Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  The navigator crawled forward to take a look at the roadway that had been decimated hours before. To his shock, a revivifying miracle had taken place. “Like a busy anthill that had its top kicked off, the whole area was swarming with parties of soldiers.” The blackened wrecks of the tanks and the transport trucks were already being hauled to the side of the road and abandoned in the bushes so new transports could get through. The wounded and dead were being loaded into trucks, some of them still moaning from their untreated injuries. Fresh camouflaged trucks, with youthful faces staring out at the carnage, roared by, headed south. Hambleton could hear the orders of officers in clipped Vietnamese. In a few minutes, it was as if nothing had happened here at all.

  Hambleton felt hollowed out. How could the Air Force save him when the NVA sprang back to life every time you destroyed it, sprouting new soldiers and new equipment like some unkillable golem? How could they do it if every chopper that approached his little grove was shot to pieces?

  The navigator turned back to his hole, crawled in, took off his holster that carried the .38, pulled the mosquito netting over his body, and stewed about his situation. Through the brambles and leaves, he watched fog begin to steal across the rice fields, “like some melancholy emblem of his own sinking spirits.”

  12

  “Their Glowing Trajectories”

  In the capital of North Vietnam, the sounds of Radio Hanoi were a familiar presence in shops and schools and on the heavily trafficked streets. Every day, the station’s announcers would read news accounts of the previous day’s battles, of American planes shot down by stalwart communist youths and stunning NVA ambushes in the jungle, along with reams of propaganda and promises of the coming victory. Even in the Hanoi Hilton, American POWs confined in their tiny cells, sweltering on the concrete slabs that served as beds, were forced to listen to the reports. There was one propagandist the men called Hanoi Hannah—her real name was Trinh Thi Ngo—a Vietnamese woman who spoke slangy English in a high, seductive voice. Hannah would read off the names of Americans killed during the previous month, play tapes sent to her by antiwar activists in the States, including Jane Fonda, and drop the needle on American pop songs. Elvis was a particular favorite.

  North Vietnamese diplomats in capitals around the world sent copies of Time, Newsweek, and Stars and Stripes back home so that Hannah and the station’s other announcers could broadcast the accounts of antiwar protests and capitalist depravities. The “reports” were often ridiculous, with descriptions of hundreds of American planes being shot down at once. But in early April, Radio Hanoi announced a great victory that was fleshed out by a good deal of detail: “Fliers used every trick to confuse ground detection . . . [T]hey could not cheat the radar observers of Detachment 62 . . . [T]he men quickly fixed the enemy on their screens . . . The whole battleground shook in the deafening burst of the missiles streaking up into the clouds in their glowing trajectories. One of the B-52s was hit, burst into flame and exploded. Its debris were scattered over a wide area. The rest of the eight-engine craft together with their escort jet fighters fled in disorder.”

  The NVA had mistaken the type of plane they’d downed. They believed they’d hit a B-52 when it was really Hambleton’s EB-66C. Nevertheless, the shootdown was announced in “triumphant” tones. For the North Vietnamese, shooting down one of the most advanced American aircraft wasn’t just a victory of arms; it was an unmistakable sign of progress. The leaders in Hanoi clearly regarded it as an event that would strike fear into the hearts of the enemy.

  Magazines and newspapers around the world noted the downing of Hambleton’s aircraft, along with its disturbing implications. “The loss of the EB-66C dramatically underscored the new sophistication of North Vietnam’s air defense system,” reported Newsweek. “The shock waves that rippled through Saigon and Washington could not have been greater if the lost plane had, in fact, been a B-52.” One American official expressed a fresh anxiety over the incident. “We’re supposedly fighting a primitive enemy,” he told the magazine. “But the way things are going, that just isn’t so anymore.” With the NVA’s new tactics, the missiles that had brought down Hambleton’s plane could change the war, or future, larger wars.

  The Times of London struck a similar tone, while noting that one of the plane’s crew had survived. “The EB-66C contains highly secret electronic equipment designed to jam the radar guidance devices of North Vietnamese missiles,” the paper reported. “The fact that it was shot down at all sent shock waves through the Pentagon. The Americans were determined that its navigator should not fall into enemy hands.” Losing an EB-66C was a serious matter for the military, but the plane’s equipment was likely to have been destroyed when it crashed into the earth from thirty thousand feet. Losing Hambleton would be worse.

  Bill Henderson continued orbiting above the clouds until his fuel ran low, then headed back to Da Nang. While his OV-10 was being fueled up, the on-scene commander raised Henderson on the radio. They were going to try again. Was he willing to come back?

  Henderson thought about it. “My arrogance at the time told me I knew how to dance around that crap,” Henderson said, meaning the AAA. “So I said yes.” He and Clark finished refueling, got a quick intelligence update, and flew back to Hambleton’s position.

  It was now about 3 p.m. Henderson raised the navigator on the radio. “We’re coming in again,” he said. “When the time comes, we’ll ask you to pop some smoke.”

  The radio crackled. “Roger,” Hambleton answered from down below.

  The ground beneath the OV-10 was still cloaked in low-hanging clouds. Henderson arrived over the position, synced up with the other aircraft, gritted his teeth, and dove into the cumulus again, and when he emerged from the bottom of the clouds, what seemed like a significant portion of the North Vietnamese Army opened up on him and Clark.

  Almost immediately, a SAM warning sounded in Henderson’s ear. At that moment the missile appeared and arced over a nearby plane—the pilot watched it swoop past him—dove under his wingman’s belly, and headed directly at Henderson’s OV-10. Henderson was just about to execute his SAM break when the missile smashed into his right wing at the engine joint and exploded.

  The wing snapped in half. The plane shuddered and then began to fall earthward. The canopy vaporized, just went away; the shock wave destroyed the metal and plastic sheathing that protected Henderson and Clark. A fireball blew forward and engulfed the two airmen, burning off Henderson’s mustache; only the sturdy ejection seats protected the two men from being incinerated. A chunk of glass tore through Henderson’s flight suit and ripped the flesh away, leaving his breastbone exposed.

  What was left of the plane turned over and lost speed rapidly. Henderson found himself upside down. The wings had snapped off, the tail was now debris sailing away from him in all directions. The molten metal from the warhead had burned off the rest of the airplane.

  In the backseat, Mark Clark pulled the ejection seat D-ring and the hard whoomp of the ejection seat rocketed him out of the craft. Henderson had no intention of following; his number-three-swimmer-in-his-age-group-cum-Dartmouth-grad-cum-fighter-pilot brain told him that as long as he was strapped into an airplane, he was damn well going to fly it out of there. But just as Clark went shooting out from behind him, Henderson heard a voice, deep and commanding, “a very powerful voice that brooked no hesitation.” It said simply: “Pull the D-ring.” It took something approximating the voice of God to get Bill Henderson out of the plane at that moment. Humbled, he reached down, pulled the D-ring, and ejected straight toward the earth.

  The pilot rotated upright and popped his chute. As it opened above him, he looked down. He was close to the ground, perhaps two thousand feet, and could hear the snap of AK-47s beneath him. A backseater in another OV-10 circling above watched the chutes pop and silently said good-bye to Henderson and Clark. “We didn’t think they were coming back.”

  Henderson drifted down for thirty of forty seconds before landing soft
ly in a wheat field. The plane had been traveling at 130 mph, and the fraction of a second between their ejections had determined the airmen’s respective fates: Clark floated toward the south side of the Mieu Giang and Henderson to the north. Clark felt horribly exposed as he descended. “There were a lot of people on the roads,” he remembered, “and they seemed to be looking at me.” He jettisoned his seat pack and saw that he was coming down in thick jungle. As the ground came rushing up at him, he lifted his feet, slammed into the branches, and surfed across the treetops. He cleared the trees, pulled back on his risers, and made a soft landing on open terrain. The airman quickly began running and found a barbed wire fence secured to the ground by two crossed posts. He pulled some vegetation back from the posts and crawled underneath. It was an excellent hiding place.

  Henderson landed in a field in the thick of the enemy offensive, just over a mile away from Hambleton. He released his chute and ducked behind a nearby rock pile, surveying the fields around him. Almost at once, something caught his eye. An old Vietnamese peasant was ambling toward him, moving at a stately pace despite the small-arms fire that was popping off everywhere. Henderson watched as the man strolled along until he reached the parachute, now ruffling gently against the soil. He bent down, picked up the edge, and calmly began rolling up the nylon. It took a while. When he was done, the villager turned and walked back toward his hut, carrying the chute under his arm. It had been a hypnotizing, disdainful performance. Clearly, the old man had seen his share of war.

  When the villager turned away, Henderson took the opportunity to go “screaming to the nearest hedge line.” He raced toward the underbrush and pushed his way through the branches. Once inside, he set about burying himself in bamboo leaves. Within a few minutes of landing, he was completely hidden from view. Though he’d expected no less of himself, Henderson was satisfied that he’d executed the USAF post-shootdown checklist with flawless aplomb.

  Henderson got on the radio, and the voice on the other end told him to sit tight, a Cobra was on the way. The Cobra was a shark-nosed attack helicopter studded with nasty weaponry, including 70 mm rockets and Miniguns that could fire up to four thousand rounds a minute. If you were down behind enemy lines, a Cobra was what you wanted coming for you.

  One did arrive almost immediately. Captain Tim Sprouse was heading toward Henderson when he heard a voice on his headset: “SAM, SAM, vicinity of Khe Sanh!” He was too low for the SAM to operate, or at least he thought he was, so he kept his course. Then the A-1 above him called out, “Here it comes guys—hit the deck!” Sprouse pushed the stick and dove for the ground as the SAM streaked above his rotors. The dive nearly put the chopper into the treetops, but Sprouse managed to pull out just before impact. The Cobra aborted the mission.

  A Huey pilot, Warrant Officer Ben Nielsen, flying with the Cobra, turned to go after all the downed airmen in succession: first Clark, then Henderson, then Hambleton. Three quick hops and it would be done. As the Huey dropped down on its approach, rounds pinged off the fuselage. Then “something really big” sounded below. Nielsen could hear heavy things—artillery shells of some kind—cutting through the air around him. The Plexiglas in front of him shattered and pieces sprayed over his flight suit. A shell blew the right cargo door off the helicopter and sent it spinning down to the rice fields below. The Huey aborted.

  Henderson had watched the whole thing with awe. “The shit lit up. The Cobra didn’t have a chance.” The choppers turned south, the chirring sound of their rotors fading slowly. Quiet returned.

  At the same time that Henderson was watching the helicopter depart, Jay Crowe, the commander of the Jolly Green that had nearly crashed at Hue, was riding in a jeep speeding away from a barrage of mortars. He needed to speak to someone, urgently. His Jolly Green had been practically dismantled in the air by something that wasn’t supposed to be there. What was this mystery force? Why hadn’t he been told about it? Something big and menacing was hunkered down in the area around Hambleton and it had opened the eyes of the men going after the navigator. “The ‘war is over’ syndrome was rapidly evaporating,” Crowe said.

  Lieutenant Commander Crowe was a big, genial, buttoned-up officer, a Coast Guard man who’d requested transfer to Vietnam from a “cush gig” flying C-130s in Hawaii because he’d become bored with the dullness of it. He’d grown up the son of a Massachusetts educator and violin teacher, a man with exacting standards when it came to established knowledge. The trait had been passed down, in spades. Crowe was a voracious reader, “big into researching things,” said his son Ty. “He knew something about everything, almost to an obnoxious degree.” What had happened to his aircraft above Cam Lo shouldn’t have happened. And Jay Crowe wanted to know why.

  When he jumped out of the jeep, Crowe buttonholed a few officers from US Army intelligence. They told him what they knew. There was a full-blown invasion under way and Hambleton was sitting in the middle of it. Crowe was taken aback. Why hadn’t he been told this? Why hadn’t anyone trying to rescue Hambleton been told this?

  The pilot grabbed a ride aboard the Jolly Green piloted by Bill Harris and flew to Da Nang. At the sprawling base, he sought out some of the Air Force intelligence officers who were generating intel for the rescue mission and told them what he’d seen: armored cars, command vehicles, massive numbers of troops, SAMs where no SAMs were supposed to be, all of it. A couple of A-1 pilots had even spotted what they thought was the pride of the Soviet arms industry, the highly advanced SA-7 missile—shoulder-launched, heat-seeking—coming up at them from the rice paddies. With those things, a single soldier could take down a $3 million plane in the blink of an eye.

  Crowe unloaded all this on the intel guys. And after he’d finished giving his report, he lingered, listening in, eager to know how the rescue briefings would change. But it soon became clear that his hot scoop—by the way, it’s fucking Vietnamese D-Day out there, boys! Might want to pass it on—hadn’t set the officers on fire. The men carried on with their day, talking about this target and that target and not bothering to get on the radio and inform the rescue teams what was down there waiting for them. When Crowe, confused by the lack of action, asked about one part of his report, the sighting of SA-7 missiles, the intel guy looked at him. “There aren’t any SA-7s in-country,” he said.

  The military often acts slowly, as commanders struggle to absorb chaotic bits of information arriving in real time. Crowe understood that. But he wasn’t repeating some flyboy gossip he’d overheard at the Officers’ Club. He’d been right over the area in question; he’d seen this stuff with his own eyes. More Americans were going after Hambleton, and intel was letting them think it was just another day over the Mieu Giang. It wasn’t.

  Crowe found it infuriating.

  13

  Tiny Tim

  On the ground, Hambleton heard the FAC above revving its engine. It was his signal to call in. “An OV-10 has been hit by antiaircraft and is down,” the FAC reported, referring to Bill Henderson’s plane. “The No. 2 man is down also. No word from the pilot.” Hambleton absorbed the news, his mood sinking.

  Henderson and Clark were safe for the moment, but the rescue scenarios had just become much more complicated. “The entire picture changed,” Hambleton said. The rescuers would have to coordinate three pickups instead of one, and in a fantastically hostile environment. But not today. The FAC informed Hambleton that no more choppers were on the way until further notice.

  He kept to his hiding place as the hours passed. By that afternoon, Hambleton found he was growing increasingly hungry and decided to go scouting for food. He knew from his jungle survival training that Vietnamese families sometimes grew vegetables and fruit—corn, pineapple, watermelon, red pepper—in small plots near their homes. Some watermelon or pineapple would give him an energy boost. He wouldn’t be able to venture out from his hiding place until darkness came, but he could find possible targets to return to later that night.

  The navigator got on the radio and told the FAC ci
rcling above of his plans. There was a delay. “Roger, Bat. I’ll alert the A-1s . . . Any trouble, click your transmitter at three-second intervals.”

  Hambleton confirmed.

  “And, Bat? Be careful. Make like Tiny Tim.”

  The FAC was aware that the enemy were probably listening in, so this was obviously some kind of code. But what the hell did Tiny Tim mean? Hambleton thought back to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which had occasionally featured a hairy oddball character by that name, strumming his mandolin and singing a song. What was the song? “Tiptoe . . . through the tulips.” The gravel mines, of course. Had to be.

  First he studied the little copse where he was hiding. The trees themselves were about ten feet high and threw the whole area into deep shade. The waist-high undergrowth was thick and tangled; as he looked around, he could see no paths cutting through it. That meant that villagers didn’t come through it very often. “I would defy anyone to be able to see a person hiding,” Hambleton said. “The only chance to be discovered was to be stepped on.”

  Hambleton removed the survival vest, which would only slow him down. He took his knife and the radio and left the other items in his hiding place, with leaves and branches covering them. Studying his compass, he set out eastward, pushing slowly through the undergrowth. He listened carefully for any human voices, counting his steps as he went. He moved through the brush until he reached the outer edge. He measured the little grove as he went and determined it was only about fifty yards wide, though looking back and ahead, he figured it stretched as much as two miles north and south.

  Hambleton lay down and peered out at the fields simmering in the strong afternoon glare. He was struck immediately by how the landscape in front of him resembled the rural parts of Illinois and Indiana. This was real farm country, with hills covered by green fields and dotted with small villages. Instead of cornfields, there were long rows of rice paddies, bordered by ditches for irrigation. Between the paddies and the ditches were narrow paths about one and a half feet wide that the farmers presumably used to reach their fields.