Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  He took out his compass and checked it. It told him he was headed east. But it didn’t matter. “I had that sinking feeling I was doing something wrong and I wasn’t facing east at all. For the first time I felt as though I was going to panic.”

  The land around him looked suspiciously familiar. He thought he recognized a couple of features of the terrain from the beginning of his journey. Was he actually walking in circles? His hand shaking, he picked up the radio and called the FAC.

  “I’m out here in the same stuff I’ve been in all along tonight,” he told the man. “There are no landmarks except lights in the sky north of me and more southeast of me. This is the right direction, isn’t it?”

  “Roger. This is the right direction.”

  “I was getting concerned,” Hambleton admitted. The FAC told him he was doing fine and that the next hole was ready. He gave him the name and Hambleton started to get up.

  He took a couple of steps before his foot caught on a root and he went crashing to the ground. He found himself in a puddle, his face and body splashed with mud. He staggered up and went on.

  He began talking to himself. “Don’t give up now. Keep going. The biggest part of the battle is over.” He imagined arriving at the river and finding his rescuers already there. It was possible. They knew where he was going, so why wouldn’t they have sent in a team to gather him up as quickly as possible?

  He came to a fork in the path. One trail led away to his left, to where he couldn’t tell. Straight ahead another trail—not the main path—led to terrain that looked very much like the place where he’d hid for the past six days.

  Hambleton stood there, debating. If he went left, he would be veering away from Quang Tri and the river. Maybe the path doubled back and led to the water, but he couldn’t be sure. If he went ahead along the less trodden path, he would be going in the right direction. But why would the path turn like that?

  He was too exhausted to think of taking extra steps. He decided to push ahead into the foliage. He took a few steps and the path beneath his feet disappeared. He was now on rougher ground and it immediately taxed his strength. After a few minutes he realized he was in the middle of a banana grove. Its crude furrows caught his feet and he dropped to his knees, unable to go any farther. Paranoia needled his brain. He felt his spirits drop; he was, he said, “exhausted and disgusted with myself because I couldn’t control my body.” If he couldn’t walk, he would never make it to the river.

  He got back up. He was lurching ahead when he ran into something sharp. He reached up and felt a barbed wire fence. Shocked, he jumped back. He was on someone’s property; perhaps he’d blundered into another village, whose people would soon be waking up.

  With a heavy heart, Hambleton decided he would have to turn around and retrace his steps. He couldn’t take the risk, in his physical condition, of coming upon any Vietnamese villagers. He wouldn’t be able to run away, and they would easily kill or capture him.

  But he had no energy left. His body felt like it was made out of cold clay, without any human spark inside. He found a banana tree and leaned his back against it, then slumped to the ground, spent.

  A thought sprang into his mind. The Negritos in the survival school in the Philippines had mentioned during his training that banana and bamboo trees contain fresh water in abundance. They store it in their trunks and, during the night, the water flows down to the roots. In the morning, it burbles back up the trunk. He turned and put his ear to the trunk. Immediately he heard the sound of moving water.

  Hambleton felt for his survival knife and pulled it out. He reached back as far as he could, then thrust the knife forward, stabbing the banana tree mid-trunk. When he wrestled the blade out, a stream of water poured from the gash. He turned and brought his lips under it and took gulp after gulp. The water tasted clean. Slowly, he felt some of his strength return.

  After he’d drunk all he could, Hambleton stood up and began his walk back out of the banana grove. Once he got clear of the broad-leafed branches, he found the fork in the path and his original route. The trail led due south. But as he pushed ahead, it began to curve back eastward. Clearly the path skirted the edge of the banana grove. He was relieved.

  The energy the water had given him ebbed quickly. After only a few minutes of walking, he still hadn’t cleared the edge of the grove. He had to turn off the path and rest against the trunk of a banana tree. As he lay with his back propped against the tree, he looked at his watch: 2:30 a.m. He realized he couldn’t continue and closed his eyes.

  Thirty minutes later, he awoke. He got back up on the path and headed east. The nap had cost him time. It was doubtful he would reach the river by daylight. He began to scout the edges of the path for a place to hide.

  He made his way toward a patch of trees and pushed through the foliage. Just then, he heard voices. He froze. What would anyone be doing out at 3:45 in the morning unless they were chasing him? He dropped quietly to the ground and put his back to a tree, facing the way he’d come. Now he listened. The thicket he found himself in was heavy with foliage; any pursuers would have trouble finding him. He turned and looked around the tree trunk. Beyond the edge of the brush, he spotted something else. It was something tan set among the dark greens and browns of the terrain. It looked for all the world like a sandbar.

  He cursed himself. What the hell would a sandbar be doing in the middle of the Vietnamese countryside? Hambleton moved to the edge of the thicket and stared at the tan shape. He removed his glasses and cleaned them. He was having trouble focusing his eyes, so he lay down on his stomach and rested them for a moment. When he opened his eyes again, the cloud cover above him had swept past and the moonlight shone down on the landscape. He pushed himself up and knelt, looking around the tree again. He stared at the light area for four or five minutes. Finally, his eyes adjusted long enough for him to see it clearly. He wasn’t looking at a sandbar. It was the Mieu Giang.

  Hambleton stood up, staring at the rolling water. “I was so damn excited, I thought, Jesus I’ve made it.” He began to stumble forward. His self-control evaporated. Were his rescuers already there, impatiently waiting for him to show? Or had he already missed them?

  The navigator thrashed through the foliage, blundering on, shoving the thick leaves aside with his arms. Suddenly, the ground dropped away from under him and he was falling down the steep embankment, his body turning somersaults. After a few seconds, he slammed into a tree trunk. He couldn’t move; he thought he would pass out.

  The American lay there, breathing shallowly, trying to regain enough strength to make it to the water. He could hear it burbling and rippling along. He began to stretch his legs and arms, feeling for breaks in the bones. But there was no sudden pain, only the throb of bruised muscle. He managed after great effort to topple over on his stomach. He raised his head and looked ahead. There was the river, a broad roiling shape, only yards away.

  Hambleton began to crawl on his belly. When he finally reached the river’s edge, he put his hands into the water and splashed some back and forth. The navigator was exultant. He’d done it! He’d nearly cracked his skull in the last hundred yards, but he was at the river. The rescue team would be here any minute. Would they come before dawn or would they need daylight to navigate to where he waited? He didn’t know. All he could think of was that he was close to home, to Gwen, to freedom.

  Painfully, he reversed course, his flight suit filthy with the riverbank mud, and pushed himself back toward the tree that he’d collided with. It would give him some cover while he waited. Once there, he heard the buzzing of a plane overhead. The FAC had found him.

  He pulled out his radio, worried that it might have been broken in his fall, but to his relief it powered up immediately. He called in and after a moment, the FAC responded. It was a different voice from the one that had guided him to the river.

  The voice asked him if he was “feet wet.” The term usually referred to airmen who’d ditched in the sea, but Hambleton knew what
the man was asking. He confirmed he was at the river.

  “That is fine. That is great.” The FAC told him he could relax now, that the “plan would be working out shortly.”

  The FAC buzzed overhead, settling into an orbit. His questions seemed to revolve around one thing: Hambleton’s physical condition. Whether from bravado or from worry—would they think he was too weak to complete the mission?—the navigator hid the fact that he’d been having trouble staying upright on the path. Something was wrong with him, but he didn’t want to jinx his chances. He said nothing.

  Unbeknownst to Hambleton, the FAC was already deeply concerned by what he was hearing. Some of what the navigator was saying was sheer gibberish. He would stop speaking for long periods or utter something nonsensical. Andersen, listening in, was alarmed as well, and kept checking in. “They seemed to want to keep verifying that I was still there and alive,” Hambleton said. He thought he sounded better than he did.

  The FAC needed his exact location. Hambleton couldn’t name any landmarks around him, because the NVA was presumably monitoring the transmissions, so they worked out a plan. Hambleton could hear the plane coming up the river. When it passed directly overhead, he clicked the transmit button on his radio. They repeated the process several times, with the O-2 vectoring in from different angles, until the FAC was satisfied.

  The voice told him to hide in place. He was to relax for the rest of the day.

  Clearly, the rescue team hadn’t yet arrived.

  24

  Clark

  Tommy Norris listened closely. Someone upriver was exhaling and inhaling loudly in the darkness, “a-huffing and a-puffing.” It sounded, on that quiet night, like an exhausted marathoner sucking wind at the end of a race. It had to be Clark. Who else would be swimming in the Mieu Giang in the middle of the night?

  The North Vietnamese patrol was inching closer. Norris turned to the sea commandos, who had brought their rifles up in case he ordered an attack. “All I could see were blackened faces and wide eyes.” Norris switched his gaze back to the inky darkness above the surface of the water. Whoever was out there was making far too much noise, especially with the patrol so close.

  Norris was in a bind. If he ordered his men to fire on the enemy soldiers, the NVA would swarm down on the riverbank and he might have to leave Clark behind, not to mention Hambleton. But if Clark kept making that infernal racket, Norris was sure the NVA soldiers would hear him. And then they’d kill or capture the airman.

  He shot a glance upriver. He could see a head bobbing out of the water, a pale face. Clark, unquestionably. But he couldn’t call out a warning. He had to let the airman pass. Only if the patrol opened up on the American would he and his men return fire.

  The breathing sound went drifting by. Norris listened to the footsteps of the men in the patrol. They didn’t hesitate or stop. Apparently, the noise of pushing through the underbrush had masked the sounds Clark’s breathing was making. Norris was astonished. Once again, his team had gotten lucky.

  He waited sixty seconds until the patrol had completely gone, then quickly slipped into the water. He was shocked by how cold it was. He switched the radio back on and told Andersen he needed illum. A minute or two later, flares sparkled high above, big shock-white orbs of light drifting down toward earth on their parachutes. Norris cut through the water with quick strokes, making excellent time; the current was with him now. He wanted to get ahead of the American and then grab him as he went past.

  Finally, when he’d reached a point where he was sure he’d overtaken Clark, he angled toward the riverbank. Now he would wait for the airman.

  But Clark had vanished. The man had been wearing an orange life preserver that was designed to be spotted in situations just like this one, and yet Norris couldn’t see him anywhere. His eyes swept back and forth from one bank to the other, but there was no hint of bright color. Maybe I let him pass by in my excitement, Norris thought. He swam along the bank, pulling back the foliage and checking the undergrowth. Nothing. “I’ve really done it now,” he thought. “I saw him, I had him. Where is he?”

  Worried and growing increasingly cold, Norris started back upstream. After exhausting himself against the current, he reached the spot where he’d entered the water. He glimpsed Kiet and the other Vietnamese sea commandos. They were sitting on the bank, looking “tired, cold and frustrated”; clearly, chasing after some phantom American while dozens of NVA soldiers walked past their position was beginning to wear on them. Norris ordered the men to begin searching the banks. They spread out and started quietly inspecting the overhanging shrubbery and bushes for any sign of the American.

  Time was passing. The work was painfully slow; the river turned and twisted on itself, and each square foot of shore had to be checked.

  The SEAL got on the radio and called Andersen. “He got past me,” he told Andersen. “The next contact he has with the FAC, tell him to hole up on the south side of the river. We’ll find him.”

  Andersen began to reel off a long list of questions: Where are you? How’d Clark get by you? At that point, Andersen’s voice cut out. Norris would attribute this to “some radio trouble,” but that wasn’t actually true. “I’m sitting out there in the middle of no-man’s-land,” Norris admitted later, “with a whole bunch of bad guys around and I didn’t want to talk to him so it was kind of like [making static noises] radio’s off!” He’d simply switched off the power. It was a Tommy Norris solution.

  Norris entered the water again, along with Lieutenant Tho, to look for Clark, while the others prowled the shoreline. Norris called in more illum. The river downstream was lit up as bright as Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring on a sunny summer afternoon. But no Clark.

  Norris was terrified that he’d blown the mission. He’d disobeyed Andersen’s direct order and gone upstream on his own initiative, and now the target had gotten by him. There was a whole river to the east of him and Clark could be anywhere on it.

  He checked his watch. Almost 4 a.m. They had only had about an hour and a half before they had to be back at the bunker. They couldn’t be out in daylight; that would be suicide. Every additional minute they spent looking for Clark decreased the time they’d have to make it back to friendly lines.

  Clark went on, chilled to the bone. The FAC began calling him on the radio. Clark took a breath and rogered. The voice came back, instructing the airman to head to the south bank and stay there. Clark confirmed. He turned and made his way toward the ghostly line of the shore.

  Once he reached it, Clark found an old sampan bobbing on the current, one of the broad, low boats used by Vietnamese fishermen. He slipped in behind it, then pulled out his camouflage net and drew it over his head. He waited, watching the river. Another artillery flare arced into the sky, and the white light lit up the water from bank to bank.

  Norris swam slowly downstream, eyeing the shore. Petty Officer Kiet was shadowing him on the riverbank, checking for footprints in the mud. As the commando came around a bend in the river, he saw a quick movement. It was a man, covered in a camo net, wearing a bright orange life preserver, watching Kiet from behind an old busted-up sampan. Kiet knew it had to be Clark.

  There was something else glinting in the moonlight. It was the barrel of a .38 revolver held just over the water’s surface and pointed directly at Kiet’s face. Clark had him sighted down. The two men stared at each other. “For a second,” Kiet said, “neither of us moved.”

  The sea commando slowly turned the barrel of his rifle away from the airman. Then he took the gun and slung it behind him on its strap. He didn’t want to escalate the situation; clearly, Clark thought he was NVA.

  He knelt down and began waving to Norris in the water.

  Norris saw the commando’s signal and then spotted Clark. He and Tho began to swim toward the boat. Norris carefully slung his AK-47 behind his back, out of sight. If it was Clark and he saw it, he might think Norris was NVA and freak out on him.

  He began to speak softly. “Mark,
I’m an American. My name is Tom Norris.”

  Clark didn’t trust his own ears. In his deteriorating mental state, he thought the NVA had tracked him. “Oh good Lord,” he said to himself, “how did they find out my name? What have I done now?” The airman pushed himself away from the bank and began edging along the back of the sampan.

  He heard his name called again. This time something registered. It’s an American, he thought.

  Norris swam closer, talking all the while. He said that he knew Clark had spent time in Idaho and that the code word for the river they were in was the Snake, which was also a river in Idaho. Then he said, “I’m here to take you home.”

  Norris was by now within a few yards of Clark. The airman’s eyes swiveled to stare at him. Norris took off his hat so the American could see his white skin and round eyes. He swam up to Clark, talking softly. When he finally got close enough, he could see the relief in the man’s face. Clark’s lips broke into a smile.

  Just then, one of the Vietnamese SEALs came sliding down the bank out of the brush. Clark’s eyes went wide and he snapped his head toward the man. “No, no, no, he’s with me,” Norris said quickly. Clark visibly relaxed. Norris came around the sampan and began explaining what the plan was, talking in an even voice.

  They weren’t safe yet. There were enemy patrols and outposts from here to the bunker. Norris told Clark to follow behind him in the river and do exactly what he did: “If I drop, you drop; if I turn, you turn.” Norris was impressed by the airman. Despite being exhausted and chilled to the bone, Clark was composed.

  Norris got on the radio and alerted Andersen that he had the first survivor and that he was headed toward the bunker. He didn’t want the South Vietnamese rangers to mistake them for enemy and shoot at them when they emerged from the water.