Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  The final attack on Saigon began on April 29, 1975. People offered American soldiers gold and jewels to let them inside the US embassy compound, while diplomatic officials fed CIA documents into the furnace, along with millions of dollars in cash. The airport was being strafed by NVA rockets and the runways became unusable. The next day, helicopters ferried the American ambassador, Graham Martin, and the last of the Vietnamese refugees to the ships of the Seventh Fleet, anchored offshore.

  The last contingent of Marines guarding the embassy grounds ran up the building’s stairs, snapping locks shut on each floor before moving higher. Then, unsure whether they’d been forgotten, the soldiers sat on the roof passing around a bottle of whiskey before finally hearing the chop of rotors descending from above. Their commander, Master Sergeant Juan Valdez, was the last man aboard the helicopter as it rose into the sky. As they flew toward the sea, the Marines watched the capital burning below them.

  As part of the agreement, American POWs returned home in 1973. One of them was José Astorga, the door gunner on Blueghost 39 who’d been wounded in the effort to save Hambleton. Astorga had spent a difficult year in a prison near Hanoi, a year he wished to forget. Before being captured, he’d learned the skills of a mechanic, which he hoped would lead to a job and an ordinary life back in the States. But that didn’t happen. “I was depressed, I was hallucinating,” he said. Classic PTSD symptoms emerged: Astorga would dream about the helicopter crash and the NVA soldiers pointing their guns at him in the hole as the chopper burned, and he would die in his dreams and his crew would burn up all over again.

  Astorga managed to get a civil service job, but after three months he walked into his boss’s office and resigned. “People didn’t understand,” he said. “I wasn’t able to adjust to society. Mentally, I couldn’t do it. Something’s wrong and I didn’t know what.” He felt guilty about his crewmates: Paschall, Frink, Kulland. He called their families and spoke about their loved ones, but in the back of his mind he always wondered if he could have saved the men. His mind dwelled, for large parts of the day, in Vietnam.

  Astorga now lives in San Diego with his family. He’s never held another job in the more than forty years he’s been back. The ordeal destroyed romantic relationships in his twenties and thirties; he was far too erratic, too haunted to sustain one.

  His path had changed so drastically on that spring day in 1972 that it could almost be said that one life ended and another, darker one began in the air over the Mieu Giang River. But he never regretted going after Hambleton. “It was worth it,” he said. “We got him out.”

  After marching for days, Bill Henderson, the downed OV-10 pilot, ended up in a tiny room in a North Vietnamese prison. His face began to heal and his eyebrows and mustache, which had been burned off by the explosion, grew back.

  There had been random moments of terror on the way north. In one village, some guys in shiny suits—obviously intelligence operatives—put a gun to the pilot’s head. “You will answer our questions,” one of them said. “I’ve answered all the questions I can,” Henderson replied. The man dropped the gun. The American was taken to a plantation outside Hanoi and put in a nine-foot-by-nine-foot room.

  The small cell was covered with ceramic tiles, which radiated the heat even after the sun went down. He lost weight rapidly. Boils appeared all over his torso and limbs, even on the inside of his eyelids. His body lost the ability to sweat; in the summer afternoons when the heat reached 120 degrees, his temperature shot up until he thought he would pass out.

  The American was eating mostly pumpkin and what he suspected was rat meat. He was tortured, but he found the abuse to be “superficial and hilarious.” The guards would come in and slap him around and stuff him into small boxes, where he’d have to crouch over to fit, but it was nothing that survival training hadn’t prepared him for.

  His room was covered with Vietnamese jumping spiders, and at night he could hear rats scurry across the floor, sometimes crawling over his leg or arm. But the heat was worse; he felt he was literally putrefying during the long afternoons. “I said to myself, ‘Am I going to stay here and rot until the rats eat me?’” About two months into his captivity, depression washed over him. There seemed no way out of that room and back to America.

  The weeks and months passed slowly. Shut away from the world, Henderson had time to think about his path in life, hours and hours in which he spent considering his career as a military aviator. “It reset me,” he said. Perhaps it was the emergence of a long-buried desire, or the suffering he experienced or the suffering he witnessed, but in that tiny room Henderson decided he no longer wished to be a shit-hot pilot delivering the smash from thirty thousand feet. After a year in the prison, he was released and returned home a slightly different man. “Before I was shot down, I would have stayed in the Air Force. Flying, really flying, there’s nothing better.” But it no longer seemed like quite enough. “I said, ‘That’s great, but so what? I thought about what I wanted to do. How can I help people?”

  Henderson went back to school and became an organizational psychologist. He reunited with his wife, and they had three children. He suffered no symptoms of PTSD or regrets about his part in the war, but he did carry with him a card containing a prayer to one of the angels he believed had spoken to him in the plane after the missile struck. It didn’t make him any more religious, but it did give him a feeling of being watched over.

  He felt no bitterness toward Hambleton. Nothing needed to be said. “If you’re going to hang your ass out there,” he concluded more than four decades after the ordeal, “you expect your compadres to come after you.”

  34

  “As Comrades”

  Gene Hambleton spent his time golfing, churchgoing, and being with Gwen. He had a regular group of buddies who met at the local barber shop to shoot the bull and tell Air Force stories. But his ordeal in Vietnam had made him less sociable; he stayed home more often. “It changed him,” Gwen told a friend. The couple’s devotion to and dependence on each other only grew.

  In the spring of 2002, Gwen was diagnosed with lung cancer and began chemotherapy. The prognosis was grim; both Gwen and Gene were lifelong smokers. As Gwen grew sicker, the two became distraught at the thought of leaving each other. “She fought for every day,” said her sister Mary Ann Anderson. “She struggled to live because she knew that he needed her.” Gene stopped doing much of anything except caring for his wife; as she grew thinner, he fed her, bathed her, and spent long hours by her bedside.

  In the fall of 2003, Gene received the same diagnosis. After speaking with his doctor, Gene refused treatment. “He told me he had a spot on his lung but he wasn’t going to do anything about it,” said his niece Pam. He felt the chemo would take the physical strength he needed to look after his wife. “It didn’t surprise me,” Pam said. “They’d been through everything together.”

  One of the last things he wrote to Gwen was a card for her birthday. “Honey, I do love you and always have. Thank you so much for a very wonderful 61 years we have had together.” One Sunday, he slipped away to attend church. While he was there, ushering, Gwen’s sister came in and told him that his wife was failing. He ran to see Gwen, but she was dead by the time he reached her bedside.

  Gene was sick at heart. “I knew when she died, he wouldn’t make it a year,” said his friend Dennis Armstrong. Nine months after his wife’s death, Gene came down with pneumonia. He was brought to Tucson Medical Center, where he passed away on September 19, 2004. His ashes were interred next to his wife’s at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois which had been built on the site of the old Joliet Arsenal, where the two had met years before. His congregation, the Spanish Trail Lutheran Church, put a note on their message board that sat on the church’s front lawn. “BAT21HAS BEEN RESCUED,” it read.

  One of the last to return home was Jim Alley. In the spring of 2010, forensic teams searching the field where Jolly Green 67 had crashed found a number of bone fragments. They
notified the Alleys and the families of other crew members that the remains would be returned to them and asked for a family member to be sent to Hawaii to receive them.

  Alley’s father—who’d kept his son’s yellow ’67 Camaro in his garage for decades—had passed away two years earlier. “My dad had the perfect family, and then Jim died,” said Jim’s brother, Tim. “Everything just went downhill. In pictures, you see that he never smiled again.” Alley’s mother was in a nursing home suffering from the final stages of Alzheimer’s. His sister wanted nothing to do with the ceremony; that part of her life was over. So Tim was left to fly to Hawaii, where JPAC, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, is headquartered.

  After Jim was reported missing, the family had followed his wishes and adopted a baby boy. Tim had been born to a cousin of the family, a single mom who felt she was too young to care for him; the Alleys took him in as their own when he was six weeks old. Tim grew up knowing that he was a replacement of sorts, a living reminder of the boy who hadn’t returned. “He was this hero I could never live up to,” he said. The Alleys were strict with their young son. Tim’s childhood was conditioned by the unspoken demand that he not die. When he finished high school, he took the Marine Corps exam, passed it, and announced to his family that he was going to join up. “I wanted to be like Jim,” he said. “But my father told me they’d already lost one son and weren’t going to lose another.” Tim became a fireman instead.

  When the day arrived, he boarded a Delta flight in Fort Myers. He was happy to be on his way, eager even. “I’d looked up to my big brother my entire life,” he said. When he arrived in Honolulu after the seventeen-hour flight, he was met by the Air Force mortuary personnel and brought to his hotel. The next morning, he went to JPAC’s facility. He took a tour of the lab, met the commander, shook the hands of the service members. After the tour was over, the director asked him, “Would you like to meet your brother?”

  The remains were waiting in a funeral chapel on the base. Tim entered and stood nervously as two soldiers approached him carrying a green wool military blanket. When the soldiers got closer, he could see that four or five bone fragments had been placed on the blanket, including a piece of a human femur. The soldiers showed the remains to Tim, turned, and put the blanket in an open silver casket that stood on a trolley. Tim approached and saw that inside was a blue Air Force uniform, laid out on the white silk lining as if it covered the body of an airman. The medals Jim had earned were pinned to the chest. “I broke down there a couple of times,” Tim said. He reached into the casket and touched the bones. “I put my hand on Jim and told him good-bye and said I was glad to bring him home.”

  The casket was loaded onto the Delta flight. The plane landed at Fort Myers and Tim was allowed off first; Jim’s casket was put in a hearse right there on the tarmac. The hearse left the airport with Tim riding behind in another vehicle, a sheriff’s car leading the small procession as it headed north. Each county they passed through along the route sent an official vehicle to accompany the hearse. When the cars came to the Charlotte County line, Tim felt a light pressure on his eardrums, the chop of helicopter rotors agitating the air. He glanced out the window and saw a Vietnam-era Huey hovering at the front of the procession.

  Exhausted, wrung out, Tim looked at the big chopper and the flashing blue lights of the police car ahead passing through towns whose streets Jim and his friends had ridden down in their Pontiac Tempests and Ford GT40 Mark IIIs in the months before Vietnam. He knew that even this small motorcade wouldn’t have happened in the early seventies, when Jim had died. The bitterness of those years had largely faded, allowing his brother to become not a symbol of an ill-starred war but simply a soldier returning to his old haunts. “It was more like a homecoming that should have happened back then,” Tim said. The sound of the Huey thrummed in the air until the hearse reached the county line, then the chopper flared its rotors and turned back, and fire trucks from Tim’s department took over and escorted his brother to the funeral home in the small city of Arcadia. There the rest of the family, those still alive after these many years, were waiting to wake Jim Alley.

  A lot of people had come to the funeral home, some of whom hadn’t even known Jim but wanted to pay their respects regardless. For hours, the men and women talked and sat and milled about. Finally, toward late afternoon, the last mourner spoke to Mrs. Alley and walked out into the parking lot, and Tim and his mother were left alone. Tim asked the funeral director to open the casket; his mother took a red rose and placed it inside. Tim had found a photograph of his father, mother, sister, and himself; now he put it down on the blue wool of the uniform, so the Alleys would be together, at least this once, the snapshot plus the remains forming a wholly intact family that never existed in space and time. Then Tim placed a plastic model car next to the photograph, the same toy-sized yellow ’67 Camaro that Jim had kept in his room, a reminder of his dream car and of a time before his draft notice arrived in the mail, before the reports of a shootdown near the Mieu Giang, before everything.

  Tommy Norris stayed in Vietnam and, six months later, set out on an intelligence mission behind enemy lines with three South Vietnamese sea commandos and another young SEAL, Petty Officer Michael Thornton. After landing their rubber boat on the seashore, the soldiers came under fire from a large contingent of NVA and were forced to fight their way back to the beach. The men became separated; Norris was firing at the NVA alongside one of the commandos when a bullet struck him behind the left ear, shattering his left eye socket and blowing off most of his forehead. He fell to the ground.

  The South Vietnamese soldier who’d been left with Norris saw his grievous injury and, assuming the American had been killed, ran off, leaving him alone and unconscious in the path of the approaching enemy. When the soldier told Thornton what had happened, the American raced four hundred yards back to where Norris lay and found his fellow SEAL. “The whole side of his head was completely gone,” Thornton said. “I thought Tommy was dead.” Thornton shot two NVA soldiers charging toward the position, threw his fellow SEAL over his shoulder, and ran back across open beach to the sea, firing his gun as he went. There he and another wounded American fought off about 150 enemy soldiers, waded into the water, and swam for hours before being picked up by the American cruiser Newport News.

  After he was pulled aboard, Thornton carried the unconscious SEAL down through the ship to the surgery and laid him on the operating table. The doctor on call looked at Norris and came over to Thornton. “Mike, there’s no way he’s gonna make it,” he said. But the salt water had cleaned the SEAL’s wounds and the sun and the warmth of Thornton’s body had prevented him from going into shock. Norris survived, to the astonishment of his caregivers. Later, a doctor would seek him out to tell him his stubbornness was almost an affront to medicine. “We didn’t think we were gonna save you,” he said. “But you just wouldn’t give up.” A year later, Thornton was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery.

  Norris returned stateside and spent years in hospitals trying to recover from his wounds. He’d lost his left eye and even some brain matter in the skirmish at the beach, and now began a series of grueling reconstructive surgeries to repair the damage. He wanted badly to stay in the Navy, but the service determined that his injuries were too severe and retired him. Norris entered a kind of limbo. His doctors told him his wounds prevented him from working, and he experienced severe headaches that would completely immobilize him. Four years after the Hambleton mission, the thirty-two-year-old Norris was living with his parents, unable to move on from the war, his face still bearing the scars of his ordeal. Still, Norris was humble. “My injury,” he said, “when you see the death and destruction to other people that you see in a war—I mean, what I have is nothing. So I lost an eye and part of my brain and had some other bodily injuries, but what is that? I have another eye. You just go on.”

  As he slowly recovered, the stories about his rescue of Hambleton and Clark continued to circulate in ready roo
ms and American base camps around the world. Finally, the Navy asked Norris to write up his memories of the rescue so he could be recommended for the Medal of Honor. He refused. He didn’t feel that the act of saving Clark and Hambleton qualified him for the medal. The two parties went back and forth. The Navy was frankly exasperated with Tommy Norris. Who refuses the highest honor his country has to bestow? Finally, they told the ex-SEAL they were going to put him in for the medal whether he submitted his memories of the rescue or not. Norris relented.

  The ceremony took place on March 6, 1976, at the White House. President Gerald Ford read out the citation, which praised Norris’s “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action,” before hanging the gold medal with its five-pointed star around Norris’s neck on its pale blue ribbon. Norris, characteristically, never thought he was worthy of the honor. “I don’t feel that I was anybody special,” he said. “It was a time and a place and a mission that needed to be accomplished, and I was fortunate to be the one that was successful in that.”

  Norris was a legend but also basically an invalid. He couldn’t get a job. Finally, in the late 1970s, he went in for an interview with the FBI; his college major had been criminal justice, and he’d always dreamt of becoming an agent. It seemed hopeless; he was past the maximum age for applicants, and he couldn’t even meet the basic physical requirements. The agency had only ever employed one other one-eyed agent in its entire history, and it wasn’t looking for a second.

  Norris wouldn’t take the FBI’s gentle “no” for an answer. He wrote the director of the FBI, William Webster, and asked for a chance. “Surprisingly, he wrote back and said, if you can pass the same tests as anybody else applying to this organization, I’ll waive your disability.” Norris passed the exam, aced the physical protocol, went through his interview, and was placed in the queue of eligible agents. Finally, he was selected for the 1979 class at Quantico.