Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  27

  Esther Williams

  As nightfall approached, Hambleton heard a surge in the sound of a plane’s engine. He called in on the radio.

  The FAC asked him if he was OK. Hambleton, lying, said yes. “Good, because you gotta make like Esther Williams.”

  Hambleton’s mind was drifting. He repeated the name robotically. Esther Williams, Esther Williams. Where had he heard that before?

  The FAC repeated the instruction. A long pause. “Not reading you,” Hambleton replied. It took more playing around with words and a mention of the Swanee before he thought, Oh, Esther Williams the swimmer. The FAC wanted him to get into the river and cross it.

  He looked at the river. It was wide, he couldn’t tell how wide, maybe two hundred feet across. He felt a surge of gloom. His body was growing colder and weaker. “Oh God, I thought. I’ll never be able to make that.” He was barely able to walk; how did the Air Force expect him to swim across it? “Then I thought, if I don’t, I’m dead.”

  Other fears surfaced: wildlife, for instance. He knew that Vietnamese rivers were badly polluted, but what kinds of creatures hid under its surface? Bloodsucking fish? Bacteria that would slip into his bloodstream and attack his organs? There was a range of waterborne diseases in-country: hepatitis A, typhoid fever. Some of the mosquitoes carried the pathogens for godawful things: yellow fever, malaria, dengue fever, and Japanese encephalitis, which dropped you into a coma and had a death rate of 30 percent. And then there would be the leeches.

  But he had to get across. In the end, he decided he could bear anything except snakes. “I think I despise snakes,” he said, “more than anything in the world.”

  There was still light in the west. He wanted to wait until seven before heading out; the descending darkness would conceal his trip across the river from anyone peering down from the banks.

  He heard sounds from above, what sounded like voices “very far away.” He crawled out of his hiding place and down to the riverbank, listening. Yes, there were voices, but no sounds of anyone coming through the bushes. He felt a pall of dread settle over him.

  The navigator quickly began to go through his survival vest, tossing aside anything he couldn’t use. He’d have to get lighter to have a chance at crossing. The first-aid kit chunked to the ground, followed by the Smith & Wesson .38—too heavy—and other items. He took the radios, which were water-resistant and should be able to survive a trip across the river, flares, the thin mosquito net, which he packed into his pocket, and his survival knife. If the NVA got to him before his rescuers, he knew what to do with it.

  Hambleton couldn’t leave the items lying on the riverbank; they would be a tip-off to his pursuers that he’d crossed there. He looked up the face of the embankment. Among the rocks he saw the opening of a hole or cave. He crawled up the slope on his hands and knees and pushed the extra gear inside. He covered the items with dirt, then hurried back down.

  More noises from above, growing closer. They were coming from both directions now, north and south. Hambleton couldn’t wait any longer. He hurried down to the river’s edge and waded in. The current was gentle, meandering. That wouldn’t be the problem. It was the temperature: the cold seemed to knife through him. After a few steps, the frigid water poured in over the tops of his jungle boots and soaked his socks. He cursed, thinking the boots would weigh him down, and hurried back to the shore, dropped to the ground, and struggled to get the boots off. He left them on the riverbank and, barefoot now, made his way back to the river in the semidarkness.

  The water was shallow and he hurried forward. Suddenly, the bottom dropped away and Hambleton plunged into the depths, his head sinking under the surface. He kicked furiously, trying to lift himself higher in the black water. Darkness enveloped him as he thrashed. When his head cleared the surface, he spit out a spray of water and sucked in a breath of air. He’d dropped into some kind of hole carved out of the river bottom. He began swimming.

  After progressing only twenty feet, Hambleton realized he could go no farther. Muscle fatigue was cramping his legs and arms. He stopped kicking and found to his surprise that the river had gone shallow again. He was able to stand on the rock-strewn bottom, the water gurgling at armpit level. He started to walk forward, hoping he wouldn’t tumble into another hole.

  Pain shot up his legs. The rocks he was walking on were uneven and as sharp as blades. They were cutting the soles of his feet. He gasped. There was no way; he couldn’t make it across. It had been a mistake to leave his boots. Now he’d have to go back and retrieve them, losing more time and allowing his pursuers to get closer. “You really are a jerk,” he said to himself.

  Gritting his teeth, Hambleton turned back and began paddling through the water. As he got closer to the shore, he glanced upward at the embankment. There were no unfamiliar shapes against the starlit sky. Wincing with pain, he staggered out of the river, water streaming off his hair, through his beard, and down his flight suit. Where the hell had he left his boots? The darkness was near-total now, and he couldn’t pick out any details on the ground near him.

  He felt around with his hands and almost immediately touched the toe of a boot. Dumb luck. But there was only one. His hands searched for the other but came up empty. The socks were right next to the pair and he pulled them on, then the single jungle boot. He yanked the zipper up the front. Where was the other one?

  He remembered that he’d taken it off near a toppled tree. He turned and spotted a jagged shape in the near distance. He crawled on his hands and knees until he found the exposed roots. Again he began to feel along the ground with his hands. His fingertips touched leather. He pulled the other boot on and zipped it up.

  Hambleton hurried to the river’s edge and waded in. This time he anticipated the deep hole he’d fallen into and started swimming. Once he was past it, he dropped his feet to the bottom and pushed forward, the water chest-high. He proceeded cautiously, anxious not to fall into another depression in the riverbed.

  Time seemed to slow. He couldn’t see the far bank and he found no other holes in his way, but still his strength was quickly ebbing in the frigid water. After pushing through the current for what seemed like an hour, he felt the ground rise up under his feet. He was near the shore. He crawled out and lay flat on the muddy bank. He found that he was as limp as a “little girl’s rag doll.”

  The navigator lay there gasping for a few moments until he’d gathered the strength to go on. He crawled toward the bushes he’d spotted from the other side and pushed through. He pulled out his radio and called the FAC. “I just made like Esther Williams,” he said. “Now I’ll rest for half an hour before turning left.” The FAC radioed his approval.

  As Hambleton was crossing the river, Norris, Kiet, and the two other sea commandos left the protection of the bunker and headed upstream, with the American walking point, moving ahead fifty yards through the darkened foliage, then stopping to listen. The enemy activity was as heavy as the night before. Not long after leaving the bunker, Norris and the other men heard an NVA unit approaching and slipped into the undergrowth. They spotted the same guard posts on the river that they’d seen on the way to rescue Clark. Moving in short bursts, Norris and the others managed to evade the patrol and made their way slowly upriver. The SEAL wondered about their incredible good fortune in avoiding contact: he theorized that the idea of an American or South Vietnamese squad penetrating this far into such thickly populated terrain was so unlikely that the patrollers weren’t looking for them. But he wondered how many times they could traverse the same ground without running into the NVA.

  The commandos were thinking the same thing. Norris heard the other two whispering to Kiet. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but their voices were growing more urgent. Norris had a bad feeling. “They wanted to go back,” he realized. Finally, one of the commandos spoke up: “I’m not going to follow an American just to rescue another American.”

  Norris couldn’t fault the commandos. It wasn’t t
heir brother who was stranded out there; it was his. Even for him, the night journey was eerie. But the young SEAL couldn’t tolerate a mutiny in the middle of his mission. He told the commandos that they were all going upriver; it would be safer if they stayed together. The men relented, but Norris knew their patience was nearly gone.

  After hours of slipping through the dark countryside, Norris and his squad reached the predetermined spot, half a mile downriver from the Cam Lo bridge. In the pitch black, he could hear trucks moving over the structure. He called the FAC and told him to have Hambleton get into the water so the team could see him. The clouds above had parted; a crescent moon shone down. It was good news. Norris would be able to spot a human figure in the water.

  They waited. They could hear North Vietnamese soldiers coughing and moving around on the paths and open areas. Peering at the river, Norris could see only the fretted surface of the water. Is he too weak to come this far? Norris wondered. Or maybe he just stood up where he was and is still obscured by the overhang. Either way, there was no American visible in the river. He and the team began to scout up and down the northern bank, peering across for telltale signs of the airman.

  Hambleton gathered some leaves and covered himself in them. Then he lay on his back. “It seemed all the muscles in my body had been stretched farther than they were meant to be and just couldn’t snap back.” Everything hurt. He couldn’t raise his head without wincing. He couldn’t stay awake. He sank into a heavy sleep.

  Forty minutes later, he awoke. The FAC told him he still had farther to go. Hambleton warned him he could do only thirty minutes of walking with thirty minutes of rest.

  He was in a kind of irritable stupor, the state that old-time Arctic explorers got into in the later stages of malnutrition. “Everything I did became a chore.” His body was sluggish, his thoughts disjointed.

  He was drifting off to sleep again when he heard more voices. Wincing, he sat up. The voices were coming from the west, and he saw when he looked back upriver figures outlined in the glow of their flashlights. Hambleton stared. “A sickening feeling came over me and I tried not to face the fact that it was just a matter of time before they, too, crossed the river and would find me.” If he moved into the water, one of the searchers might spot him, so Hambleton simply looked on as the figures slashed at the undergrowth with their gun butts and wooden sticks. They seemed to be focused on a certain area of the riverbank. Had someone reported seeing a man there? The search went on for twenty minutes before the figures dispersed.

  Hambleton pulled himself to his feet and started downriver. The depth of the water was constantly changing, going from knee-deep to over his head in a single step. He was spent and just wanted to lie down. There were trees lining the riverbank, and he stayed under them, grabbing onto the branches and the low-hanging vines to pull himself forward. It was pitch black under the shrubbery. His feet splashed the water as he staggered on, his progress excruciatingly slow. After walking for a few minutes, he took a step and tumbled into a hole in the river bottom. His head sank below the surface as he gasped for breath. Now completely submerged, he thrashed his arms and legs, trying to push himself upward. A few terrifying seconds passed before he finally made it back to the surface.

  After thirty minutes of walking, he crawled out of the river and collapsed in a field of grass that came down to the water. He wanted nothing more than to lie there and sleep. But within a minute or two, the sound of voices came floating down to him again; they were coming from the other side of the river now and they were moving closer. Panic fluttered in his chest, but he was too weak and cold to stand up; even crawling was beyond him. How could he make it to the river? Hambleton decided he would have to roll down to the water. He took a breath, gathered his strength, then pushed his left shoulder into the air and toppled over. His chest smacked into the mud. Hambleton took another breath, then pushed his right shoulder up and repeated the movement. He was rolling in slow motion toward the river.

  The FAC came up on the radio, whispering. “You gotta move, you gotta move. It’s hot on that side.” Hambleton was nauseated with fear. The soldiers seemed to be following him. He stopped moving and his gaze probed the dark bank for his pursuers.

  He could hear their sticks striking the branches of the foliage, the leaves crashing together as the unseen men pushed their way through. Hambleton stared at the beams of their flashlights, praying they would stay up on the banks and not dart toward the river.

  It went on for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, as he lay there watching. Then the flashlights moved away. The sound of thrashing slowly faded, then stopped.

  He moved toward the water. Just as he was about to wade in, there was a splash. Instinctively, Hambleton reached for his survival knife and peered through the foliage. His heart bumped fast; had his pursuers decided to cross the river after him? As he stared at the inky river, he saw a large hump slowly emerging out of the water. It was round and broad and moving toward him. Hambleton stared at it, then realized it was the shell of a big mud turtle. He let his breath out with a gasp. Adrenaline sped through his veins, causing his body to shake.

  Hambleton scurried into the water on his hands and knees, wanting to get away before the searchers returned. In his hurry, his elbow smacked into something solid. His face twisted in pain and his arm went numb. He ducked his head, trying not to cry out. Once the feeling in his arm returned, he felt along the riverbed to see what he’d hit. It was a long, thick rectangular piece of wood. As he felt along its surface, Hambleton could sense that it had been cut from a log. It was about nine feet long. It could be only one thing: a railroad tie.

  Here’s the answer to my exhaustion, thought Hambleton. If he could dig it out of the riverbed and float it, he could hang on and move faster down the river. He began to shove the tie, pulling it this way and that, trying to dislodge it from the mud. After a minute or two of agonizing effort, one end lifted up from the riverbed with a sucking sound and popped above the surface. Hambleton was holding on to the other end. He draped his arm over the wood and pushed into the water. The tie took much of the burden off his body. “Joyous relief came over me.”

  Norris was frustrated. An hour went by. Nothing. He listened to the FAC talking to Hambleton on the radio, asking for his location. Hambleton’s answers were bewildering; Norris couldn’t make heads or tails of them. Was he even speaking English? An hour passed without a trace of the airman, then another. The team was moving through the foliage, pulling back the vines on the shoreline, looking for signs of him. As they searched, they spotted several encampments of enemy companies and heard vehicles coming and going over the bridge.

  He could tell from the commandos’ body language that they were growing more anxious. Dawn was getting closer and they were far from their base. Finally, Norris signaled Kiet that they would head back. He was bitterly disappointed not to have found Hambleton. How many times could they come into the NVA’s sector and not get hit? What would they do if Hambleton couldn’t move?

  The team began its slow journey back to the bunker.

  Hambleton’s progress was pitiful. He was still holding to the thirty minutes of travel and thirty minutes of rest, but he could stagger only a few feet at a time. The darkness made progress more difficult. He would occasionally trip on an underwater vine, and branches kept smacking him in the face as he stumbled blindly forward. But the log took the pressure off his legs, and he was able to last longer in the water than he would have without it. When he gripped the wood, his hands came away covered in sooty ash. Something had burned one end of the tie. He wondered if it was part of a railroad bridge that had been hit by an American bomb, sending the burning wood into the river.

  The first streaks of daylight appeared; it was now the morning of the twelfth. He had been on the run for ten days, with little rest and barely anything to eat or drink. Hambleton began searching the shoreline for a place to hide. There. A thickly wooded patch of foliage a short distance from the river. He dropped his feet t
o the rocks and pulled the tie out of the water, slowly hauling it up onshore so it would appear to anyone passing by that it had washed up on its own. He crawled into the brush. Once inside, he searched for fruit or nuts, anything to sustain him, but found nothing. Farther on past the bushes, however, he saw a hill and at the top of it the leaves of several banana trees. He thought that once he regained a little strength, he would climb up and see if any of the bananas were edible.

  He pulled out his radio and called in. The FAC asked him to pinpoint his location. They would try the same triangulation process they’d used the day before. The FAC warned Hambleton that there were enemy in the area and to stay concealed.

  Once the FAC had his approximate location, Hambleton went to sleep inside the thicket. Around ninety minutes later, he woke. He could hear the sound of the FAC’s plane above. He checked in on the radio. There was a message for him: a plane was going to attempt to drop him another survival package. “Someone will be by shortly.”

  The navigator had hoped that his rescuers were close, but he needed food, and so he waited impatiently for the Madden package. He could hear birds chirping in the trees above, but no sounds of voices or dogs or chickens, no sign of a village nearby. At around 4 p.m., he heard the drone of an approaching aircraft engine, deeper than the buzzing of the FAC. It sounded to him like an A-1. He watched the blue patch of sky through the branches and spotted the plane as it zoomed past, a package under one wing.

  The pilot called him on the radio, asking if he was on line with his position. Hambleton confirmed. “OK. We will back off and do it again. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  The plane disappeared, the sound dying off, and then fifteen minutes later it was back. Hambleton watched its approach and saw the package drop away from the wing. It was falling straight for his hiding place, and for a few seconds Hambleton thought it might actually crash right into him, but it sailed overhead and pocked into one of the banana trees on the embankment above. He would wait until darkness fell, then go hunting for it.