A Hollywood producer snapped up the rights. Charlton Heston, Dean Martin, and The Rockford Files’ James Garner all expressed interest in playing Hambleton, but the project eventually stalled. It wasn’t the right time. “In the eyes of ‘Tinseltown,’” said Anderson, “Vietnam was a dirty word.” The television actor Jack Webb, of Dragnet fame, picked up the option when it expired but died before he was able to do much with it. The rights were then sold to the country and western singer Jerry Reed, co-star of Smokey and the Bandit and famous for his hit “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft).” Reed was hardly the high-powered producer the movie needed. It seemed like the project was sinking into a dim B-list purgatory.
But Reed came through. By 1987 he’d arranged financing, signed a hot director named Peter Markle, decided on Malaysia as a shooting location, and announced that Gene Hackman had agreed to play the downed navigator. The pairing of the actor and the character seemed preordained; not only did the two men share the same first name and last initial, but Hackman had been raised in Danville, Illinois, not far from where the navigator had been born and lived before his family moved to the nearby town of Wenona. The two Genes were both midwestern boys who’d worked their way up in the world.
Hambleton was over the moon. After all, how many Americans had Gene Hackman play them in a Hollywood movie? The navigator flew out to the location as a technical adviser and relived his ordeal as it was painstakingly re-created in the Malaysian countryside. He bridled at some changes to the story: the filmmakers, for example, wanted to insert a knock-down argument between him and Gwen just before he shipped out to Korat, to make their reunion that much sweeter. “Gene would have no part of that,” says his sister-in-law. The scene never made it into the film.
When it came time for the premiere, Gene and Gwen flew out to Los Angeles. The film was almost as fiction-heavy as the book, but after the screening, he gave it his full endorsement. And Hackman? “He was a better me than me,” Hambleton said. He went out on the road to promote the movie and proved to be a good soldier, even if the truth about what had happened in Vietnam inevitably suffered onscreen. In one radio interview, the host asked Hambleton about the African American FAC (played by Danny Glover) who guides him home in the film:
“Are you still in touch with Captain Bartholomew?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Hambleton answered. “I’m never going to let him get away. My guardian angel? No way.”
“What’s he doing now, is he still in the Air Force?”
“He lives in Rochester, New York.”
“Really?”
“Yep. What he’s doing up there I don’t know but he lives in Rochester now.”
“Did you go to the premiere together?”
“He didn’t make it.”
“What did he think of the movie?”
“I’ve had a couple of letters from him and he thought it was just absolutely great.”
If Hambleton had simply been being droll, it would have been a strong performance. The tossed-off “he didn’t make it” was especially good. Captain Bartholomew didn’t make the premiere because, of course, he didn’t exist. But Hambleton’s remarks weren’t a bit ironic. He thought the film was wonderful. He thought Gene Hackman was wonderful. He must have seen such white lies as the price of his own Hollywood moment, the dream he’d had since Wenona of making it out and doing something truly big.
As he settled back into life in Tucson, Hambleton always denied that he suffered any lingering effects from his eleven days on the ground. “I think I’m pretty much the person I was before it started,” he told one interviewer. “It’s changed my mind about a few things, about first of all the horrors of war and it’s shown me anybody can do what they had to do when they have to do it.” But others noticed things. Four years after he returned, Gwen’s niece Vicky and her husband visited the couple in Tucson. Gene and Gwen welcomed them to their house, brought them into the living room, and sat down to talk. Soon Gene excused himself. Minutes later, the niece and her husband heard him in the bathroom, throwing up. They asked Gwen if he was sick. Gwen reminded them it was April second, four years to the day since Gene had been shot down.
There were other reminders. Sometimes, standing in the shower, he would hear a little plink sound and look down and see a piece of flak shrapnel that had worked its way out of his skin lying on the floor. But the anniversary was the toughest. The memories returned every year, along with the nausea.
For the families of the men who hadn’t returned, the news had come most often in the evening. Jim Alley’s parents were sitting in their home in Plantation, Florida, around 10:30 one spring night when the doorbell rang. It was an hour when the Alleys weren’t used to receiving visitors, and both thought immediately of their son. Mr. Alley stood up and walked toward the front entrance, but before he could reach it, he paused, then stopped. Despite his wife’s entreaties, he couldn’t make himself walk the last few feet to the door and turn the knob.
Mrs. Alley had to get up and answer the bell. When she opened the door, there were Air Force men standing on her doorstep. The men spoke a few words and handed her a telegram. Years later, Mrs. Alley retained a clear memory that the officers had behaved cruelly in the way they delivered the news of Jim’s disappearance, though she never said how. Perhaps they didn’t linger to talk about Jim, which was, above all, what she wanted. “This was our only son,” she wrote in a letter afterward. “He was a wonderful boy . . . We do not say this ’cause he was our son, but you had to know him to really know what I’m trying to tell you. He never got in any trouble . . . He made student of the year in the 12th grade. You don’t find many boys like our son was . . . He thought as much of us as we did him. He called me at least once a week, when he left for the service.”
The Air Force men didn’t ask about any of this, didn’t ask who the young man was whose death notice they were delivering. They handed over their message, turned, and left.
The news reached Centerburg, Ohio, around the same time. Hayden Chapman’s sister Beth was returning home about 11 p.m.; she’d been out with the girls from her job. As she pulled into the driveway, she saw her husband standing in the doorway of their home, the light behind him framing the outline of his darkened body. She ran up the steps and he told her what had happened to Jolly Green 67. “I just collapsed on the floor,” she said.
Chapman’s nephew Brad, who’d hero-worshipped Hayden and would eventually become an Air Force pilot himself as a tribute to his uncle, recalled the moment when he heard. “My sister Julie answered the phone and said it was Grandpa. My mom got on the phone and listened and then she put her head down on the table. I remember what clothes I was wearing that day. I remember where I was in the house. Our life and our world basically ended.”
Hayden’s sister Carol was listening to the radio when the announcer read a report of a Jolly Green being shot down in Vietnam. “It scared me.” She called her husband, who’d already received word of the crash. “You have to tell me,” she said to him. “Is it true?” When he said yes, Carol began to scream. “It scared my husband to death. He didn’t know what to do for me.” In her mind, she was seeing Hayden not as a grown man but as the child she and her sisters had doted on and fought with, their games of 1-2-3 played in the backyard in Centerburg until it got dark. “I thought, ‘That beautiful, beautiful boy.’” Many nights afterward, she would wake up and hear “blood-curdling screams” echoing in her bedroom and only after a few seconds realize it was her own voice making the sounds.
As the years passed, letters arrived for Hambleton from the families of the men who hadn’t returned. He conscientiously answered (and saved) the letters that the grieving wives and sons wrote him. His responses to their questions—What happened that day? Could my son still be alive?—were full and gracious. “Please keep in touch if there is ever anything that I can help you with,” he wrote Barbara Serex, daughter of Henry Serex, his Bat 21 crewmate. “Please don’t hesitate to call on me. I wish you much
good luck and nothing but happiness to you and your family.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Hambleton was invited to speak at Air Force survival and evasion schools across the country. He mixed easily with the younger airmen, who listened closely to his account of the Bat 21 ordeal. Often when he gave a speech, Hambleton would talk about the men who came to save him. He named them—Kulland, Alley, Chapman, and the rest—and gave quick bios of each one. He wanted the audiences to know a little about the airmen so that they wouldn’t just be names hurrying by in a narrative. When he got on the phone and spoke to a reporter about Chapman, who’d piloted Jolly Green 67, he was effusive. “I have been all over the country, and every place I go they use the word ‘hero.’ Well I am not. The heroes were Captain Chapman and his crew, Lt. Tom Norris of a SEAL team that picked me up . . . I can’t say enough about what Chapman was doing. I owe my life to him and all the other people involved.”
Then, beginning in 1994, something odd occurred. US military teams had returned to Southeast Asia to recover the remains of those who’d died in battle and whose bodies were never retrieved. On that list were the men involved in the Hambleton mission. In April 1994, the families of the men aboard Blueghost 39 were notified that remains of their loved ones had been found and would soon be brought back to the United States. And three years later, the bodies of the men from Jolly Green 67 were discovered and repatriated.
The news had a peculiar effect on Hambleton. Now in his speeches he talked about the eleven men’s sacrifice, but he stopped mentioning them by name. Before, he would give a little description of each of them, their hometowns, perhaps their rank. Small reminders of their individual lives. But now that their remains—bone fragments, in most cases—were being returned, he no longer did this. Perhaps the physical reminder of what had been lost was too much for him to bear. Perhaps it was the expectation that he would go to the airmen’s funerals and face their families and their children that distressed him.
When the organizers of the ceremonies contacted Hambleton and invited him to Arlington to welcome the men of Jolly Green 67 home, the ex-navigator told them he couldn’t make it. His excuses ranged from the barely adequate to the ludicrous-sounding: he had a previous speaking engagement, or he was miffed because the organizers wouldn’t send him a plane ticket.
Many of his fellow soldiers going to the ceremony were incensed. How could Hambleton stay away? These men had died trying to save him, and now he was too busy to welcome them home? No one could fathom it. One of the airmen who helped organize the Arlington ceremony, Darrel Whitcomb, personally called Hambleton and invited him to attend, but the retired officer declined. Hambleton never gave what his fellow airmen considered a good explanation for his absence.
It seemed, after all that had been done to keep him alive, like a slap in the face.
Why did Hambleton refuse? We can only surmise what was running through his mind; he never gave a reason that seemed convincing. Perhaps a clue can be found in the many letters from the mission members’ families, which he kept for decades at his home in Tucson. In late October 1974, Hambleton received a handwritten note from Jim Alley’s mother. In it, Mrs. Alley expressed her deep gratitude for an earlier letter from Hambleton and talked about the couple’s continuing bewilderment over Jim’s fate. Things had not gotten better in the years since Jim disappeared.
We cannot accept the fact that our son is dead. Only you know and we would like for you to tell us what really happened to the Jolly Green trying to rescue you! Would you help us locate the crash site? I’m planning on going over there . . . I pray every day that my son will be home soon. It’s been three years April 6th that he went down. I know on the news that we have boys still in prison over there, I pray our son is one of them. I would give my life for my son! . . . I always get a dozen roses and place them out by his flag pole, and we fly the flag. You know, sir, losing him and never getting anything of him is just about more than I can stand.
How could Hambleton face these men and women and tell them their loved one was surely already dead even before they got the telegram? That there was no hope of rest or peace for them? Meeting these people would be to confront what his moment in the sun had cost. It would be to consider the question “Am I really worth eleven lives?”
What could his answer possibly have been? Many of the men who’d died had children; he was childless. Many of them were just beginning their lives and careers; he was closer to the end of both. What did he have to show these families that could atone for the loss they woke to every day?
In private moments, the ex-navigator was tormented. “He was always very much embarrassed and concerned about the number of guys killed trying to get him out,” said his closest friend, Dennis Armstrong. “He wasn’t worth that and nobody was worth that. It shouldn’t have happened.” Hambleton was anguished that some of the men never had the chance to have families and the others never returned to see their children. “He was very sorry it happened. He had survivor’s guilt, absolutely. He broke down. He would cry.”
Armstrong recalled watching Hambleton talking to audiences about Bat 21. The airman was good at public speaking, personable and warm. His version of the events hit all the main points: the SAM exploding, the days in his hiding place, the long walk to the river. But when he reached the point in the story where his rescuers were killed, he would sometimes stop and turn away from the audience. Only after composing himself with some difficulty would he turn back and go on.
33
The Returns
The invasion of South Vietnam, the red fiery summer, raged for six more months, killing 25,000 civilians and turning a million Vietnamese villagers and townspeople into refugees. The North saw 100,000 of their soldiers killed or wounded; casualties in the South were double that. Supported by an aggressive air campaign pushed by President Nixon, who ordered the renewed bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong harbor and other shipping ports, the ARVN often fought bravely and well. The South Vietnamese generals launched a fierce counterattack in June and July, reclaiming much of the territory they’d lost in the spring. By October, the offensive was over.
Nixon’s aggressive strategy had risked a Soviet withdrawal from the spring summit planned for Moscow. But at the end of May, the meeting went ahead. Nixon and Kissinger flew to the Russian capital on Air Force One as the world watched and the television networks broadcast live coverage. On the first day of negotiations, after a boat ride on the Moscow River, the Americans met with Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Almost as soon as they sat down, the Soviet leaders launched into an extraordinarily bitter attack on their policies in Vietnam. “You are murderers!” Podgorny shouted. “There is blood of old people, women, and children on your hands. When will you finally end this senseless war?” It went on and on, at high volume, with each leader expressing his outrage in the most passionate terms. But Kissinger, listening closely, sensed all was not as it seemed. “For all the bombast and rudeness,” he later wrote, “we were participants in a charade. While the tone was bellicose and the manner extremely rough, none of the Soviet statements had any operational content . . . The Soviet leaders were not pressing us except with words. They were speaking for the record, and when they said enough to have a transcript to send to Hanoi, they would stop.”
He was correct. After Brezhnev and Podgorny ranted for several minutes, the shouting ceased and negotiations resumed in a much calmer tone. There was even a “joyous” dinner that night in which Russian vodka flowed freely and Nixon became so intoxicated that he only just managed to get out of the room without passing out. On May 26, 1972, the two countries agreed to an international arms control treaty known as SALT I, which, among other provisions, froze the number of ICBMs in each nation’s arsenal. The agreement was widely seen as a breakthrough and was praised even by the president’s enemies. “A FIRST STEP, BUT A MAJOR STRIDE” read the headline in the New York Times the next morning.
Nixon’s punish
ing counteroffensive, along with the signs of a détente between the United States and the two major communist powers, also pressed the leaders in Hanoi toward the negotiating table. On January 15, 1973, the White House announced that, in light of progress in the peace talks, the president was suspending military operations in Vietnam and the final withdrawal of American troops would commence. Twelve days later, the United States and the government of North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords; by the end of March, the last American combat troops left the country, after 58,220 of their fellow soldiers, and millions of Vietnamese combatants and civilians, had been killed. The war, for the Americans, had ended.
Nixon had gotten what he wanted, an “honorable” exit from the war. But the consequences for the South Vietnamese were dire, as the Americans knew. The South had barely been able to fight off the Easter Offensive with the full backing of the USAF. How could it survive once the planes and the pilots left? When he read the details of the agreement, Prime Minister Thieu of South Vietnam flew into a rage. Feeling betrayed by Nixon, he refused to sign. Nixon, who’d won a landslide victory in the 1972 election, attempted to sway Thieu with promises of military supplies and millions of dollars in aid. The Vietnamese leader knew that he had few good options; if he refused to sign the peace deal, the Americans could walk away without giving his regime anything at all. Eventually, he conceded.
In the next two years, the North Vietnamese, in violation of the peace accords, secretly built up their forces with the aid of both China and the USSR. The NVA swept south, taking provincial capitals on their way to Saigon. Rumors of beheadings and mass executions filtered through the city. South Vietnamese soldiers stripped off their uniforms and flung them onto the streets, and civilians threw rocks at Marines in their trucks as they sped by, furious that the Americans were leaving.
Saving Bravo Page 26
