Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  Andersen ended his presentation with a flourish. He would travel to the forward operating base, he said, to lead the operation personally. If this was going to be the Division’s last shot, he was willing to put his life on the line to make sure it succeeded. Major General Marshall, impressed with the Marine’s commitment, agreed to the plan on the spot.

  An energized Andersen left to begin prepping the mission. Marshall personally briefed General Abrams, a longtime friend. He laid out Andersen’s plan. Abrams repeated his concerns about the tremendous expenditure of men and materiel that had already occurred at a critical time in the war. Every man sent after the navigator was another potential casualty or prisoner of war. But Marshall persuaded him to let the ground team take one last shot. Abrams restated his ban on any helicopters but agreed to the rest of Andersen’s proposal.

  The first phase of the operation had involved five services, dozens of different personnel types, and hundreds of men. For the second phase, the rescue planners decided to “do it black.” The mission was to be not only secret but also secretive. No longer was everyone from Da Nang to Saigon going to be following the mission’s progress as if it were the seventh game of the World Series. No one even announced a team was going in. “It was, ‘we’re going to do something special,’” said one intelligence officer involved in the planning.

  The number of men privy to information about the unfolding operation was radically reduced. Personnel, especially forward air controllers, were individually selected to fit the mission. “It became a close cadre of FACs,” the intelligence officer said. “You kind of knew, these were the guys.” Once they’d been chosen, the FACs began looking for intel on the terrain and conditions around Hambleton and the other men. But they were cagey; they refused to pinpoint which areas they were interested in. One experienced intel officer found himself getting annoyed—“Just tell me what you need to know!” he wanted to yell—but after the loss of Jolly Green 67, it was a different kind of game.

  The intel officer brought the FACs over to a new kind of map that had arrived at Da Nang only three weeks before. It was a large-scale, fine-detail overhead photograph with a grid of map coordinates laid over it. The men clustered around the thing and studied the important landmarks: hills, valleys, and rivers. Finally, they all agreed on Hambleton’s position inside a tree line, and they marked it. The same with Clark’s. Those would be the starting points for the operation.

  Meanwhile, Andersen was calling the Navy and Seventh Air Force controllers; they agreed to provide artillery and airstrikes for his last-ditch effort. But he still didn’t have a tactical leader. All his highly trained operatives were slated to head stateside in three days. The operation might take longer than that, and Andersen couldn’t risk his point man being pulled out in the middle of everything. He had the mission he wanted but no one to execute it.

  What he was looking for was a particular kind of soldier. He had to be near-impervious to cold, as the spring runoff now flooding the Mieu Giang was sure to be frigid, and the team might have to wade through the river to reach the men. He had to have experience leading South Vietnamese soldiers, as they would form the bulk of the rescue team. He had to follow orders to the last period and comma, because his every move would be coordinated with preplanned artillery strikes. And he had to be highly amenable to risk.

  Andersen wanted a hunter-killer with the mind of a Boy Scout, and there were very few Americans like that left in Vietnam. Almost all of the Army Rangers, Green Berets, and Navy SEALs had departed months before. The Marine officer picked up the phone, hoping to get lucky.

  19

  The Hurricane Lover

  On April 9, Tommy Norris was sitting in an office at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, dressed in jungle greens, briefing his new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Craig Dorman, who’d just arrived in-country. The phone rang and Dorman picked it up. Norris sat back in his chair, bored but polite, and waited for his CO to finish his conversation. As he listened in, however, he realized that Dorman was discussing something interesting. Two phrases got Norris’s attention: “downed pilot rescue” and “behind enemy lines.” Norris leaned in to hear more.

  Dorman looked at the SEAL and, still speaking into the phone, said, “Well, it just so happens, he’s sitting right here in my office.”

  The officer hung up. He’d just learned from Andersen that a team was being put together to extract two airmen in an overland mission. (Bruce Walker, who was still on the run, would be snatched up afterward; Larry Potts still had not been heard from.) The operation needed a leader, and Norris—who had previously met Andersen during operations in the Mekong Delta—was the lead candidate. In fact, he was just about the only candidate. As far as men with combat experience, time in with Vietnamese commandos, and a background in “water work,” Norris was someone who checked all the boxes.

  Dorman was in a bind. He had just arrived in Vietnam and he needed this young SEAL to guide him through the complex bureaucratic and operational issues he faced. Technically speaking, Dorman could deny Norris permission to join the mission. But the thought of telling that to Norris, who sat across from him looking like a mongoose that had just spotted a brown water snake, was exhausting. “Tom,” Dorman recalled, “was chomping at the bit.”

  Dorman gave the Navy SEAL the details of the mission. Before he’d even finished speaking, Norris knew he wanted it.

  Now that they had a team leader, the next thing the rescue planners had to figure out was how to get an emaciated, fifty-three-year-old man across land overrun with thirty thousand enemy troops and to the Mieu Giang River. They would have to guide him around the obstacles—gun emplacements, natural barriers, NVA positions—over an open radio channel. How could they accomplish that without giving away his route?

  To get the navigator to his pickup zone, the Air Force had to find a language only he and they could speak, an entirely private and unbreakable code that would be inscrutable to the North Vietnamese. And so the officers of the Seventh Air Force began considering the minutiae of Gene Hambleton’s existence. The men started calling Hambleton’s friends and family scattered across the globe. They talked to his squadron mates in Thailand, phoned the Pentagon, and spoke to Air Force buddies spread out across bases in the United States and abroad. They got Gwen out of her bed in Arizona in the middle of the night. They spoke to guys who’d flown with him in Korea and served under him at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. They were trying to find something—a hobby, a favorite book, perhaps—to work with. They asked each of these people about Gene’s pastimes, his enthusiasms and obsessions. It was as if they were collecting material for his biography.

  The answers trickled in. The planners learned that Hambleton was from Illinois. That had possibilities. The exact deliberations that the rescue commanders went through were never written down, but it’s likely they thought about the state itself as a code source: it contained landmarks and distances, and those could be molded into a numerical cipher. But it took only a minute of thinking to realize that the scale was too large; the planners were going to move Hambleton to the river in segments that were perhaps a few hundred yards long. The geography of Illinois was simply too big to be helpful.

  They might have narrowed the search to Wenona itself. Would Hambleton remember the distance and direction between his house and, say, Main Street? The idea had potential. But for it to work, they’d have to get someone to go out to Wenona and measure off the distance from Hambleton’s boyhood home to the road. There was no time for that. And even if they had gone with a Wenona cipher, who knew if Hambleton—though his memory was excellent—would recall the exact size of things? To a boy, houses appear bigger and streets longer than they are in real life. The planners couldn’t depend on childhood memories; they needed precise figures.

  The men kept phoning. They learned that Hambleton had a fondness for pranks; that he liked to drink whiskey cocktails; that his dog was named Pierre; that he was a regular churchgoer; that his
church was of the Lutheran denomination; that he was careful with his money; and that he loved his wife. All of it was perfectly, utterly useless. One topic, however, did keep coming up. A significant percentage of the men and women who were woken out of their sleep mentioned the same thing when asked about his hobbies: Gene Hambleton was a stone lunatic for the game of golf.

  Golf! Officers in Saigon managed to rustle up an atlas of North Vietnam and checked the country for signs of a course. There weren’t any. The officers realized that the game was as foreign to the enemy as polo or the novels of Booth Tarkington. But how could the planners turn the suburban American pastime into a unique military code?

  Golf is a game of numbers. Many obsessive duffers—and it soon became clear that Hambleton was about as obsessive as they got—knew how far a famous hole was from its tee. That meant the planners could map out his first walk toward the river, measure the distance, then match it up with the distance of a hole that Hambleton knew. The first tee at Tucson, his home course, was 430 yards. They could begin with a walk of that same length and then move on.

  The river was about a mile and a half from the navigator’s hiding place. Taking in the various detours they would have to work into the plan, nine holes should get him to the water. It seemed perfect.

  But a complication quickly arose. Hambleton couldn’t get to the Mieu Giang by the shortest route possible. There were villages and minefields and NVA positions along that route that would have been suicidal for him to approach. So he would have to go indirectly, in precise, short walks that skirted the dangerous terrain but still kept him on a general course toward the water. His journey might look like the handle of the Big Dipper or the Grim Reaper’s curved scythe. So the code would have to contain both distances and directions.

  This presented a new dilemma. How could you convey to Hambleton whether he should head north or south on each leg of the escape route? The calculations on Hambleton’s end could be done: he had a compass on him, and he was a kind of savant of cardinal direction. But how to broadcast which way he should head across a radio channel without giving the game away? The NVA knew approximately where Hambleton was. Once he emerged out of his protective circle of gravel, if you got on the radio and mentioned a course heading—“play the fourth at Augusta, heading northeast”—the enemy would be able to intercept the American as he crept through the furrows at night.

  It was a seemingly insurmountable problem. There were good pop culture references for things like “west,” for example: one might get on the radio and say, “Go this way, young man,” and hope Hambleton had paid attention in his grade-school history lessons about the opening of the frontier. But for the directions they’d actually be using, such as “southwest” or “northeast,” there were few, if any, hints that would work.

  In their phone calls, the officers probed further into the recollections of his friends and family. And here they learned something remarkable: not only could Hambleton recall the shape of every hole he’d played, where the weeds were thickest, and how many traps it had, but also he could tell you whether it was laid out northeast or southwest. This applied to dozens of courses across America as well as in Europe; the navigator had even played St. Andrews, the Scottish birthplace of golf. It turned out, merely by coincidence, that there was a long list of numbers and directions stored in Gene Hambleton’s head that he could access at will.

  Perhaps one in a thousand golfers knows which way number 6 at Augusta plays. That statistic isn’t even published in the course’s manuals or its scorecards. But Hambleton was that golfer. He knew.

  What if, the planners thought, they overlaid those links onto the map of central Vietnam and used Hambleton’s memory and geeky skill set to get him to the river? His commanders decided it was worth a try. They collected details on the various greens that the navigator had played over the decades and soon had nine holes that would, if Hambleton executed them correctly and an NVA patrol didn’t catch up with him en route, put him on the banks of the Mieu Giang.

  With that, they were ready to begin.

  20

  When the Moon Goes over the Mountain

  On the night of April 9, Tommy Norris headed to Da Nang to meet with Andy Andersen. Creighton Abrams had grounded the choppers, and the rescue operation was now in the hands of a tiny, secretive group, but it became clear to Norris that Hambleton was still a priority for the US military, because when he made it to the airfield to fly to Da Nang, he found a general’s plane—a gorgeous T-39 Sabreliner—sitting on the tarmac waiting for him. It was the military equivalent of a Learjet, and Norris found he was the only passenger. “I felt like a corporate exec,” he said. The young SEAL sank back into the leather seats as the twin turbines spun and lifted the Sabreliner into the night sky.

  Norris was impressed by the commitment to get Hambleton. He understood the stakes. “This guy knows something that they want back,” he thought. There was little question that “they,” the leaders of the US military, were concerned about Hambleton being taken to Hanoi. But Norris didn’t care about the navigator’s background one bit. “That’s my fellow American out there,” he said. “I’m gonna bring him back.”

  He arrived at Da Nang at around 8 p.m. and immediately sought out Andersen. He’d met the Marine a couple of times before and knew him as “a short, cocky guy . . . very passionate and very professional.” When the two sat down together at the sprawling base, Andersen started laying out the mission. He’d already arranged for a team of five South Vietnamese sea commandos—led by a “superb, hard-charging” officer, a Lieutenant Tho—to accompany Norris on the mission. But Andersen had run into problems with other aspects of the operation: the existing maps of the area were sketchy, for example, and the intel on NVA units in the rescue area was thin and constantly changing. Andersen had no idea where the enemy was going to be when the rescue team went in. The mission would have been a risky proposition even in normal times, but during a large-scale invasion, with the NVA present in huge numbers and on alert, it was even more so. This type of rescue was called “E & E”—escape and evade—and it had never been used in this area of Vietnam before.

  As he went into the details of the operation, Andersen briefly mentioned that Norris and his team would be restricted to a five-hundred-meter area outside their base. He didn’t want them going any farther: too many NVA moving around out there. The last thing the military wanted was to lose more men getting Hambleton back.

  The word “restricted” got Norris’s attention. In fact, it bothered him. And the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. “My concern was, well, suppose we don’t get him within that five hundred meters, do we go beyond that?” He knew what his answer was: of course you go beyond that. You go as far as it takes. But Andersen made it clear: under no circumstances were any of his men to proceed beyond his clearly defined perimeter. This was not what Tommy Norris wanted to hear. “I would have liked to have him say, ‘What are your feelings, how would you approach this, what do you think would be the best method to recover these people?” But that wasn’t Andersen’s style. Marines, in general, don’t ask. They tell.

  It was an old story. There is the US military way of doing things and there is the SEAL way. The military likes plans, procedures, timetables. It is the Organization Man going to war. It prefers to go into battle with superior numbers; the concept dates back to Napoleon and beyond, and Army and Marine officers probably mumble it in their sleep. But within the American military, a Navy SEAL is a countercultural figure. He is trained to think for himself. He doesn’t salute, shaves only if he feels like it, wears whatever suits the mission. He operates in teams of seven or fourteen men. He revels in uncertainty. And he makes his living by going up against numerically superior forces. “We function much different than they [the Navy] do,” Norris said. “We were renegades of the Navy as well as everybody else.”

  So he nodded along at Andersen’s briefing and didn’t make too much of a fuss, but privately, Norris had
already made his decision: when he got out in the field, he was going to run the operation exactly as he saw fit. The perimeter was a figment of the Marine’s imagination. “What Andersen said didn’t affect me,” Norris said. Behind the Boy Scout smile, he was already planning a rebellion.

  At the end of the briefing, Norris went over the mission in his head. He liked the plan that Andersen had drawn up, but the difficulty of what he was proposing was slowly dawning on the young SEAL: infiltrating an area full of thirty thousand enemy soldiers to save two men, overland, at night. Just reverse the situation in your head. Imagine a squad of NVA soldiers sneaking past the American lines in, say, 1968, grabbing three of their men, and then walking them out through patrols of Marines and Army soldiers. What were the odds of success? One in three? One in four? Whatever numbers you came up with, they weren’t good. “I don’t mind saying,” Norris recalled, “that I was beginning to wonder just what I’d gotten myself into.”

  But Hambleton and Clark weren’t just Americans. They were American airmen, the very thing that Norris had wanted to be before he became a SEAL. He would have signed on if the dudes had been kitchen attendants, but the aviator thing added a personal connection. He felt obligated to get the men back. “Nothing else really mattered.”

  That afternoon, Norris and Andersen, along with their South Vietnamese team, jumped on a helicopter and flew to Ai Tu Combat Base. They landed in the middle of a firefight; the North Vietnamese invasion had pushed ten miles south of the Mieu Giang, and shells were impacting the airfield and the base buildings. The two Americans ran from the chopper, took cover from the artillery barrage, then went to see General Vu Van Giai, the South Vietnamese commander for the area. Giai, understandably, had only a few minutes to spare for the Americans. After he listened to Andersen outline the mission, the South Vietnamese general told them he could give them transport up to the forward operating base, where a unit of Vietnamese rangers would support them. But his artillery couldn’t reach the area where the operation would unfold. Norris wouldn’t be able to count on their guns, even if he got into serious trouble.