Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  The men began swimming downriver. Norris could hear the NVA moving on either bank, but minute after minute passed and they slipped by in the dark water. Clark swam adequately and they made good time.

  The pale gray of the French bunker appeared on the south bank. The South Vietnamese commandos called out quietly to the rangers hidden in the brush. When the rangers responded, Norris headed toward the bunker. He pulled himself up on the bank and saw the sea commandos helping Clark out of the water. Together, the exhausted men trudged up the hill and into the bunker. There they found Andersen waiting.

  The Marine took charge, checking Clark for wounds and getting some chow into him. Knowing they would soon go after Hambleton, Norris and the commandos stretched out and tried to get some sleep. Andersen had called for an armored personnel carrier to take Clark to the rear, and soon it came clanking up the road.

  Andersen escorted Clark to the APC. The Marine officer never recorded his feelings at that moment, but he must have been thrilled. After so many disappointments, the Division had accomplished—at least once—what they’d set out to do six years before.

  The vehicle moved off and Andersen found Norris. He asked him what had happened out there. How far did you go upriver? How did you end up missing Clark? “Knowing his position on our working area,” Norris said, “I did not tell him how far we went that night or about the enemy patrols we encountered.” Essentially, he lied so that he’d have a chance at Hambleton.

  Resting on the stretcher, Clark was grateful to be alive. He realized now that Norris and the South Vietnamese commandos had come upriver in the darkness, into terrain crowded with the enemy, to save his life. He found this remarkable. “I wouldn’t have gone in there after me,” he thought to himself.

  25

  Places Like the Moon

  That morning, miles to the north of the downed airmen, Bill Henderson was marching toward Hanoi. He would cover ten miles on the trails, and then the guards would lock him up at night with shackles on his feet as he sweltered in the 100 percent humidity.

  His captors had turned out to be a bunch of teenagers who’d treated him fairly well, even offering him a Vietnamese cigarette after confiscating the pack of Winstons they found in his pocket. “It was good for me,” said Henderson, “because they weren’t some ideological assholes.” The young soldiers had treated his chest wound with sulfa powder and put a dressing over it. The cuts on his face were beginning to heal.

  A day after his shootdown, he’d been brought in front of a rather plump NVA major, more menacing than the teens who’d captured him. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” the major said, “and you’re going to answer them.” The man asked Henderson his name, rank, and serial number. “I gave him that. They published this shit in Stars and Stripes.”

  The major continued. “What plane were you flying.”

  “I’m not going to tell you that,” Henderson said.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to kill you.”

  Henderson didn’t have to think about it. “I’m not going to tell you that,” he said again.

  The major studied Henderson for a minute, then walked away. His guards grabbed the American and led him off.

  As the pilot walked north, he was astonished by evidence of a massive invasion force. “There were millions of NVA out there. There were SAM missile launchers being dragged down southward. The B-52s would come in and blow the shit out of them.” The hospitals he passed, if you could call them hospitals—they were really just forward aid stations with the most basic supplies—were packed with badly wounded men lying in a stupor. But the tidal rush of olive-clad humanity continued unabated.

  Henderson was now seeing up-close the people, the houses, and the fields he’d bombed for months without much of a second thought. The countryside was ripped up with bomb craters. One NVA officer, Nguyen Quy Hai, was commanding a battalion in the sector. “There were lots of bombs,” Hai recalled. “After they fell, I could see human thighs hanging in the trees. There were bodies that had been hit and had exploded.” Hai didn’t feel hatred toward the American soldiers; he didn’t feel anything toward them. That emotion was a self-indulgence. “We were running out of food, bullets, clothes, everything,” he said. “I had no time or energy to think about the Americans.”

  The North Vietnamese photographer Doan Cong Tinh was shooting pictures of the invasion and the airstrikes. “After the bombs fell, some soldiers died, some were injured,” Doan said. “The towns became places like the moon. The houses were gone.” Another NVA soldier witnessed the attacks and what came after; it was hard not to. “When we walked,” he said, “our feet would be covered in blood.” It was for this reason that people in the North had a saying about their soldiers’ fate: “Go south,” it went, “and die.”

  Nguyen Thi Uong, a twenty-five-year-old local, could hear the American bombers and fighters flying over her village nightly. “There were many bombs,” she remembered. “After the planes left, the inhabitants of the villages would come out and bury the dead. And then we would visit with the dead ones’ families.” If the bodies weren’t buried quickly, the dogs would eat them. Hunger roamed the countryside, afflicting every living thing. “We had no food to eat,” Uong recalled. The villagers had strong feelings toward the pilots who flew the planes. “If we fought them, why would we not hate them?” she said. “Yes, we hated them. If we couldn’t capture the downed airmen, we killed them.”

  Now among the enemy, Henderson didn’t have an oh-my-God-what-have-we-done moment. He reacted like a soldier. He didn’t hate the Vietnamese, but he didn’t apologize for what was happening either. “It was the price of war,” he said. “You lock into survival mode. I’d been trained to deal with this.” Weren’t the NVA shooting at American planes? Wasn’t that battle?

  After about four days—he’d lost track of the exact time—his guards loaded him into a transport and he continued his journey toward Hanoi. One afternoon, the driver pulled up at an Army barracks. Henderson was taken out of the back and marched into the building. He found himself in an officers’ mess, where his guard pushed him into a seat. He waited. Eventually an older NVA colonel came in and sat across from him. Henderson realized that they were waiting for the man’s underlings to serve them tea.

  Henderson was expecting another interrogation: What were you flying? What were your orders? Stuff he’d already refused to answer. But the colonel wasn’t interested in those things.

  Once the tea had been served, the colonel looked at the pilot. Then he asked a single question: “Why are you here?”

  Henderson stared at the man. He found himself at a loss for words. The Vietnamese colonel had grown up with war, first with the French, now with the Americans, and he was apparently seeking the reason why this had been his fate. Why are you here?

  It occurred to Henderson that he didn’t have a good answer. “I had no fucking clue,” he said. “I was there because I was told to go there because I signed up because I needed a job.” But how do you tell this to an enemy colonel who has probably watched hundreds of his men die from American bombs? How do you convey that your presence in Vietnam didn’t spring from some personal crusade against communism or the deep belief that East Asia must remain free from Soviet influence but was a result of the lack of jobs for Dartmouth music majors in 1968? That is, that there was no personal reason worth speaking of?

  Henderson sought for the words that would convey this truth to the Vietnamese officer. “My government said I should be here to do these things,” he said finally. “I don’t know why.”

  The colonel regarded Henderson for a moment. Then he dropped his eyes and shook his head slowly. He got up and left the room.

  José Astorga, the door gunner from the Blueghost 39 chopper, was also on his way north. He’d been handed over to the North Vietnamese and was transported by truck and then by canoe, a bamboo splint on his broken leg. His clothes were filthy and he was weak, having lost a lot of blood in the crash. He had a hi
gh fever and was vomiting frequently. Soldiers would come up to him and slap him around, just venting their anger. At one point, the VC turned him over to regular soldiers. “They took me to a village and decided to execute me.”

  “OK, go ahead,” he told them. But this wasn’t defiance, as it had been with Henderson.

  The soldier brought up his rifle and pointed it at the American’s chest, but just then an officer spotted what was happening. He quickly walked over to the soldier and told him to stop. The soldier lowered his rifle and the officer took Astorga to a hut in the village. He left him outside while all the soldiers went in to decide his fate. When they came out, the officer said, “We decided to let you live.” Most likely, the North Vietnamese were simply playing with his mind.

  Something inside Astorga had broken. The unrelenting pain and the certainty of his own death had unnerved him. José Astorga was ready to die. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he told the man. The officer must have been startled by this; there were very few American prisoners who asked to be killed. He ignored Astorga’s request, and his escorts grabbed their prisoner and ordered him to resume marching.

  Later on, somewhere in North Vietnam, Astorga and his keepers were on the road. After hours of marching, they arrived at some kind of junction and Astorga saw a thin white man standing up in a bamboo cage. It was Bill Henderson. The Vietnamese told Astorga not to talk to the captured pilot, but the two exchanged names and spoke briefly.

  He made it to a camp near Hanoi, where a doctor put a cast on his leg. He was kept in solitary for a month. Astorga had survived, but he’d been changed.

  26

  Zeroed In

  Hambleton spent the morning of April 11 studying his surroundings. The sun was beginning to light up the eastern sky and he could make out the basic features of the landscape around him. The river flowed past steep embankments on either side. West, the way he’d just come, there were trees and bushes lining the top of the slope. To the north there was thick foliage.

  There was no way in hell he was making it back up that embankment, so he headed toward the foliage. When he’d found a good spot, he began to dig a hole. Once it was completed, he gathered some leaves around him and pulled them over his body. He was hungry, but the bananas he’d passed coming in were green and inedible. And why was he thinking of bananas when in a matter of hours he’d be feasting on sirloin and French fries?

  A sense of well-being came over him. He’d made it through. Snug as a bug. He’d had to kill a human being to make it here, and the memory of it horrified him, but he’d survived. He didn’t think to himself at that moment that he’d proved his father wrong and achieved something so unlikely and bitterly won that it would make his brother Gil’s wartime heroics seem almost routine. Instead, Hambleton was flooded with a sense of gratitude—specifically, toward Jesus, or “the Boy,” as Hambleton called him. “I found myself thanking the Boy for all of His help. I was . . . thoroughly convinced it was because of [Him] that I wasn’t lying in one of those rice paddies on the other side of the village, bleeding to death.”

  He couldn’t keep his eyes open and fell into a light sleep. On and off that afternoon, he would drop off, then come awake with a startled jerk of the head. On waking up the second or third time, he heard voices. He turned his head and tried to locate the source, but it could have been coming from either embankment.

  When Tommy Norris awoke on the morning of the eleventh, he stepped outside the bunker. Daylight shone down on the top of the bluff and he could see the South Vietnamese rangers relaxing. They were playing cards and cooking some food. The sound of laughter and meat sizzling on the campfires floated over the forward base toward the river.

  Andersen was on the radio, prepping the rescue of Hambleton. He called in airstrikes along the river, hoping to clear out any guns that might spot the navigator coming down. As he spoke to the FACs, the Marine officer learned that a convoy of Soviet tanks was approaching the Cam Lo bridge; he ordered it taken out. Fast movers came sweeping in and dove on the column, destroying three tanks and leaving a number of transport vehicles with smoke billowing from their burning frames. The fewer assets the North Vietnamese had on the river, the better it would be.

  Norris heard a sound in the distance: the cough of an artillery gun. He froze. The shell came in long, arcing over the bluff and hitting harmlessly about a hundred yards to the west. After it had exploded, Norris looked around, a feeling of anxiety growing inside him. The rangers had barely looked up. They were goofing around, snacking on their freshly cooked treats, and generally having a good time. Nobody was scurrying for cover or even glancing up at the sky. The men were acting like they were on R&R in Thailand or something, not sitting across the front line from a large contingent of enemy.

  Norris caught the eye of the South Vietnamese lieutenant, Tho. “We’ve got big trouble,” he said. He began running around, trying to corral the South Vietnamese soldiers into the bunker and under their tanks. “You’re going to get hit hard!” Norris screamed at the men. Andersen came out of the bunker to help. Then, the whistle of more rounds in the air, followed by B-40 rockets and mortars.

  Shells hit yards away from the bunker. Norris saw bright flashes and men twisting in midair. He raced to them, now lying prone, some dead, some grievously wounded. Body parts were scattered on the ground; blood mixed in with the mud and grass. The unhurt rangers were panicking; Andersen thought they were going to break and run. Amidst the whistling of the shells, the Marine called out in Vietnamese that he would shoot anyone who deserted the outpost.

  Norris grabbed survivors by their shirts and shoved them under the tanks and inside the bunker. He screamed at the gunners to get in their tanks and open up on the enemy positions across the river. As more rounds thudded into the hill, he ran from body to body, leaving the dead and pulling the wounded to the bunker. Once they were all inside, he began doing triage. Some of the men had been hit by shrapnel and were bleeding badly.

  The NVA were zeroed in. The rounds slammed into the earth, shell after shell, sending sprays of mud and shrapnel spinning through the base. Norris emerged from the bunker holding the radio, trying to call in airstrikes. The South Vietnamese lieutenant was standing next to him. Norris was talking to the Air Force when he felt something, a slight displacement of air, a sixth sense that told him a round was about to fall. Before he could move, the shell hit yards away and the man next to him immediately cried out and dropped to the ground. Norris put down the radio and bent over him. “A big piece of shrapnel went through his right arm and tore it to pieces,” he said. The American grabbed the lieutenant, dragging him into the bunker. Once inside, as the concussions rocked the concrete structure, Norris filled a needle with morphine and injected it into the man. He started bandaging up the wound as best he could.

  Another Vietnamese soldier appeared at Norris’s side. “Lieutenant Colonel Andersen has been hit,” he said. The American had been outside trying to coordinate artillery and call in a medevac when a round came in close. Norris ran outside and found the Marine on the ground, unconscious and bleeding from the head. A fragment of steel had penetrated his skull just above the right eye. Norris picked up Andersen and carried him into the bunker. He inspected the officer’s wound as more rounds shook the ground in the bunker, but he couldn’t remove the shrapnel.

  He called for two armored ARVN personnel carriers that were about half a mile away to come in and retrieve the wounded. But the South Vietnamese refused. They wouldn’t start out until the bombing stopped. Finally, after ninety minutes, the enemy guns went quiet. Men were moaning and the bunker reeked of blood. Norris got the first APC to the base and the men loaded Andersen and the other injured soldiers in.

  His leader was down. Half of the rangers were dead or badly wounded, along with Lieutenant Tho. A frisson of panic jumped from soldier to soldier. Even the normally poised Norris was shaken. “I’m like, ‘Oh, man, I am just going to lose it. This is not a good thing.”

  Andersen was tak
en to another outpost deeper in the rear; from there, he was flown out on a helicopter. Eventually he would arrive at a Saigon hospital, hours away from the forward operating base. But he’d become so obsessed with completing the mission and bringing in Hambleton that he would end up climbing out a hospital window and making his way to Major General Marshall’s office, eye patch and all, where he persuaded the commander to lend him his Sabreliner jet to fly him to Da Nang. From there, he planned to hitch a ride back to the French bunker. Someone with higher rank got wind of Andersen’s plan and quickly vetoed it. Andersen was out of the battle.

  Tho was evacuated out as well, accompanied by his senior enlisted sailor. Around sixteen men—Norris, Kiet, two sea commandos, and “about a dozen very scared Vietnamese rangers”—were all that remained of the rescue team. Those numbers could drop quickly; if the outpost was attacked again, Norris believed the commandos would abandon the mission. On the afternoon of April 11, the odds of getting Hambleton were growing longer.

  Meanwhile, the FAC was calling on the radio. When Norris finally picked up, the officer gave him a report on Hambleton. The navigator had missed several of his hourly check-ins. And when he did make his calls, he literally couldn’t talk. There was only silence on the other end, alternating with slurred gibberish. “He’s not going to make it,” the man told Norris. They couldn’t wait for Hambleton to swim downriver like Clark.

  In the steamy afternoon heat, Norris posted guards to watch for any enemy approach. The tank crews kept near the hulking forms of their vehicles and tried to get some sleep, and the three remaining sea commandos caught a quick nap. Norris was fully tasked with trying to set up the Hambleton rescue. The FAC gave him the airman’s estimated location, about two miles upriver. It was much farther away than Clark had been. But they were going to have to go get him.