Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  The second A-1 dropped white phosphorus, which bloomed out in chalky clouds, obscuring the rice paddies. One pilot orbiting above pulled out a personal camera he’d brought along. He thought that the Hambleton mission would be remembered long after this day had ended and wanted to record the moment when the navigator was pulled into the helicopter. As Jolly Green 67 came in over the treetops, the pilot brought the camera up and began snapping photos.

  Jolly Green 67 swept forward, headed toward Hambleton, who finally picked it out of the sky. One of the pilots raised him on the radio, asking about the terrain they would be landing on. Hambleton replied that there were rice paddies to the east and west and he could make it to either quickly.

  At the base, Lieutenant Commander Crowe, who’d briefed the crews expecting they would only try to resupply Hambleton, was monitoring the radio traffic. He heard Jolly Green 67 commencing its run. “I was just stunned,” he said. He hadn’t expressly ordered Chapman not to attempt a rescue, but he’d made it clear it would take an almost perfect situation on the ground for one to be warranted. He listened in as the chopper made its approach.

  As the planes swept toward the Mieu Giang, the fields south of the river looked serene in the afternoon sun. The calm that had so mystified the pilots that morning held. But as soon as the helicopter passed the far, northern bank of the river, the ground in front of Chapman’s windshield erupted. The chopper was immediately raked by a wave of gunfire, the bullets hitting with the sound of a hammer slamming into sheet metal. It was clear within seconds that the lack of ground fire had been a trap. The NVA had been lying in wait for the rescue choppers.

  Sheets of AAA fire and machine-gun bullets came up at the Jolly Green from the rice paddies and brush. Bullets were hitting everywhere as the gunners furiously fired their Miniguns. Hambleton was getting ready to pop his smoke when he heard a voice shouting on the radio: “I’m hit! They got a fuel line.” It was Jolly Green 67. Brinson—two miles behind—could hear someone in on 67 yelling, “We’re taking hits, we’re taking hits!” The voice sounded panicked as it repeated the same words over and over.

  Down below, Hambleton was listening in. The voices of the men watching Jolly Green 67 were “frantic.” Despite the order, he decided not to light his flare. “I knew right then we were in deep trouble.”

  Jolly Green 67 was being whipsawed by ground fire. Boli had briefed the men that if they received damaging fire, they were to pull out and head southeast. Now, as bullets banged into the fuselage, the helicopter began to turn to the east. Other pilots were shouting on the radio, “Turn south, Jolly, turn right.” Chapman and his crew needed to pick up speed and get out of the shooting zone. The other A-1s dove in to hit the gun emplacements firing at the stricken helicopter.

  But something had gone wrong. Jolly Green 67 was flying east instead of southeast, which put it directly in line with the emplacements where the NVA guns were dug in. The radio traffic was chaotic. Someone in the craft was keying down the “transmit” button on the radio; the pilots in 67 couldn’t hear the instructions.

  “Stay away from that village!” a voice cried out on the radio.

  An A-1 pilot was watching the chopper from above. Suddenly, “something big” hit the craft and it erupted in flame. The fireball lit up the afternoon sky as the chopper lumbered over the huts, losing altitude. The pilots kept the bird turning; it was now pointed southwest.

  Fire spurted out of the helicopter. Pieces of the engine shot out and hit the main rotor, which started coming apart. The chopper began to roll. It was fully engulfed in flames now as, leaning left, it sank rapidly and smashed into the ground. A huge orb of bright flame leapt up from the green field.

  “Jolly’s down, Jolly’s down!” Boli shouted on the radio. The men hovering above could see a ball of black smoke unfurling from the landscape. The urge to vomit rose up in Boli’s throat. He began to cry.

  Voices on the radio were calling over and over, “Jolly Green 67, come in. Jolly Green 67 . . .” No survivors emerged from the chopper. The aviation fuel was feeding brightly burning flames. Jim Alley was dead. Hayden Chapman was dead, along with his crew: Roy Prater, Allen Avery, William Roy Pearson, and John Henry Call.

  Hambleton watched as the black smoke corkscrewed up, so tall and thick that it obscured the village behind it. He knew that the chances of a crewmember having bailed out of the helicopter were minimal. “Anyone getting out would be the result of a miracle.”

  He began to weep. “I hate to see a grown man cry,” he said, “but I cried.” Five men, he thought to himself. Five good men lost. Actually, counting the unexpected addition of Jim Alley, it was six.

  The night before, he’d considered abandoning his hiding place and striking out on his own. During the internal debate, he admitted, “I felt it necessary to talk it over with someone I knew.” The face of his squadron commander had appeared to him and Hambleton asked, “What do you think of the idea?” (The squadron commander said nothing.) Gwen materialized, and then the faces of some golfing friends. To each of them he said, “Shall I walk home and join you on the course?” He’d received no answer.

  Now he felt he couldn’t afford such indulgences. “You are by yourself,” he thought. “Don’t go off the deep end.” He banished the dead from his mind. From now on, he was going to think only about surviving. It was as much a sign of his increasing fragility as it was of strength.

  In his hiding place, the survivor Mark Clark had seen the stricken chopper trying to exit the battle zone. He’d heard the crump of the helicopter crashing into the field from his position across the river. He was distraught. “I really cocked this up,” he said to himself. “Six more guys dying because I fucked up.” He wondered if there was an antiaircraft site in his range of vision that he’d failed to spot, costing the men their lives.

  The toll of the rescue attempt had reached nine, plus another man on the ground and two taken prisoner of war. It was a disaster with little precedent. There had never been a rescue mission in Vietnam, or in the history of the Air Force for that matter, in which so many lives had been lost going after a single soldier. When General Abrams was informed of the crash, he immediately ordered that there would be no further attempts to rescue the men by helicopter. His order was clear: “No more rescue attempts by helicopter.” The effort to save Hambleton and Clark was, for the moment, over.

  17

  The Division

  Many of the airmen who’d seen the crash of Jolly Green 67 couldn’t sleep that night; the image of the aircraft bursting into flame in midair had imprinted itself on their memories with a Zapruder-like intensity. One of the FACs, Captain Harold Icke, sat in his hooch and taped a message to his wife, as he did every so often. “It’s been a bad two days,” he said. “A lot’s happened. I’ve seen things that I hope I never see happen again. We’ve lost more people. I’m sure we’re going to lose more today.” The mood at Da Nang was grim, bewildered. “We now had two survivors,” said Lieutenant Commander Jay Crowe, “and no new ideas.” The airborne operation had failed, and it was not going to be resumed.

  What about the South Vietnamese? There were ground units not too far from Clark’s position. A call had previously been put in to the Second ARVN Regiment, which was holding ground south of the Mieu Giang River, asking if they could send an armored personnel carrier to retrieve him. The commander responded that they would “not move out of Cam Lo because they are afraid of the VC.” This caused some bitterness among the Americans, but the truth was the Second, like many South Vietnamese units, was fighting for its life and had few resources to spare for a lone American.

  Some officers believed that Hambleton and Clark couldn’t, in fact, be rescued at all. They should be left right where they were until the South Vietnamese beat back the invasion and pushed the enemy north. When the American allies reclaimed the ground around Cam Lo, they would find the two survivors. But that could take months, if it ever happened at all, and it was an open question whether Hambleton and
Clark could evade capture, or even survive, that long—especially Hambleton, who had no access to fresh water. For their part, Crowe and his fellow rescuemen refused to entertain the idea. “[We] found this impossible to accept after so much sacrifice,” he said.

  There was, the men knew, one final way, a simple rescue method that had been practiced for centuries: sending a team of soldiers overland into hostile territory to get the survivors out. And there existed a team of operatives in Saigon that specialized in exactly these kinds of missions. They were known as the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group (MACVSOG), and they did just about everything relating to lost airmen: they went behind enemy lines and reconnoitered enemy camps, scouted troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, studied raw intel for information on downed Americans, and dropped millions of leaflets promising rewards to Vietnamese who helped locate them. On occasion, the unit’s recovery unit—known as the Recovery Studies Division, which made it seem like a Harvard think tank—even went after Americans who’d been taken prisoner by the enemy or were on the run from them. When traditional methods failed, the Division was the last resort.

  But the group, like many ground-based outfits, was being phased out. In fact, its commander, USMC Lieutenant Colonel Andy Andersen, a “short, stocky, fiery” Marine officer who was about as gung-ho as they came, was in the process of closing up his office. And besides that, the Division’s track record was nothing short of horrible. In six years, it had gone on dozens and dozens of missions and had managed to recover 492 South Vietnamese soldiers, as well as the remains of 101 dead American pilots and navigators and return them home to their families in the States. But when it came to living, breathing Americans, the Division had experienced one disaster after another. Its operatives would chopper in to a location deep in Laos where an American was reportedly being tortured and find an empty hut, or they would burst into a remote village in North Vietnam looking for a hidden pilot and find only hungry peasants. “Informants” regularly conned the Americans out of money. It drove Andersen crazy.

  If the airborne effort to get Hambleton out had been a costly failure so far, the Division’s track record looked much, much worse. In many months of trying, it hadn’t managed to save a single American airman.

  As he closed up his operation, Andersen had been quietly monitoring the message traffic on the Hambleton and Clark situation as part of the unit’s normal operations. The Marine, however, had done more than listen; he’d ordered his second-in-command to gather intel for a possible rescue try and asked other members of the Division for ideas on how it might go down. If the choppers failed, how could they get Hambleton out? Slated to return stateside in a matter of weeks, Andersen was deeply distressed at the Division’s long list of failures. “He burned to rescue a fellow American from the clutches of the communists,” wrote one historian. But even if he did somehow persuade his superiors to give him the mission, which seemed highly unlikely, he would still need a specially trained operative to lead it. And that he didn’t have.

  Part III

  The Swanee

  18

  The Real John Wayne

  April 7 brought no relief to Hambleton or the men attempting to save him. Down in his patch of foliage, Hambleton heard on his radio that yet another OV-10 had been shot down that afternoon. The FAC, First Lieutenant Bruce Walker, and his Marine Corps spotter, Captain Larry Potts, had been flying about five miles northeast of his position when they were hit by a SAM and bailed out of their OV-10. The two men were now on the ground and Walker was actively evading the enemy; Potts hadn’t been heard from since the missile hit.

  Hambleton’s thoughts darkened. His rescue had become this endlessly unfolding, man-killing nightmare that seemed to repeat itself day after day. His depression deepened when the FAC called down that afternoon. “We won’t baby sit you tonight,” the voice said. “Adios.”

  The navigator felt a twitch of paranoia. “Was that my Air Force’s way of saying ‘Adios’ to me, too? Were things that bad? Were more troops coming from the north?” The closeness he’d felt with the observers melted away; the mistrust that every soldier feels for the military brass seeped in. Had the generals in Saigon written him off as too expensive to recover?

  To add to his worries, Hambleton was growing concerned about his physical condition. For the past couple of days, he’d found he could barely lift his head above the edge of his little hole in the ground. His neck muscles couldn’t support the weight. Hambleton was forced to reach back and push his head up and hold it in position so he could look out over the fields. Were his muscles beginning to atrophy? Or was something wrong with his spine?

  He heard a rumbling in the sky. “It sounded,” Hambleton said, “like two freight trains running 400 mph,” but as he listened he recognized the pitch of those particular engines: B-52s. The enormous bombers released their loads and the countryside around him erupted in fire and sound. Hambleton ricocheted off the walls of his hiding place, tumbling as if he were in a washing machine. “The goddamn ground actually moved,” he said. He had a flash of empathy for the Vietnamese peasants. “I don’t understand how those guys stood it for ten years.”

  When the rumbling stopped, Hambleton lay gasping in his hiding place. He thought he was doomed. Nixon had clearly resumed the bombing of the North, which meant that his little situation was going to be a footnote to the resumption of the Vietnam War in its full ferocity. “I thought hell, it’s all over.” But in fact, the B-52s weren’t part of the president’s counterstrike against North Vietnam; they’d been sent specifically to hit positions around Hambleton, both to support his rescue and to destroy those forces attacking to the south. It was the first time the bombers had been used in a search and rescue in the history of the USAF. It was also a sign that the Air Force had not completely given up on the idea of saving the navigator.

  The bombs shook the branches of the trees around Hambleton. “The earth crawled and humped like some huge, writhing cobra.” Hambleton had no idea what was happening. He began debating with himself, going over and over his remaining options now that the air rescue had failed. As he saw it, there were two things he could do: Stick with the plan . . . Or run. Should he try to make his way to friendlier lines? Or should he trust the Air Force? He went back and forth between the options until his brain ached.

  The planes departed and he tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was too distraught. “I never felt so lost and orphaned before in my life.” It seemed to him the motto of “Leave no man behind” had found its exception. He was going to be left behind.

  In Saigon, Lieutenant Colonel Andy Andersen was also engaged in a passionate internal debate. The Marine officer badly wanted to volunteer the Division for the Hambleton mission. But Andersen sensed that if he asked his commanding officer to give him a shot at the navigator (and Clark and Walker and Potts, who’d just been shot down), the answer would be a hard no. What had his men done in six futile years to make anyone believe they had the capability to retrieve the lost airmen?

  The thought of leaving Vietnam without saving a single one of his brothers pained Andersen to his core. He had to have the mission. Andersen “had a fire burning in his belly,” said one intel officer. “He saw this as a last chance.”

  As Andersen sat in his office, the phone rang. It was Major Winton W. Marshall, the vice commander of the Seventh Air Force, who was desperately looking for new ideas on how to save Gene Hambleton. If Andersen took the call, he’d be going outside of his chain of command and would surely face his commander’s wrath for violating one of the most basic rules of the American military. But the fiery Marine ruminated for only a few seconds before coming to “a bold and perhaps dangerous decision”—dangerous not only to his men but to his future prospects in the Marine Corps. He took the call.

  When he picked up the phone, Marshall asked for a meeting. Andersen agreed. He quickly gathered up all the intel that his men had been collecting, along with all the maps and other a
ids he would need for the meeting. He would have one shot at convincing the general.

  Marshall was at least willing to listen, but other commanders had turned decisively against the rescue mission. Perhaps it was the pressure from the White House, perhaps it was the unprecedented scale of the operation, but there was palpable disappointment, even anger, over the Hambleton affair. The commanders at MACV, the joint command that ran the war in Vietnam, vehemently opposed using any more of its men or hardware to save the navigator. One major who planned to go with Lieutenant Colonel Andersen to the Marshall meeting was even told that if he so much as stepped outside of headquarters, he’d be court-martialed.

  The next morning, April 8, Andersen arrived at Marshall’s office at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The Air Force men had been shaken, even stunned, by their defeats in the field; the mood in Marshall’s office was chastened. But when the fire-breathing Andersen walked in the room, it was like a jolt of adrenaline. “It couldn’t have been better,” said Jay Crowe, “if it had been the real John Wayne.”

  After the men had been introduced, Captain Boli, who’d been the leader of the Jolly Green 67 attempt, laid out the latest intel. Everyone in the room agreed that any further attempts by helicopter were not up for consideration; the area around Hambleton was still bristling with enemy hardware. The airborne rescue phase was over. Marshall then turned the meeting over to Andersen.

  The Marine officer stood up and unfurled the maps he’d brought with him. He pointed to Hambleton’s and Clark’s locations and estimated their distance to the Mieu Giang River. What he was proposing was this: a team of commandos trained in “water work” would proceed to a forward operating base on the Mieu Giang. At the same time, the survivors would be directed to make their way to the river and then swim down it to the east, traveling only at night, when the risk of capture was lowest. The commandos would then cross the front lines into enemy territory and be poised on the banks of the river to bring the survivors in.