Saving Bravo
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Southeast Asia, April 1972
Positions of Hambleton and Others, April 1972
Prologue
Gene
Midwestern
Rocket Man
Korat
The Boys in the Back
The Time of Useful Consciousness
Ernie Banks
Blueghost 39
Tucson
Blowtorch Jockeys
Dark Knights
Joker
Yesterday’s Frat Boy
“Their Glowing Trajectories”
Tiny Tim
Futility
“I Know We’re Going to Die”
Low Bird
The Division
The Swanee
The Real John Wayne
The Hurricane Lover
When the Moon Goes over the Mountain
The First at Tucson National
Dark Encounter
Photos
The Grove
Clark
Places Like the Moon
Zeroed In
Esther Williams
“Some Kind of Rescue”
The Sampan
Journey’s End
“Lay That Man Down”
Beyond a Normal Call of Duty
The Returns
“As Comrades”
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Chronology
Appendix B: Walker and Potts
Notes
Index
Sample Chapter from THE BLACK HAND
Buy the Book
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Stephan Talty
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Talty, Stephan, author.
Title: Saving Bravo : the greatest rescue mission in Navy SEAL history / Stephan Talty.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006365 (print) | LCCN 2018007171 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328866271 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328866721 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Search and rescue operations. | Hambleton, Gene (Iceal Eugene), 1918–2004. | Search and rescue operations—Vietnam | United States. Navy. SEALs—Search and rescue operations—Vietnam. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Vietnam War. | HISTORY / Military / Special Forces. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century.
Classification: LCC DS559.8.S4 (ebook) | LCC DS559.8.S4 T35 2018 (print) | DDC 959.704/342—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006365
Book design by Emily Snyder
Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.
Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover photographs © Getty Images (Navy Seal pin); Shutterstock (soldier and palm trees)
Author photograph © Nathacha Vilceus
v1.1018
For the sixteen who didn’t come back:
Wayne Bolte
Robin Gatwood
Charles Levis
Anthony Giannangeli
Henry Serex
Byron Kulland
Ronald Paschall
John Frink
Peter Hayden Chapman
James Alley
John Henry Call III
William Roy Pearson
Allen Avery
Roy Prater
Larry Potts
Bruce Walker
Author’s Note
Darrel Whitcomb has been researching, writing, and lecturing on the Bat 21 mission since his service as an Air Force forward air controller in Southeast Asia in 1972. He allowed me to use his extensive collection of mission interviews, research material, maps, and photos for this book. Darrel provided key insights on combat, and specifically, rescue operations and military culture, and offered technical advice throughout. His help with this project has been invaluable.
Southeast Asia, April 1972
Positions of Hambleton and Others, April 1972
Prologue
The River
Gene Hambleton pushed himself away from the tree he’d collapsed against and peered into the jungle. A stray beam of light had passed down between the fronds and thick vines that hung in front of him, illuminating something beyond them, something light among the dark browns and greens. He squinted. It looked like a sandbar.
The navigator managed to lever himself up and stumble over to the edge of the banana grove. He crouched down and placed his fingers on the last of the fronds, and pushed the leaves apart. There it was, a large, long sandbar, glowing in the sun, a slash in the thick foliage.
But a sandbar in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle? It was ridiculous. Hambleton thought, not for the first time, that he might be losing his mind.
He was aware that his condition was deteriorating rapidly. After eight days on the run from the enemy, with no food and fear a constant companion, he couldn’t trust his own perceptions. His body was bruised, severely malnourished, and weak. He’d lost about forty pounds on his already thin six-foot-two frame; his once pristine flight suit hung on him, filthy and torn. The hallucinations he’d been experiencing for the past day were growing more frequent and more lifelike. Perhaps this was one of them.
And yet there it was, a sandbar about fifty yards away.
Exhausted, the navigator lay down on the ground and stared in fascination at the line of tan, wishing the daylight were stronger so that he could get a clearer view. It was muggy. Mosquitoes buzzed; gibbons shrieked in the canopy. After four or five minutes, his eyes seemed to adjust and the thing below him swam into focus. Hambleton realized that he’d been mistaken. What he was looking at wasn’t a sandbar after all. It was a river.
The navigator was overcome with emotion. He’d found the Mieu Giang at last, which meant he was close to being rescued. He would not be marched to Hanoi, as he’d feared, and tortured to give up his secrets.
Hambleton struggled to his feet, staring at the rolling water. His self-control deserted him and he hurried forward toward the river. He had to reach it; his rescuers might be waiting. The stealth he’d practiced so obsessively for the past days disappeared as he thrashed through the foliage, shoving the thick leaves aside and pushing his body through the gaps. As he careened forward, the ground dropped away from under him and he fell heavily. He’d blundered over the lip of an embankment, and now he tumbled down its side, his body turning somersaults. He raised his arms to protect his head as he pounded down the slope. After a few seconds, Hambleton crashed into a tree trunk and stopped dead. He could hardly breathe.
Unable to stand, he began to crawl on his belly. When he finally reached the river’s edge, he put his hands into the water and splashed some back and forth, delighting in its texture. It had to be the Mieu Giang. Though he knew Vietnamese rivers were often full of bacteria that caused terrible diseases, his throat was bone dry and so he plunged his face into the water and drank. “Thank you, sweet Jesus,” he said. “Thank you.”
After he’d been shot down, Hambleton had vowed to himself that he wouldn’t be captured. One reason was his desire to see Gwen, his willowy beloved wife, again. The other had to do with the Cold War. In nearly thirty years in the Air Force, he’d worked on highly classified missile systems and specialized in electronic counter-w
arfare, collecting top-secret information that the Soviets coveted. In his memory lay the inner workings of advanced radar systems and the names of the cities that American nuclear warheads were pointed toward at that very moment. Now he would make it out of the jungle without having to reveal them to the KGB agents stationed in Hanoi. Just by surviving, he would prove to his father and his war-hero brother that he too could display courage under great stress, that he was a man to be reckoned with.
As Hambleton studied the river, however, his mood darkened. He couldn’t tell how wide it was but guessed two hundred feet. “What had looked like a godsend only moments before,” he later recalled, “now looked like an impassable abyss.” He could barely walk. How was he supposed to swim across that?
He rested until the sky turned dark. When he awoke, there were rustling sounds from above. They were coming from the foliage on the edge of the embankment. Something was heaving itself through the underbrush, thwacking its way forward. More than one thing. It could only be the North Vietnamese.
The water was shallow as he hurried into it. The stones cut painfully into his feet, but he couldn’t cry out in case the NVA soldiers heard him. The water rose up to his chest as he forged into the current and pushed downstream as fast as he could.
As he rushed downriver, the bottom beneath his feet dropped away and Hambleton plunged into the cold depths, his head sinking under the surface. Underwater, he fought for breath, kicking and flailing, trying to push himself higher. But the heavy survival radios weighed him down, and he only sank deeper into the translucent darkness.
One reason Gene Hambleton believed he was close to being saved was the unprecedented number of soldiers who had been sent out to bring him back alive. For a week, hundreds of American pilots, navigators, door gunners, forward air controllers, and pararescuemen had risked their lives to retrieve him. Never before in the nation’s history had so many men or so much materiel—an armada of fighter planes, B-52s, attack helicopters, Navy aircraft carriers—been put into play to save a single person, and they never would be again. But the mission had not gone well. Eleven men were dead and one was missing, while two more were being marched to North Vietnamese prisons. And Hambleton, who was surrounded by thousands of enemy soldiers, remained in imminent danger of being captured.
Because of this stupendous outlay of blood and treasure, certain members of the military had turned sharply against the mission. “You goddamn son of a bitch,” one furious commander told a rescue planner. “If anything goes wrong in that operation, you guys are gonna be hung out to dry.” Helicopters had been forbidden to make any more attempts to bring Hambleton back. No further B-52 airstrikes had been authorized. In fact, the only force left with a chance of getting Hambleton out alive was a short, slim, soft-spoken twenty-eight-year-old Navy SEAL named Tommy “Flipper” Norris and his small team of South Vietnamese sea commandos.
Norris was an unusual person to be leading such a mission. He didn’t come across as very warrior-like; in fact, he looked barely big enough to be in the Navy, let alone in the SEALs. (One soldier who met him years later remarked, “Damn, I didn’t know they made ’em that small.”) Then there was Norris’s friendly expression—he was as polite and affable as a young priest—and his tendency to dissolve into loud, braying laughter when something amused him. But the smile hid a ferocious will. Lieutenant Tommy Norris hated, just hated, to give up on anything. Once, when bad eyesight threatened to end his dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he’d managed to improve his vision through hours of concentrated effort, which no other failed applicant had even thought of trying to do, because most people don’t regard seeing as a skill you can get better at. And when it came to physical courage, he was a freak, even among his fellow soldiers. “He simply did not seem to notice,” one fellow soldier said, “or react to personal danger.”
The young SEAL, however, was in trouble. That afternoon, more than a dozen members of his support team had been killed in a rocket attack on their forward base. And as the hours passed, the American realized that he was facing a gathering mutiny among his commandos, who believed with good reason that if they ventured out that night to save Hambleton, they were going to die.
Part I
Gene
1
Midwestern
His original ambition had been to fly. Ever since he was a teenager living in the heart of the Midwest, Iceal “Gene” Hambleton had ached to get away from its listless plains and into the air. But he was born in farm country, near the Illinois-Indiana border, to a man who discouraged dreaming in his sons.
The family had been in the Midwest for generations. Gene’s father, also named Iceal, grew up in the small town of Rossville, Illinois, but had set his heart on becoming a lawyer and getting away from the boredom, the bad crops, and the 5 a.m. milking times of farming life in the early 1900s. After graduating from high school, Iceal Sr. went away to college and was doing well there. Then a letter arrived instructing him to return home immediately; his father had died and he was needed to tend the crops. Iceal packed his law books into his suitcase and returned home to Rossville.
That first dose of bitterness didn’t take, not completely. Iceal Sr. was a fiercely stubborn young man—his sons would inherit this quality—and he wasn’t about to be easily denied his dreams. He went to work on the farm with his usual zeal and even found enough time to marry a sweet-natured local woman, Stella Wilbur, whom he’d known since he was fourteen. On November 16, 1918, a son arrived and was named Iceal Eugene Hambleton. Iceal Jr. had an older sister, Frances; three years later, a younger brother, Gil, was born.
Iceal Jr. was born near the end of a farm boom. World War I had pushed prices to previously unimagined heights; an Illinois farmer could sell his corn crop for $1.35 a bushel, almost three times the prewar haul. But when the peace treaty was signed at Versailles, profits plummeted, and with a young family to support, Iceal Sr. turned his eyes to agribusiness. By the 1920s, he’d worked his way up through the ranks of a company that bred and sold Percheron horses, a sturdy breed used for farming and pulling carts. Seventy percent of the draft horses in America were Percherons by the end of the decade; they plowed the fields and hauled the corn and wheat harvests for thousands of small-time farmers who couldn’t afford the latest tractor from International Harvester. With the country growing and needing to be fed, it seemed like Iceal Sr. had stepped onto the first rung of a ladder leading upward. After working diligently for a number of years, he was even named president of the company.
Then the Great Depression arrived. The price of a bushel of corn fell to eight cents, less than it cost to produce. If you drove through the back roads of certain midwestern states in 1932, you might be startled by the smell of fresh popcorn wafting across the fields. Farmers fed their bushels of cobs into the family stoves to heat their houses rather than selling the crop, lending the air of places like eastern Illinois the scent of a Bijou cinema lobby. Bankers called in their loans and, when farmers were unable to meet them, quickly foreclosed. In Iowa, locals kidnapped a judge and threatened to hang him unless he agreed not to force any more families off their land.
The demand for the Percheron horses melted away and the company folded. Iceal Sr. was left nearly penniless, without even a farm to feed his family. The indignity leached into his character, poisoned his moods, sharpened his already sharp tongue. Nothing Iceal Jr. or his younger brother Gil did was good enough for the old man. “He was opinionated and bullheaded,” said his granddaughter Pam. “And he was real hard on the kids. He was just such a dominating kind of a person.” Their mother was very different, “soft and fuzzy,” but it was Iceal Sr. who set the tone for the household.
From all indications, the elder son had inherited a far sunnier and more personable nature than his father, but the strain of the Depression years and the constant belittling at home wore on him. By the time he reached school age, the family was living in tiny Wenona, Illinois, “a carbon copy of thousands of little communities in the
U.S.A.” Wenona had a one-room schoolhouse, a town eccentric (his name was Mr. Anderson), and not much else. People depended on their neighbors and knew the intimate details of the lives of dozens of other Wenonians. “By a family’s reputation from generations past,” Iceal Jr. later wrote, “a newborn baby shall be known.” It was hard to outrun your history in a place like Wenona.
As the firstborn son of the brooding Iceal Sr., the young boy grew to resent his given name. “Iceal” didn’t fit his gregarious personality. “All my life I’ve been looking for the guy who tagged it on me,” he would later say, knowing full well that the guy who tagged it on him was his old man. At some point during his boyhood, he even began refusing to answer to Iceal. It takes only a little imagination to suppose that he wanted not only to free himself from its un-American weirdness but also to put as much distance as he could manage between himself and his coldhearted father. (How appropriate that the name’s first three letters spelled “Ice”!) And so he took his middle name, Eugene, shortened it, and became the far more pleasant-sounding Gene.
Gene was funny, mischievous, and defiant; the word back then would have been “devilish.” He was inordinately fond of pranks. Tired of his father’s beatings and lectures, Gene acted out, his rebellions mostly taking the form of Huck Finn–type capers. He and his friends attended the one-room school with a potbellied stove in the corner to heat it when the sharp-clawed winter winds swept across the Illinois fields. His teacher was Miss Jones, “big boned and with perfect posture,” who carried a leather strap about a foot long to dispel any thought of misbehavior. Gene and his buddies made up their minds one day that the strap was an affront to their dignity as young Christian men and decided not only to carry out a plot to steal it but also to then burn the thing right there in the classroom stove. Gene was chosen to grab the whip while his two friends created a diversion by staging a fight in the schoolyard. When the pair started throwing haymakers and rolling in the dirt, Miss Jones ran out with the rest of the class and tried to untangle them. Once she was fully engaged, Gene slipped back into the schoolroom, grabbed the strap from her desk drawer, opened the stove’s soot-black hatch, and threw it into the flames. Miss Jones soon forced confessions out of the boys, and Gene was soundly whipped.