Twenty yards. The men were running alongside, bellowing “Stop! Stop!” in Vietnamese. Ten yards. Silence. Five. And the boat went shooting around the bend.
The sun was coming up. Full light now. The sampan was visible to anyone on either bank. They passed NVA outposts carved into the shoreline, and Norris spotted mortar tubes and rocket sites sticking up from the ground but saw no soldiers milling around. They were probably sleeping. He knew the spot where he’d heard the tanks refueling had to be coming up, and he worried that there would be more vehicles there filling up on gas. But when the sampan approached the depot, he could see that the tanks had disappeared. He did spot a large field truck sitting next to a ramshackle building, and then soldiers, the crews from the fuel tankers. But they were busy covering their vehicles with camouflage to protect them from the day’s airstrikes.
The sampan glided by the outpost. Once they were past, Norris—unable to resist—picked up the radio and called in the coordinates so that fighters could drop their bombs on the tankers.
At one point Kiet whispered that they had to get under cover. Once they slipped behind the brush, Norris watched the commando in the front of the boat. Norris had no idea why they’d stopped. For ten minutes, Kiet said nothing. Hambleton, passing in and out of consciousness, absorbed one fleeting impression: the Vietnamese commando had “the greatest pair of eyes of anyone I know.” He could see things on the riverbank the two Americans had no inkling were there.
Finally, after ten minutes, Kiet said, “We go now,” and the two put their paddles in the water.
The forward base was getting closer. Norris heard someone talking. It was Hambleton, who was “starting to moan and babble.” It sounded like he was having some kind of an anxiety nightmare beneath the fronds. In his weakened state, the stress of the past eleven days was working on the navigator.
Norris whispered for him to shut up. If he could keep it together for just a little while longer, they would be home free. But Hambleton’s voice only grew louder. Norris reached forward and shook Hambleton. “Quiet,” he whispered. Finally the airman’s rantings faded away and he dropped into unconsciousness.
They were close now. Perhaps just one more bend in the river and the bunker would be in sight. Norris and Kiet steered the sampan toward the south bank, where the bunker would appear. The sun was hot on their necks.
The sampan came around the bend and suddenly the water in front of it began to boil and churn, and an enormous noise shattered the quiet. Branches and vines splintered off the slim trees. The surface of the river erupted in violent little bursts of water. Someone on the northern bank was shooting at them with a heavy machine gun.
Norris and Kiet turned the boat quickly and raced toward the shoreline. The sampan slid in under an overhang of vines, the clattering roar of the machine gun echoing in their ears. Norris jumped out of the boat to check the banks for NVA. If they were pinned down by the machine gun and bracketed by troops on the other side running to find out what the shooting was about, they’d be dead within minutes.
The SEAL knew he’d been lucky. The gunner who’d spotted them coming down the river had been watching from a village perched on the bank. He’d seen the prow of the boat as it came around the bend and opened up on them. But he’d been too quick. Had he waited a few seconds longer, he would have been able to fire broadside into the sampan at almost point-blank range, killing the three men with ease. His eagerness had got the better of him.
Bullets sheared through the foliage, and now mortar rounds joined the one-sided battle. Norris could hear the gasp of the shells exiting the mortar tube, and rounds ripped through the brush farther up the slope. He peered upward through the branches, studying the riverbank nearest him but couldn’t see any soldiers coming to investigate the gunfire. He breathed easier. But there was no way they could get past the machine-gun nest. If they tried it, the gunner would carve them up. Their AKs were no match for a tripod-mounted machine gun. He needed an airstrike, and he needed it now.
Norris scrambled back to the sampan. Hambleton was moaning again underneath the fronds. Kiet held the boat pinned to the bank with his paddle. Norris grabbed the handset and raised the FAC. “We really need some air support,” he said.
He waited.
Da Nang was still under rocket attack; no fighters could get out. But the aircraft carrier USS Hancock was sitting in the South China Sea, its decks and holds filled with fast movers. When the FAC put out an urgent call for help, the pilot of one of the Hancock’s A-4 Skyhawks—their wings loaded with five-hundred-pound bombs—answered. He was leading a flight of five fighters and they were only five minutes away; the FAC asked the pilot to proceed toward the Mieu Giang immediately.
The Skyhawks instantly turned toward the river. The FAC radioed the SEAL and informed him that he had some fast movers approaching. Norris sheltered along the south bank. The FAC dropped a smoke rocket, which thumped into the brush near the machine gun, still spurting fire. Now they waited on the fighters.
Norris and Kiet could hear the Skyhawks streaking overhead, their engines sucking in an acre or two of air and tearing it to pieces. A concussion wave bloomed across the water as the bombs struck, and dirt and flame shot into the air. Two A-1s that had finally managed to lift off from Da Nang joined the fight, strafing the area along the north bank with smoke bombs, which provided perfect cover for the three men in the sampan.
The gunfire stopped. The air above the river was still again.
Norris and Kiet speared their oars into the water and pushed the sampan toward home.
When they emerged from the smoke, Norris saw they were only five hundred yards from the bunker. He wanted the cover of foliage, so they swerved the boat toward the shore. They quickly covered the distance to the outpost. When the bow of the sampan slid onto the packed mud of the bank, Norris jumped out.
The sampan stopped. “Where are we?” Hambleton asked from beneath the fronds. “End of the line,” Norris said. The navigator, temporarily alert, felt relief flood through him.
He stood up and tried to step out of the boat. but his strength failed him and he tumbled to the ground. Kiet helped Hambleton stand. Norris bent over and picked him up and hoisted him over one shoulder. Kiet had gone ahead and alerted the rangers, and he came back now with several men. In his half delirium, Hambleton could see people running toward him, what looked like Vietnamese soldiers. He wondered if, after all he’d been through, he’d somehow blundered into a trap.
Gunfire erupted from the opposite shore, and the men ducked and hurried back toward the bunker. Bullets pitted the slope, and little geysers of dirt erupted around them. Finally they made the top of the hill and ran into the blockhouse. The men laid Hambleton on a stretcher and covered him with a blanket. Hands reached for his boots and unlaced them. He could feel someone massaging his feet. “They felt like two chunks of ice,” he said. He looked at their faces, their uniforms, still bewildered. One young soldier next to him was wearing an NVA uniform. Hambleton goggled as his eyes swept past him to the next man. This one had patches on his camouflage identifying him as a Cambodian. Hambleton’s gaze switched over to the other side. Here, a man looking at him was wearing a hat that read “LAOS.”
He called out. Norris’s face appeared at his side.
“What the hell have you gotten me into?” Hambleton said excitedly.
Norris looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
Hambleton gestured toward the uniforms.
“Don’t worry about it,” Norris said. “You’re going to be all right.”
The Vietnamese soldiers sensed his unease. One of them came closer to him. “Smoke, Colonel?” he asked in English.
The instant, junkie-like craving for tobacco momentarily blotted out any fear the American felt. He nodded. The soldier reached into his pocket and pulled out a red box. Marlboros. Hambleton sighed with pleasure.
The soldier selected a cigarette, put it between Hambleton’s lips, and lit it.
&
nbsp; The others cleaned Hambleton’s wounds and brought him food, which he devoured. Another ranger found a small bottle of wine and poured some for the airman.
“I was overcome with a flood of emotions,” Hambleton said. “I was so relieved and happy.” He called Norris over and promised, if he lived to be a thousand, he would do anything he could for him.
Suddenly Hambleton heard a high whistle, and a mortar round hit the outside of the bunker. Three of the soldiers leaned over Hambleton to protect him. He was moved. “Kindness needs no words in a time like that.” He could hear the rangers outside returning fire and more shells thudding into the base and striking the three-foot-thick concrete walls. Despite the bombardment, Hambleton no longer had to worry about evading the enemy. “I savored the thought that it was all over.” He began to think about returning home. And Gwen.
Norris got on the radio and called for an APC. The South Vietnamese officer on the other end said they wouldn’t come down to the bunker until the rockets stopped. The SEAL called the FAC and told him to send some fast movers at the NVA outposts that were dropping the mortars on them. The skies filled with American aircraft, all hitting the emplacement across the river. The rockets stopped.
As the APC approached, the sound of its metal tracks outside the bunker reminded Hambleton of the enemy tanks he’d heard moving along the roads when he was hiding in the stand of trees. The vehicle pulled up in front of the bunker and the men carried Hambleton out on the stretcher. Norris helped load him in, then he, Kiet, and the other two sea commandos boarded as well. A hatch above Hambleton’s head was pulled open and he could see the rangers riding on top of the APC, turning their heads this way and that, looking for the enemy. Occasionally he heard the report of an M16.
The APC bounced along the road for thirty minutes, reaching the city of Dong Ha, which was still under NVA attack, late that afternoon. It stopped, and the doors were pulled open. Men, Americans, came in and lifted Hambleton out on his stretcher. He saw the drooping rotor blades of a US Army medevac helicopter. He was overjoyed.
31
“Lay That Man Down”
The navigator heard a whirring sound; he turned his head to look. There were eight or nine television cameras and a cluster of men carrying microphones. The journalists walked with the stretcher as Hambleton was hurried toward the chopper. One asked about the men who’d died in the rescue operation. “It was a hell of a price to pay for one life,” Hambleton said. “I’m very sorry.”
The attendants loaded him onto the chopper and pulled the door shut. The engines whined, and Hambleton could hear the sound of small-arms fire. The pilot pulled back on his stick and the medevac helicopter lifted into the air. Hambleton saw concerned faces above him. A paramedic, then another. They pulled off his shirt and went to work on him, inserting a needle into his arm and another into his emaciated torso. They began to clean his wounds with disinfectant. Another face—a doctor?—lifted his hand and turned it, studying the pus-filled finger. Hambleton got a glimpse of the dark, swollen thing. The doctor shook his head. Hambleton wondered if he was going to amputate it. The doctor moved on to his left arm, which he discovered had been fractured from his fall down the hill when he’d first spotted the river.
The chopper landed next to a field hospital, and the airman was rushed into the emergency room. As the stretcher-bearers brought him in, Hambleton could see doctors and nurses gowned and scrubbed up and waiting for him. “Fifteen or 20 in all swarmed over me like a bunch of mechanics at the Indianapolis Speedway during a pit stop.” Hands removed the old dressings on his wounds and replaced them with fresh ones. Special creams were applied to his still-freezing feet to help with blood flow. Empty IV bottles were replaced with full ones. His blood pressure was taken and his wounds were reexamined.
After he’d been checked and rechecked, Hambleton’s stretcher was taken from the examining table and hoisted onto a cart. He was wheeled to another helicopter, this time an Air Force Jolly Green, waiting outside, the doctors and nurses walking alongside the cart, still working on him. Inside were more doctors and paramedics. The chopper flew him to another, better-equipped hospital at Da Nang.
Days before, Hambleton had worried that the military had forgotten him, but now he was in danger of being smothered with attention. “I was again given the royal treatment and wheeled into a ward,” he remembered. The airman was placed in the hallway while his accommodations were prepared. He looked around. There were seven or eight injured airmen in hospital beds, all craning their necks to see who the celebrity patient was. He smiled. He was delighted to be back among people again. He’d missed making small talk with the guys, and besides, he had the best goddamned rescue story in the history of the United States Air Force.
As he looked around, Hambleton noticed something. There were no empty beds in the hospital ward; he wondered where the doctors would put him. Finally he spotted some activity at the end of the ward; workers were pulling mops, buckets, and other janitorial supplies out of a small room. He watched as a cot appeared and was wheeled in. Then the attendants came and got Hambleton, carrying his stretcher into the room—which was really a broom closet, with no windows and bare cement walls—and laying it on the cart. They turned and left.
More nurses and doctors arrived. One of them handed Hambleton a mirror and he stared into it. “I saw a face I hardly recognized—sunken eyes and a . . . beard!” Emaciated and exhausted, he looked years older than he was.
After two hours of tests, Hambleton asked for some food. A nurse called an attendant and he brought two white paper cups. One contained chicken broth and the other “the most god-awful gelatin I ever tried to eat.” But he finished off both cups with gusto and washed the meal down with a Coca-Cola and a pitcher of water.
Finally, the last nurse left, closing the door behind her. But after days and nights on his own, Hambleton found the silence to be almost unbearable. When an attendant opened the door, he saw a handwritten sign taped to the other side: KEEP OUT. NO ADMITTANCE.
Obviously, Hambleton was being kept in isolation. But why? He asked the man what was going on. The attendant said some colonel had phoned the hospital and insisted that only medical personnel were to be allowed to see the navigator. That’s all he knew.
Hambleton was too exhausted to argue. He was alive. He was safe. He would soon see Gwen. After days of sleeping on the ground, he found the mattress and the feather pillow were too soft. He actually missed the hard ground of his hiding place in the copse of trees. But eventually he nodded off.
Word filtered out by radio and through base scuttlebutt that Hambleton had been rescued. The men at Korat and Joker and others on bases across Southeast Asia who had nothing to do with the mission were elated. The fifty-three-year-old airman had overcome long odds. He was free.
Andy Andersen was still recovering from his shrapnel wound when he heard the news. Soon after, his second-in-command, Major Gerald Bauknight, showed up at the hospital and told him about the talk he’d had with Colonel Frank Zerbe, and about Zerbe’s threats to leave them dangling in the wind if the mission failed. “Andersen said, ‘Well, I’m going over to Zerbe’s apartment right now.’” The Marine climbed in the jeep and the two men drove over to where Zerbe was staying. When they arrived, “Andersen went in there and chewed out the colonel, told him where to get off.” The fact that Clark and Hambleton were both safe—and that Andersen had been wounded in the operation—most likely saved the Marine from serious consequences from the military command.
With Zerbe dealt with to his satisfaction, Andersen searched out his fellow operatives who’d been risking their lives for months on end to rescue a living American. He gathered them up and brought them to an Officers’ Club to toast the mission’s success. “The whole group got together and got totally drunk,” Bauknight said. “They had a great old time celebrating.”
In Tucson, Gwen Hambleton was asleep. There had been a small incident earlier in the night. She’d woken and sat straight up in bed; so
mething prompted her to speak out into the darkness. “Hang in there, Gene,” Gwen said. “They’re coming.” Her dog Pierre stirred at the side of the bed. But all else was quiet. Gwen checked the clock. It was 11:30 p.m. She went back to sleep. At that moment, her husband was on the river, delirious and fearful, waiting for Norris.
Now, four hours later, something woke her again. She turned in the bed and realized it was the phone. She sat there, allowing the ringing to fill the room.
She had been preparing for this moment for days. The Air Force would call—especially in the middle of the night—only with significant news, either good or bad. The nightlight threw the wrinkles of the duvet into relief. She took a few seconds to compose herself, then found the base of the lamp on the night table next to her. She twisted the switch and light flooded the room. Then she reached for the phone.
“Gwen Hambleton speaking.”
The man on the other end introduced himself. He was a sergeant at the Casualty Affairs Office at the Air Force Military Personnel Center. He apologized for calling in the middle of the night. Gwen said nothing. “We’ve just received a message from the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing,” the sergeant said. “We have your husband.”
Gwen felt lightheaded. “Oh, dear God,” she said.
The sergeant asked if she was all right. She told him that yes, she was. He offered to have a doctor sent over from the base hospital at Davis-Monthan. “Thank you, no, Sergeant,” she said.
The man told her that Hambleton was now at Da Nang Air Base and that he was suffering from exhaustion and was badly dehydrated. He didn’t mention any other injuries. He gave her an address to send mail to and told her the details would be in a telegram that would reach her within the hour. Gwen thanked him and hung up.
Saving Bravo Page 24
