Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  Gwen began to weep, crouched over on the bed. Her dog Pierre watched her, fully awake now. She sobbed for several minutes.

  After she’d composed herself, Gwen stood up and went to the bathroom, where she washed her face and combed her hair. Feeling refreshed, she went to her closet, found the brand-new dressing gown that she’d purchased for her trip to Bangkok, and put it on. Then she walked through the house, turning on all the lights. It was the middle of the night in Tucson, but the windows of the Hambleton house blazed as if a gala party were in progress.

  Gwen ended up in the living room, where she went to the stereo and turned it on. Music filled the room. She walked to the couch, turned, and sat down.

  After Hambleton had breakfast the next day, a visitor was announced. He was an official from the Department of Defense, and he asked questions for thirty or forty minutes. A larger team from military intelligence followed soon after to conduct a standard debrief of his escape and evasion experience. They talked for three hours. Later, a typed memorandum of the meeting was delivered to his room for Hambleton to read over and approve. The navigator never revealed what he and the intelligence officers spoke about, but he did say he believed that his background had played a part in the intensity of the rescue mission. “I’ve had some pretty sensitive jobs,” he said. “I had access to plans that not too many people had access to,” and with his memory for detail, he’d “never forgotten them.”

  After the intel guys had said their good-byes, six men—lieutenants and captains—walked into the room. Hambleton didn’t recognize any of them; they certainly weren’t from his squadron. One by one, the men gave their names, but he still had no idea who they were. Finally, one of them spoke up. “We’re the O-2s and the FAC boys, sir.” These were the men who’d watched over him for eleven days.

  “No!” Hambleton said. “Really?”

  One of the men reached into his back pocket and handed Hambleton a water bottle. Hambleton unscrewed the cap and tasted the contents. It was a Manhattan. He sipped the cocktail, laughing and talking with the other officers. He recognized some of the voices.

  Hambleton found it hard to express his feelings adequately to the men who’d guided him out of danger to the safety of this room. “I had always bragged I wasn’t the emotional type,” he said. But in front of the half-dozen men who had worked so diligently to save him, he was overcome with gratitude. He reached out and shook each man’s hand, wishing he could convey to them the deep thankfulness he felt.

  The next night, the base came under attack. A shower of NVA rockets detonated, shaking the hospital. The explosions were close and loud. Hambleton lay tensed in his bed, terrified that having survived his long ordeal behind enemy lines, he was now going to be taken out by an ordinary bomb. But the mortars soon ebbed away.

  The following day, an ambulance took him to the flight line and he boarded a plane for Clark Air Base in the Philippines. One of the first things he asked to do there was to call Gwen. The administrators agreed and the navigator dialed her number. But he ended up with an earful of static; the call wouldn’t go through. After a few failed attempts, Hambleton asked a Red Cross official in the hospital for help. The official spent a frustrating hour trying to reach Tucson, but in the end all he could promise was that a telegram would be sent.

  Once he arrived at Clark, Hambleton was eager to keep going all the way back to the United States, but the doctors at the base were concerned that the eighteen pounds he’d put on since his return was mostly water weight. They worried that the water might get into his lungs on a long flight, so they decided to hold him a few extra days. Hambleton, lonely and still weak, agreed.

  That night, at 3 a.m., the navigator was lying in his bed when the walls around him began to shake. He snapped awake: the medicine bottles in the cabinets were chattering like castanets, the glass clinking louder and louder. An earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale was rolling through Manila. The dresser and the other furniture in the room began swaying, and outside he could hear a low, powerful rumble. Hambleton thought to himself that he was surely cursed; everywhere he went, disaster followed.

  Hambleton was gaining his weight back, and each day he felt a little stronger. His finger and shoulder wound had fully healed. Finally, he was able to call Gwen. She told him what she’d been going through, the terror of seeing the Air Force officials pulling into her driveway, the wait to hear if he’d survived that first day on the ground. “Thank God he’s alive” was all she could think when the Air Force told her they’d maintained voice contact with him. She’d been praying every day for his rescue.

  Gwen recounted the friends calling her and wishing her strength. And she told him that she’d willed herself not to cry during the entire ordeal, perhaps believing it would be a sign of weakness. It wasn’t until she learned that he’d been rescued that she hung up the phone and, sitting in her bed alone, began to weep. “But for joy,” she told Hambleton.

  Gwen told him that one day toward the end of his days behind enemy lines, a feeling had come over her. She’d said to herself, Gene has what it takes to survive. Hambleton thought back later on that part of the conversation. “I’m no believer in ESP,” he said, but he synced up her conviction that he was going to make it and found it had occurred at the exact time he decided to go with the Air Force plan for him to walk toward the river.

  While Hambleton was still in the hospital, he got a call from his wing commander in Thailand, who asked him if he could stop back at Korat before he returned home to the States. The Bat 21 event was already changing how rescue missions were conducted. “This episode absolutely stunned the rescue community,” says military historian Darrel Whitcomb. “The message was: There are places helicopters can’t go.” Search and rescues had to be approached as combat events, and other options besides the Jolly Greens had to be contemplated. The commander wanted Hambleton to speak to his airmen and talk about his evasion techniques so that they might survive when the rescue choppers weren’t able to come for them. Hambleton badly wanted to get to Tucson, but he agreed. “I am an Air Force man,” he said. He was carried out of the hospital on a stretcher and loaded aboard a plane headed for Thailand.

  As the plane came in for its landing at Korat, Hambleton propped himself on his elbows and looked out the small window. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. Every fellow in my squadron who wasn’t flying was there. Along with them were the F-4 and F-105 boys.” Hambleton was moved, and “mighty happy.” He was glad to be alive, but it was just beginning to register on him that his ordeal meant something to thousands of ordinary airmen still fighting the war.

  Two corpsmen came aboard and took either end of his stretcher as a nurse stood by him. Hambleton saw two figures climbing up the ramp: his wing and squadron commanders. The first man saw the two soldiers gripping the handles of the stretcher and said, “Lay that man down. He ain’t going to be carried off this airplane.”

  The men laid the stretcher down and Hambleton slowly got to his feet. He was wearing hospital pajamas, and he felt awkward at the thought of facing his friends and crewmates in such clothing. The wing commander had anticipated this: he’d brought with him a pair of jungle boots, a squadron hat, and a new flight suit complete with patches. He gave them to Hambleton, saying, “You’re going to walk off.” Hambleton nodded and pulled on the flight suit. His legs were shaking; he hadn’t yet built up the muscle he’d lost while on the run. But once he was dressed, his boots on, his cap firmly affixed, he took a few steps down the ramp, flanked by the two commanders.

  As he made his way toward the tarmac, Hambleton was startled by a roar. The men standing below him erupted in a burst of applause and shouting. “It was the greatest ovation of my life,” he said. Hambleton waved to the men. As he did, he felt a pang of remorse. “I thought quickly . . . that I shouldn’t be getting all the cheers. They belonged to all those boys who did all the work to pull me out of that trouble.”

  When the squadron dudes quieted down, Hambleton spoke.
He thanked the men for the welcome but added that it was the pilots and corpsmen and the pararescuemen who’d gone after him that they should be applauding. Then he was whisked into the wing commander’s vehicle and driven to the Officers’ Club. It was time for some de rigueur Air Force partying.

  As Hambleton walked in, he saw signs on the walls welcoming him home. The tables and chairs had been pushed back, and the men began to surge in behind him, the pitch of conversation rising steadily as more airmen poured in. Officers came over and shook his hand and congratulated him and laughed and asked him questions about the eleven days. He spent the next hour with a circle of constantly changing airmen grouped around him, listening intently to his stories. For them, he was the embodiment of a great and unspoken thing they were all part of: the intense devotion of one American fighting man to his brothers.

  After an hour, he could feel his strength fading. The squadron’s flight surgeon had been watching him closely and offered him the use of his old hooch as a place to rest. Hambleton gratefully accepted and said good-bye to his fellow airmen. It had been a wonderful party.

  Hambleton spent ten days at Korat, giving talks to hundreds and hundreds of airmen as they returned from their missions. (Several of the airmen he spoke to would later that year face their own “escape and evade” ordeals as the air offensive continued.) Then he boarded a C-9 plane back to Clark and then on to Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield, California. The next morning he flew the final leg of his journey to Davis-Monthan. When he emerged from the airplane, he saw throngs of people waving, and a volley of cheering washed over him. Newspaper photographers and television cameramen rushed toward the Jetway. A convertible waited to take him on a motorcade through the city.

  He smiled broadly, searching the crowd for Gwen. He’d been longing to see her for many weeks. He’d imagined whole conversations with her when he was fading in and out of consciousness on the river, and now he wanted to hold her, talk to her. He spotted his wife running toward him. She was wearing a dark blue dress with white and red piping, a white bag hanging off her right arm. Gwen had clearly thought about her outfit; she meant to be seen wearing the colors of the American flag.

  He felt his throat tighten. “Those hallucinations couldn’t possibly equal the real thing.” Gwen came running up to him and the two embraced, Gene pulling her close. A photographer for the local paper snapped a series of pictures of the two, Gene thin in his flight suit and dark blue Air Force cap, a white hospital band around his right wrist. In the first, he’s embracing Gwen—her back is to the photographer—and is whispering something in her ear. Her arms gently encircle his waist, and she seems partially collapsed into his taller frame. In the second, they’ve begun to walk away from the plane, and he has his right arm wrapped around her shoulder and is pulling her tight to him, his face partly turned away from the camera. She is quite clearly crying. It’s only in the third shot, when they are walking, he with his left hand in his pocket, that her lips show the beginning of a smile. But her eyes are closed and she has the expression of a child who is trying to appear happy although she is still feeling some kind of sorrow or pain. “She suffered worse than I did,” Gene would later say. The photographs attest to this.

  32

  Beyond a Normal Call of Duty

  At fifty-three, Gene Hambleton was a certified war hero. Correspondents for CBS News and other networks were waiting in Tucson to talk to him and marvel at his survival; the interviews appeared on the national news that night. Newspapers across the country and as far away as Bangkok and São Paulo ran stories about the airman, with headlines such as “RESCUED U.S. NAVIGATOR BARELY ESCAPED N. VIETS” and “11DAYS BEHIND ENEMY LINES.” A piece even ran in the Bloomington Pantagraph, one of the newspapers read in Hambleton’s hometown of Wenona, Illinois, which must have pleased him no end, and another in Piper City, Illinois, where Gwen was from. The rescue “brought jubilation to headquarters officers who have had little to cheer about,” wrote one reporter, while another said that Hambleton “was a symbol to the men of his unit and the whole service of one American fighting unbelievable odds.” Weeks later, the navigator told reporters that he’d been unable to pay for a meal, a cocktail, or a pack of cigarettes since he got back. “It’s kind of embarrassing, actually,” he said. “I’ve only spent $6.13 in over a month.”

  There were welcome-home banners strung in Tucson and a large family party in Illinois. At a ceremony attended by the top Air Force officers, he was awarded a sparkling array of medals: the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal, and a Purple Heart, all at once. Journalists drove out to his father’s place to interview the old man. For once, Iceal Sr. had warm words for his son, telling an Illinois journalist “how great it was” to know that Hambleton was safe. “He thought enough of this country to fight for it,” he said approvingly. Hambleton clipped and saved both stories. “For some reason,” wrote one columnist, “certain individuals are called to give beyond a normal ‘call of duty.’” The navigator had become one of the elect.

  Gwen invited reporters into her living room and told them the mission had been “fantastic . . . miraculous.” She thanked the Air Force, the Marines, and the other services involved: “They have accomplished something that must have seemed impossible.” Reporters found Hambleton upbeat, exhilarated to be alive. “I never lost hope,” he told the Arizona Daily Star. “I knew I would come out of there.”

  Everywhere the navigator went, people stopped him and asked about the eleven days and the run to the river. “He wasn’t a bragger,” said his close friend Dennis Armstrong, “but if someone brought it up, he would talk about it.” Old Air Force buddies wrote him from all over the world. “I was really shocked to see your name in the paper,” wrote one USAF officer from São Paulo, including with the letter some news clips about the rescue from the Brazil Herald. “SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING TO GET THEIR NAME IN THE HEADLINES,” read a telegram from his pals at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. “WE DID NOTICE THAT YOU FAILED TO SHAVE AND THAT YOUR UNIFORM WAS REALLY TERRIBLE.”

  The navigator’s saga represented a victory in a war that had produced so few. The feeling that American airmen had when he was on the run—that man is giving the North Vietnamese pure hell—now radiated out into the general American public. People wanted to sit with him, touch him, hear him speak. And Hambleton didn’t disappoint. He recounted the events of his journey to the river with suitable drama and encouraged his listeners to draw the same lesson he had from it. “You never know how strong you are,” he told them. “You never know how long you could hold out.”

  Hambleton did revel in the attention. He even filled out the paperwork and ordered a vanity license plate from the state of Arizona that read “Bat 21.” People in Tucson would spot the plate and wave to him, and he would pull over and they’d talk for a while. He traveled all around the country for speaking engagements—recounting his ordeal to military men and their wives, to high schools, Air Force cadets, ROTC programs. He appeared at grammar schools and children wrote him to ask how he was doing now and to thank him for his courage. As far as old-fashioned American glory went, it was everything he could have asked for.

  One part of his return didn’t go as smoothly as the rest. He and Gwen occasionally made it up to New Hampshire to see his brother Gil and his family, and though his nieces and nephews still reveled in the visits, there were new tensions in the house. Gene liked to talk about the shootdown and the rescue with Gil and his kids; he couldn’t help himself. He’d been the overlooked Hambleton for so many years, living in the shadow of his brother’s World War II exploits, and now it was his turn to shine a little. “I always thought it was Gene’s way of saying, ‘I’m an important person and just as successful as my brother,” Gil’s daughter Sharon says. “But my father always felt Gene overplayed the whole thing.” Gil was quiet and serious and had never talked much about the flights over Germany, the darkness lit up by AAA, the dead squadron mates. And s
o he listened to Gene talk about the Vietnamese patrols—“There were times I could reach out and touch them”—and the F-4s and all of it in complete silence. Sharon could feel his disapproval. “He always felt that Gene should have been a little more humble about it.”

  Hambleton was not going to be humble. He was rightfully proud of how he’d handled himself on the ground. Even Tommy Norris himself had praised him for his tenacity. “I certainly admire the man,” Norris said. “He deserves a lot of credit.” Hambleton felt he’d proven something that had long been in doubt: he had what it took. He’d nearly gotten killed a few different ways in Vietnam, and he wasn’t going to hide his light under a bushel for anyone.

  After a year, Hambleton retired from the Air Force. An author, William Anderson, approached him to write his life story. The two worked steadily on the project, then sold the hardcover rights to Prentice-Hall, and BAT-21 appeared in the fall of 1980. The first 25,000 copies sold out almost immediately, and foreign editions were printed in half a dozen countries, including France and Japan. The book was selected for a number of book clubs and became a selection of the Literary Guild of America. Reader’s Digest published a condensed version. “The world is hungry for heroes,” said Anderson.

  Despite Hambleton’s cooperation, the book was partly fictionalized; Anderson created composite characters, dreamed up events, and invented pages of dialogue. In the story, Hambleton remains clearheaded and in control until the end, something that amused Tommy Norris no end. (“He wouldn’t have gotten out of there,” the SEAL said, “if someone didn’t come get him.”) Anderson also created a fictional African American FAC named Captain Bartholomew, who guides Hambleton throughout the entire eleven-day operation. In the final pages, Hambleton meets Bartholomew for the first time and exclaims, “Well, I’m a son of a . . . you’re black!” Bartholomew replies, “Well, waddaya know. So I am.”