Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  He had to see how badly he was injured. He jerked the zipper down past his sternum and got his left shoulder out of the flight suit. His fingers felt for the wound. He found it; the cut appeared to be shallow. The tough fabric of the flight suit had probably blunted the impact. He pulled out the first-aid kit from his survival vest and daubed some disinfectant on the wound, then fumbled for a dressing and put it on.

  He sat in the mud and slop, trying not to dwell on what had just happened, but the thoughts came anyway. Who was the man and what was he doing in that hut? He hadn’t been able to make out what the guy was wearing. Perhaps he was VC.

  But he’d killed him, knifed him in the chest and left him to bleed out on the dirt road. The thought wouldn’t leave him. It had been self-defense, but Hambleton felt no thrill at escaping death. “Actually killing a man face to face had been the most terrifying thing he had ever done in his life,” wrote his biographer. His training hadn’t prepared him for the reality of death, for the physical sensation of it.

  And then he’d stumbled down the road making an enormous racket instead of crawling to the ditch and scanning the terrain for the dead man’s comrades. Survival school had taught Hambleton that panicking was the worst possible thing he could do. But he’d done it anyway, “galloped off like a wild fool.” Not only had he lost count of how many strides he’d taken, but also he’d expended a huge amount of energy. He’d always thought of himself as cool under pressure, but he’d come undone.

  Hambleton could feel his mind slipping, losing focus. He had to concentrate. He called the FAC. The voice told him to play number 4 at Corona de Tucson.

  At about 10 p.m. on the night of April 10, as Clark was slowly pushing downstream, Tommy Norris and his team of Vietnamese sea commandos left the French bunker. Their faces were blackened and they each carried an AK-47 rifle, several grenades, and some spare ammunition, along with one canteen apiece. The commandos wore tiger-striped camo blouses with blue jeans; Norris had on his olive-green shirt and jeans, which made less noise than the standard-issue uniform. They knew Hambleton hadn’t gotten to the Mieu Giang yet. Tonight they would focus on saving Clark.

  The team made their way to the river, rippling under the moonlight, where Norris reached his hand in and tested the water. It was cold. The current was a knot and a half, difficult for all but the best swimmers. “I said, ‘Uh-oh, I’m not going to put my guys in that.’” Norris and Lieutenant Tho decided the team would have to go overland.

  The men moved away from the riverbank and headed west. The terrain was covered with small trees and underbrush—bamboo, nipa palm, elephant grass. As they pushed farther west, Norris kept a sharp eye out for rice paddies and fields; he didn’t want the men to blunder out into the open. Along with exposure, noise was a constant worry. With the enemy thick around them, one clink of a canteen neck against a knife or a belt buckle could give them away.

  When they’d walked just over a mile from the bunker, Norris heard the sound of machinery ahead. He stopped his men and peered through the semidarkness. Headlights a ways off. A line of NVA tanks and transport trucks was moving across the Cam Lo bridge. As Norris watched, the lead truck turned east off the bridge and headed directly toward him.

  They’d barely left the bunker and already they were in danger of being spotted. For a second or two, Norris thought about calling in an airstrike. But the trucks were so close that the American bombs might hit his men, or even Clark, if he was near the bridge. He had to think of something else.

  Norris pointed toward the river, and the Vietnamese commandos slipped into the bushes and pushed their way through the thin branches and waxy leaves. Hiding themselves in the underbrush, they watched as the procession of headlights continued toward them. Stealth was their primary tactical advantage. Norris briefly considered attacking the convoy but quickly rejected the idea. It would result in a clatter of gunfire, costing them their cover and, at best, ending the operation, at least for the night; at worst, they’d be captured or killed.

  When the lead truck was five hundred yards out, its headlights swerved away. The convoy had turned onto a small road and was now heading south toward the mountains. Norris breathed a bit easier.

  The men stood and began walking again, watching the river for any sign of Clark. The NVA was seemingly everywhere. A patrol moved by, the soldiers talking and laughing. Norris signaled for the men to take cover, and they slipped deeper into the underbrush and waited until the troops passed by. As they moved upriver, two more squads skirted their perimeter, and the men squatted in place, their fingers gripping their AK-47s. There were guard posts, both on the roads and on the river itself, soldiers in silhouette smoking and chatting as they gazed at the landscape in front of them, watching for intruders.

  The farther upriver they got, the more Norris realized that the Mieu Giang wasn’t just confined to a single body of water; at points, it divided into three different channels. Especially at night, it was easy to follow the wrong one and get completely turned around. If they didn’t stick to the main channel, they could miss the American coming down. It was slow, painstaking work, and Norris felt each minute pass. “We’d burned up so much time. I was so afraid that Clark would pass us before I got to the water to intercept him.”

  They were 250 yards from the base, then 500. He kept glancing at the river, watching for a white face on its surface. More soldiers came on foot. Norris was aware of a truth of working behind enemy lines: every patrol you passed on the way in, you would have to pass again on the way back out. Even though they’d been lucky so far, each unit of NVA they evaded decreased their chances of getting back to the French bunker alive.

  The radio chirped softly. Andersen was calling for a progress report. They were already past the five-hundred-meter limit that the Marine officer had set. Norris whispered a quick update, not mentioning his exact location, and went back to the search.

  Finally, after hours of slinking through the shadows on the riverbank, the men came to a well-covered spot with a good view of the water. Midnight had passed; it was now the very early hours of April 11. They were about 1.2 miles from the base. Norris made a decision. There were too many NVA patrols along the banks; eventually their luck would run out, and one of the patrols would stumble on them. Norris told the Vietnamese commandos they would stay there and wait for Clark to come floating down the river.

  Two of the commandos slipped down to the water to find out how fast the current was running and to look for any obstacles. Flares, called “illumination rounds,” or “illum,” launched by the NVA, lifted into the air and hung there, fizzing loudly and lighting up the river and its banks in stark white.

  Norris got on the radio and, keeping his voice as low as possible, called in to the naval gunners for some illum of his own. He heard the crump of the guns, and more light poured down from the black sky, turning the upper section of the river fluorescent bright. He listened to Clark’s progress on the radio while peering at the furrowed water. The airman would be coming down the south bank. The thing now was to wait and not miss him.

  The men squatted in the bushes and studied the river, gurgling about ten feet away. Out of the darkness came a different noise: the tramping of feet. After a few minutes, Norris heard voices. He turned toward the sound. A patrol of NVA soldiers was approaching very close to the bushes his men were secreted in. He tensed. If they had to take on the patrollers, they could do it and probably kill them all, but the sound of the gunfire would be like an alarm bell for every soldier within a quarter mile.

  What were these soldiers doing off the road and so close to the riverbank? The thought shot through Norris’s mind that the squad had finished its patrol and the men were taking a shortcut back to their camps. Which would bring them right on top of his men.

  If it was five or six, they could cut them down in short order with controlled bursts of their AKs. But the mission would be over. They would be running for their lives.

  Just then, Norris heard the sound of
loud breathing from the river. He turned to look and saw a white face on the dark water. “Oh, Jesus, why me?” he thought.

  Gene Hambleton grew up in small-town Illinois wanting to fly planes but eventually found his calling as an Air Force navigator.

  Courtesy of Jim Flessner, Mary Ann Anderson, and Donna Cutsinger

  Gil Hambleton (left) flew B-17 missions in Europe during World War II, but his older brother Gene had to wait until the Korean War to see combat.

  Courtesy of Jim Flessner, Mary Ann Anderson, and Donna Cutsinger

  Thoughts of Hambleton’s beloved wife, Gwen, sustained him throughout the grueling eleven-day rescue. “We always thought of her as a movie star,” says Gene’s niece.

  Courtesy of Jim Flessner, Mary Ann Anderson, and Donna Cutsinger

  Jim Alley, a motion picture photographer (or “mopic”), joined the mission to rescue Hambleton ten days before his flight back to the States. Where others toted M16s, Alley brought along a camera.

  Courtesy of William Van Der Ven

  Marine Corps Captain Larry Potts, a straight-arrow soldier from Smyrna, Delaware, was lost while on a spotting mission for the Hambleton rescue operation.

  Courtesy of Trent Wicks

  Air Force Lieutenant Bruce Walker was flying an OV-10 when he was shot down during the Hambleton rescue operation, setting off a separate, unsuccessful mission to bring him back.

  Courtesy of Martha L. Walker

  Army First Lieutenant Byron Kulland, who grew up on a North Dakota farm, was one of the first to join the rescue mission. He’s pictured here with his wife, Leona.

  Courtesy of Monica Lee

  Kulland piloted a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, better known as a Huey. These were multipurpose workhorses throughout the Vietnam era.

  Bell Helicopter

  Air Force Captain Bill Henderson (left), pictured here with his escort officer, was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese after his shootdown.

  Courtesy of William J. Henderson

  Hambleton was aboard a Douglas EB-66C Destroyer similar to this one when a surface-to-air missile struck the aircraft.

  United States Air Force photo

  Air Force Lieutenant Anthony Giannangeli, the forty-one-year-old electronic warfare officer who flew with Hambleton that fateful day. The miniature planes in this photo were made by his fellow cadets.

  Courtesy of Robert Giannangeli

  With his flight home approaching within a matter of days, Air Force Captain Peter Hayden Chapman insisted on flying the Jolly Green to pick up Hambleton. The navigator recounted, “I can’t say enough about what Chapman was doing. I owe my life to him and all the other people involved.”

  Courtesy of Dorothy E. Murphy

  A Sikorsky MH-53, better known as a Jolly Green Giant. Choppers like these were deployed in the early stages of the rescue effort.

  United States Air Force photo

  When two other commandos abandoned the mission, Petty Officer Nguyen Van Kiet (left) volunteered to go upriver with Navy Lieutenant Tom Norris. Kiet was awarded the Navy Cross for his efforts, the military’s highest honor given to non-American service members.

  United States Navy photo

  An emaciated Hambleton is transported to a hospital in Da Nang following his rescue by a commando team led by Norris (center), April 13, 1972.

  Nick Ut for AP

  Hambleton and his wife, Gwen, reunited with Nguyen Van Kiet and his wife, Thuy, at Nellis Air Force Base in Arizona, in 1999, twenty-seven years after the Bat 21 mission.

  Courtesy of Jim Flessner, Mary Ann Anderson, and Donna Cutsinger

  Tom Norris wearing his Medal of Honor, awarded to him in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

  Courtesy of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society

  23

  The Grove

  In the command posts and chow halls and hooches of the American bases in Southeast Asia, among the mechanics and the pararescuemen, the drivers and the food servers, the story of Gene Hambleton had begun to leak out, despite the attempt by Norris et al. to make it “go dark.” In fact, by the night of April 10, he was the talk of the American military in Southeast Asia. Door gunners and the men who drove the generals and the guys who fueled up the airplanes in Saigon and at Da Nang and Korat huddled together and passed along the latest scuttlebutt. In the ready rooms of the USS Hancock, anchored offshore, Navy pilots and their crews eagerly followed the unfolding drama. There was little operational detail—the mission was still top secret—but there was an awareness that Hambleton was out there and on the run.

  It wasn’t just the massive rescue mission that piqued the interest of the Air Force and Army guys, though that was intriguing; it was more the thought of this old dude out there in the jungle, seemingly outwitting the enemy at every turn. “He was a fifty-three-year-old man running around up there in the DMZ by himself,” said Master Sergeant Daryl Tincher, who’d initiated the rescue effort at Joker, “beating the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong by himself. He was giving them all they wanted. With his decisions, with his intestinal fortitude. He became a household word, the first words out of people’s mouth in the command post.”

  Is Hambleton still free, they’d ask one another as they fueled up an F-4. Have the gomers got him yet? When the answer came back, the men would smile and whistle softly to themselves. Hoo-wee, he must be one tough old bastard. Hambleton’s will to live, said one officer involved in the rescue, “was the most intense we had ever seen.” Stuck in the middle of this gigantic invasion with just a .38 in one hand and his balls in the other, he was becoming an inspirational figure; you just had to root for the guy. It got so bad at Joker that Tincher had to order his men to leave their HQ and go to their hooches to get some rest. “I had five sets of controllers on that mission,” said Tincher. “And you had to run them out of there. My radio operators, my hi-fi radio operators, my telephone people, my weathermen. Everyone wanted to be part of it.”

  By the spring of 1972, the conflict was at a standstill. Support back home was cratering. The proportion of Americans who believed that sending soldiers to Vietnam had been a mistake had risen to 60 percent, a number that had nearly doubled in the last four years. But this little war within a war, Hambleton’s run to the river, held out the slim possibility of victory. The men loved it. The news and gossip about the downed airman spread all the way back to the Pentagon, where desk-bound majors and intel specialists followed the story as if it were Rod Carew’s latest hitting streak, arriving in the office every morning and asking one another the question of the day: Still running, is he? Well, I’ll be damned.

  For many Americans back home, Vietnam was a war without the possibility of heroes. That wasn’t true for the men actually in-country; they either knew men who’d done wondrous things under great pressure, or they’d heard the stories that were passed from hooch to hooch: medevac helicopter pilots going into shit-crazy LZs and carrying out wounded troops, or PJs who’d stayed beyond their allotted time on the ground, fighting off NVA regiments with an AK-47 and a few grenades. Word traveled quickly. The story of USMC Captain John Ripley, who’d singlehandedly blown up the bridge at Dong Ha, was already widely known and admired only days after the event. Hambleton was the latest, and the most unlikely, of these underground heroes.

  What the military didn’t realize was that the cheek-by-jowl relationship between the reporters covering the war and the troops on the ground meant that word was slowly, very slowly, seeping out to the regular world.

  Hambleton finally collected himself and made his way down the main road out of the village. He’d lost count of his steps, but he staggered forward, trying to estimate the distance he’d covered. He found his body was behaving strangely. As he walked, he was tilting backward slowly, like one of those toy birds that sipped water then leaned back at a crazy angle. Except that his body never came back forward. After a few minutes of this, he would end up sprawling backward and collapsing on the road. This happened again and again. He was completely u
nable to control himself.

  Hambleton had no idea if the problem was muscle exhaustion or something neurological, or if he was suffering some kind of psychological aftereffect from killing a man. But he had to find a way to counteract the tilt. Finally, he began walking with his head pitched forward, “like the crazy-looking Road Runner bird.” This corrected the backward incline and allowed him to stay upright while better avoiding the bumps and divots in the road. But the increasing signs of deterioration were worrying.

  He cut a bizarre figure. His body seemed unwilling to obey his demands to walk straight. His arms felt ahead into the darkness to keep him from running into anything—“I felt like I was wrapped in a great black cape”—and his legs were shaky. He shuffled like a man in leg chains, in short, halting steps. When his feet tapped against a bump or divot in the ground, he would totter and try to regain his balance. Sometimes he didn’t make it and fell off the path entirely. It occurred to him that anyone watching his progress would think he was blind drunk.

  He found a pair of coconut trees and collapsed next to them. His throat was parched. He hadn’t had water since his journey began. He massaged his face with his hands, trying to stay awake. Dawn was now only a couple of hours away; he was determined to make the river by then.

  As he sat there, Hambleton was overcome with a new feeling. I’m going in the wrong direction, he thought. Once the idea entered his mind, he found it impossible to shake. I must have turned west back there somewhere. I’m headed deeper into enemy territory. I’ve made a terrible mistake.