s position that morning, Bill Henderson studied the cloud cover. It topped out at about two thousand feet, with a bottom of about seven hundred. Those numbers would usually be problematic. But this was a rescue mission and Henderson thought he could find a way in.
He knew Hambleton was surrounded by guns. The pilot of the previous OV-10 that had flown over the downed airman had been startled at what he’d seen: a beehive of tanks, transports, artillery positions, and troop carriers, crisscrossing the area around Hambleton. The number of vehicles was so unexpected that the pilot checked his map coordinates, thinking he’d somehow gotten lost and was looking at a massive camp deep in South Vietnam. But then he spotted red stars—the symbol of the NVA—on the doors of the trucks and, soon after that, a wall of flak rose up to greet him. Where had all these troops come from? he wondered. Headquarters still had not briefed the rescuers that they were going into an invasion zone. As he departed the area, the pilot relayed the information, along with the navigator’s coordinates, to Bill Henderson.
As he arrived over the rescue zone, Henderson contacted the A-1 pilots and Jolly Green crews to coordinate their efforts. “OK, guys, we might be able to pull this off,” he told them. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I have the coordinates, so get on my wing. I’ll get you within a quarter mile of him. Stay on my wing.” The plan was that Henderson would break through the clouds at the head of the set, angle downward toward Hambleton, and get the rescue choppers positioned above him. The A-1s would rip the shit out of any enemy guns that were targeting the choppers. The lead helicopter, flown by a Coast Guard pilot, Lieutenant Commander Jay Crowe, would then buzz in behind him with fighter cover. The high Jolly, flown by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Harris, would hover a mile south, ready to move in if trouble developed. If the approach could be made, Crowe would touch down, grab Hambleton, and get back up in the air as fast as possible, and they’d all turn around and haul ass back to base.
Henderson pushed the stick down and the plane’s nose dipped. His windscreen was covered by streams of wet gray mist as the seconds passed. At seven hundred feet, the plane broke out of the cloud bank. There was Vietnam below them. A second or two later, “the whole fucking world lit up.” The sky seemed alive with pulsing fire and puffs of dark smoke. Tracers streaked across his windshield; Henderson had never seen anything like it. “Flak everywhere.”
Henderson zotted Hambleton’s position, then jinked and climbed to get out of the AAA. Behind him, an A-1 headed straight toward Hambleton, followed by the low bird, its engine whining at high speed. As the crew of the Jolly Green looked on in amazement, it seemed that everyone on the ground—NVA troops, tank gunners, truck drivers—turned their guns and began shooting. Bullets chopped their way through the nose of the helicopter and splintered the instrument panel. A round slammed into the flight instrument gyro, knocking out the navigation. Warning lights lit up all over the cockpit. Lieutenant Commander Crowe jumped on the radio and called out that he was taking heavy fire. “Break it off, break it off!” the on-scene commander shouted on the radio. “Get out, Jolly Green, get out.” Crowe pulled back on the stick and the chopper climbed upward, but the controls had gone sluggish. Perhaps a hydraulic line had been cut or a component smashed by a bullet.
Crowe experimented with the speed to see if the chopper could land. When he dropped the Jolly Green below 120 knots, it began to veer out of control. But he needed to get it down to 105 before he could lower the landing gear. The pararescuemen in back had chutes; if the bird was high enough, they could bail out. But Crowe’s altimeter had been shot out; he had no idea what his altitude was. Watching Crowe struggle to keep the chopper in the air, Harris, the pilot of the high bird, was incredulous. “How he managed to fly that bird is beyond my comprehension.”
The escorting A-1 pilots called the control tower at the Hue airfield and requested an emergency landing. The air controller came back to him; he was not to attempt to bring the bird in. The airport was under rocket attack, and they were
too busy to deal with some shot-up helicopter. As they argued, the A-1 pilot jumped into the traffic and told the controller in no uncertain terms that the Jolly Green was coming apart and he was either going to land at Hue or crash into the jungle. The officer relented.
Crowe spotted the runway and came in at 105 knots. The chopper touched down and whipped along the tarmac. Crowe shut off both engines to slow it, but ahead of him he could see a deep hole in the runway where a rocket had blown out the asphalt. If he hit that, the chopper would wreck itself. He did a quick cycling flare and the chopper lifted a few feet into the air, just managing to clear the crater. The Jolly Green touched back down and slid to a juddering halt.
A fire touched off in the back of the crew compartment. Tendrils of acrid smoke seeped forward. Crowe shouted for his men to get out. Rockets were thudding into the ground as the crew ran down the runway toward a waiting base vehicle. They climbed in and the transport sped off.
With Crowe out of action, the pilot of the high bird, Bill Harris, decided he would try to grab Hambleton with a run-in from north of Dong Ha. He made a beeline for the copse of trees where the navigator was hiding and got within a hundred yards. Hambleton popped his smoke. But rounds were thwocking into Harris’s aircraft one after the other. “Extreme, intense fire,” he remembered. “Big orange balls of fire coming through the rotor blades, right at us.” The on-scene commander called for him to break off. Reluctantly, seconds away from getting Hambleton out, Harris aborted and turned away. “We were that close.”
Hambleton had listened to the choppers approach and heard the roar of the AAA guns opening up. “Where in God’s name had those guns come from?” he thought as the din pounded in his ears. He believed that the F-4s and A-1s had killed almost every enemy soldier within a large radius.
Saving Bravo Page 10
