Saving Bravo Read online

  What did that mean, exactly? Was he going to resist capture to the point of death, or did he actually contemplate killing himself rather than be taken? Hambleton never said. His motives were equally murky. Perhaps Hambleton, who’d felt belittled by his father throughout his childhood, refused to reenter a world where he would be humiliated again, and where his humiliation would now be combined with episodes of great pain. Or perhaps, at fifty-three, he simply thought he wouldn’t survive extended torture sessions. But by the spring of 1972, he’d made up his mind that he would not be captured under any circumstances.

  On April 5, the planners at Joker called in more resources from around Southeast Asia. A young Air Force photographer, Sergeant Jim Alley, was onboard a Jolly Green flying from Nakhon Phanom Royal Air Force Base in Thailand to Da Nang to reinforce the rescue squadron there. Time was running short. The next day, if the weather cooperated, Joker wanted to make a big push to get Hambleton back.

  News of the mission was filtering out across US bases in Southeast Asia. It was acquiring a dark reputation; few could remember so many guys being lost so quickly during a search and rescue. “Fear is nibbling at your gut,” said one airman. “You’re meeting far more resistance than you have before. You know that people are dying out there.”

  Jim Alley was from Plantation, Florida, a sprinter, lean and short—five foot six—a quiet, shy, serious-minded kid with a hank of brown hair hanging over his watchful eyes. He was a gearhead, his bedroom packed with model cars he’d built himself as a teenager. Before his draft notice arrived, Alley had worked in his father’s auto shop, degunking transmissions. When evening came, he’d wash up, put on some fresh clothes, and meet his equally gas-brained friends and go cruising around Plantation and the nearby towns. “On any given night in Fort Lauderdale,” said a high school friend, “we’d be racing in the streets. Harbor Beach, US 1, anywhere we could find open road.”

  Jim wasn’t really a racer, to be honest. He’d never had the car for it. He drove a ’57 Chevy that just didn’t have the horsepower to go up against the modern big-block Corvettes and the hellcat Z/28s. Jim’s friends sensed he would have liked a serious hot rod, but his parents were quiet people and they probably didn’t want him getting in trouble with the Plantation cops or, God forbid, putting his ride into an overpass and splattering himself all over the dashboard.

  There were the usual teenage incidents around Plantation. One time, some football players from a rival high school blocked Jim’s car in a parking lot and tried to goad him into a fight. He wanted no part of it. In the melee that followed, one of the boys pulled a knife and slashed Jim on his arm, cutting right through his shirt. Alley didn’t lose his composure or try to beat the guy into the asphalt. Instead, he walked away.

  In the late sixties, even peaceable kids like Jim Alley got their military notices. Jim had a moral issue with going into combat, and so the letter set off a crisis in his teenaged life. “He was drafted in the Army, but he said he could not kill,” his mother wrote later. “He didn’t want a gun.” Eventually, Jim figured out a way to serve without carrying an M16. He entered the Air Force as a motion-picture cameraman. He would be an observer of battle, silent behind the lens, in the war but not of it.

  When he was getting ready to leave, his father surprised Jim with his dream car, a canary yellow ’67 Camaro. And his dad didn’t go for the more run-of-the-mill motor; no, Jim Alley was finally going to get the boss racer he’d so ardently desired for most of his eighteen years. His dad splurged for the big 327-cubic-inch engine, the V-8 with the standard four-speed manual transmission that rumbled and then screamed when you stomped on the accelerator like some howling primordial beast. That would get their attention on Harbor Beach.

  Despite this, Jim had a premonition. As he prepared for his deployment, he made an odd request of his parents. If he didn’t make it back, he told them, he wanted them to adopt a baby. And not just any baby; he specified that they find an infant boy to take in. “I think he thought they would be lonely if he didn’t come back,” said his brother Tim.

  The Alleys agreed and Jim went off to ’Nam.

  Sitting in the back of the chopper with Alley were two pararescuemen (PJs), Louisiana-born Sergeant Doug Brinson and a tough, undersized Texan, Airman First Class Mike Vogel. It was dark, with just the low lights from the cockpit illuminating their faces. As the helicopter hurried southeast to Da Nang, the men occasionally got up and walked around, fighting boredom, their bodies casting shadows in the half dark. The thrum of the blades vibrated the air and shook the metal behind the men’s backs as they talked. Idle chatter, really. Vogel and Brinson weren’t particularly worried about the mission. The only reason you became a PJ in the first place was to get as much action as humanly possible.

  Alley sat across from Brinson and Vogel, his big eyes visible through the clear visor of the helicopter helmet. It was well into the flight when he changed the course of the conversation. “I know we’re going to die,” he said.

  The other men went silent. Talking about dying on a mission was verboten for pararescuemen. “You wouldn’t hear a PJ say that if he was going to die in the next sixty seconds,” said Brinson. And here was Alley, who wasn’t just new to combat but a photographer who was hauling a camera instead of an M16 and would never leave the chopper, while the PJs could possibly be down there among the enemy, getting their asses shot at. “To the general public, that is not a remarkable statement,” Brinson said, “but among us very gung-ho, brash PJs, it was horribly out of place.”

  The two men didn’t react. They could see that Alley wasn’t just fearful; he was transfixed by the idea of his own death. They felt sorry for him.

  But he kept on with it. “I’m going to die,” he said again and again. It was as if he couldn’t help himself. Finally, the fourth or fifth time, Vogel snapped. “Will you shut up?” he yelled at Alley.

  Seeing the terror on the twenty-three-year-old’s face, Vogel softened a bit. “You’re not gonna die,” he said. Vogel explained to Alley that the Air Force only needed to use the Jolly Greens they were flying in on. “We won’t even get in the action. They just want our choppers.”

  Alley went silent. He said nothing else for the rest of the flight.

  They arrived at Da Nang in the early hours of April 6.

  The morning broke clear. The pilots, navigators, forward air controllers, and other airmen who’d converged at the base were ordered to a briefing. A final decision on whether to go after Hambleton had to be made.

  Before the gathering, an A-1 was sent out “to juke around and draw fire” to see what was out there on the ground. To the amazement of the Joker commanders and everyone else involved in the rescue, the pilot came back with a plane untouched by enemy bullets. He’d glided over the rice paddies and the village that had spouted lethal fire as recently as the day before, and it was like taking a scenic tour over the Grand Canyon. Not a single shell had been fired at him. No AAA. No SAMs. It was as if the NVA had melted away into the jungle and left Hambleton alone in his grove of trees.

  The men in the room knew that the silence could signal a trap. It was a well-known technique of the NVA to go quiet, coaxing potential rescuers to a landing zone where gunners would then open up on them. The NVA had even instructed its soldiers on exactly how to do this. “When conditions are right, the pilot’s radio transmitter and signal flares can be used to lure enemy aircraft into the ambush sites,” read one of its training manuals. “The element on the outer perimeter fires at the A-1s. The one on the inner perimeter must conceal itself and suddenly open fire when the [helicopter] hovers and drops its rope ladder to rescue the pilot!”

  But the test flight had been clear. It could be a trap but it could also not be a trap. After the A-1 pilot gave his report, the commanders announced that the environment around Hambleton was workable and the mission was a go.

  Some of the airmen remained skeptical. “I was like, ‘Oh, really?’” said Doug Brinson, the pararescueman who’d fl
own to Da Nang the night before. “So where did the thirty thousand NVA troops go in the last few hours? I’m not an idiot.” He didn’t say it, but he thought it; many of the men that morning probably did. “We all knew this was a fool’s mission,” said Brinson.

  But the weather was perfect. The ground fire had vanished. The men in the room wanted to believe a rescue was possible.

  As the meeting was wrapping up, an airman spoke out. Doug Brinson remembered turning to see who the man was and realizing it was the photographer from the night before, Jim Alley. The words he spoke were almost grotesque to Brinson and the others. What Alley said was: “I’m not going.”

  The faces of the other airmen registered shock. If the refusal to go on a mission had become an occasional occurrence among Army soldiers during the ground war, it was practically unheard of among airmen involved in a rescue mission. The statement hung in the humid air. The pilots and navigators couldn’t believe that someone, especially this short, mild-mannered-looking dude, had the balls to say it.

  It was, of course, perfectly reasonable to be terrified of going after Hambleton. There were thirty thousand NVA down there waiting to kill Americans. Everyone in the room was, on some level of his psyche, terrified. But no one was going to say that.

  Alley did have a point when you considered his particular role in the mission. For years, rescue operations had been carried out without a photographer on board, but now the Air Force was sending him into the hottest zone many of the airmen had ever seen. He wasn’t a pararescueman or a navigator or a door gunner. He was a short-timer, just ten days away from getting on the “freedom bird” and flying back to Florida. And now he was being asked to risk his life in a mission that had already killed three men and sent two others to prison camps, to make a movie. It’s not as if Alley was going to reach down and pluck Gene Hambleton off a rice paddy.

  The commander looked at the photographer. “You’re either going to get on the chopper,” he said, “or you’re never going to fly again.”

  The threat was laughable. Alley was leaving the country in just over a week. If he never flew again, it would be fine. Who really cared? He wasn’t a pilot. He wasn’t career Air Force. He had no stake in the service to protect. The commander had threatened something that mattered not at all to Jim Alley.

  The airman said nothing. The meeting broke up.

  Hambleton was awake early the next morning. He took his flight suit off the bushes, where he’d laid them to dry after a downpour, and dressed quickly. The clothes were only slightly damp by now. Sunlight was beginning to penetrate the foliage. There were some clouds high up, but the sky was clear. It was a perfect day for a rescue.

  He heard voices. The villagers to his east were out, going about their ordinary routines. He could smell the food they were cooking on their fires, but he wasn’t tempted; he would soon be feasting on seafood and steaks at an American hospital or mess hall. “Today,” he believed, “was the day of his deliverance.”

  16

  Low Bird

  The helicopter code-named Jolly Green 67 was chosen to pick up Hambleton; it was next in the rotation. The squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Harris, was scheduled to pilot the chopper, but thirty-two-year-old Hayden Chapman, the young man from Centerburg, Ohio, who’d fallen in love with the B-17s flying over his father’s farm when he was a boy, stepped forward and asked to fly the mission.

  It was unusual for the rotation to be broken, not something Harris would ordinarily have allowed. He knew Chapman well; the two had carpooled when they were serving at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Over many mornings, they’d become close friends. Still, Harris refused the request. “It was my turn,” he said. “I insisted.” But Chapman was adamant. “I want to go,” he told Harris.

  Why did the younger pilot want the run so badly? Harris knew; the others in the squadron most likely did as well. Not long before, Chapman had been the low chopper on the rescue of some infantrymen. He’d brought the Jolly Green down to treetop level and was hovering there while the soldiers below—there were six or seven of them—waited for him to land. There was a firefight raging; tracers streaked through the jungle and upward at the chopper; the soldiers were in imminent danger of being overrun. As Chapman lowered the Jolly Green down to the landing zone, he felt the helicopter vibrate with what might have been small-arms fire. If one of the bullets hit a hydraulic line or a rotor, he could easily lose control and the Jolly Green would crash. Chapman made a split-second decision: he pulled up and flew the Jolly Green over the treetops and away from the firefight.

  But then something unusual happened. Though he knew the landing zone was hot, the pilot of the high bird decided to make a pass. He brought his aircraft down on the LZ and immediately started taking rounds to his fuselage. The pilot kept the chopper steady while the soldiers poured into the cabin, turning to fire their automatic weapons at the enemy. When the last soldier was in, the pilot got the chopper above the trees and flew the men out.

  That mission had stayed with Hayden Chapman. When he’d returned to base, he’d found to his horror that there were no bullet holes in his fuselage. Chapman was heartsick; he felt he’d aborted too early. And so he apparently decided to take the next mission, no matter what it was.

  Like Jim Alley, on April 6 Chapman was about ten days from boarding a plane back to the States. His tour was up and he’d received orders to fly for the Eighty-ninth Military Wing out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, the fabled “Special Air Mission” that piloted the president, vice president, members of Congress, and foreign dignitaries on trips all over the world. It didn’t mean that Chapman would be flying President Nixon right away—he would probably begin with senators and the like—but still, it was one of the golden summits of all flyboy life. Before he went, though, the pilot felt a need to atone, to leave Vietnam with his conscience clear.

  Harris gave him the mission.

  Lieutenant Commander Crowe, who’d miraculously landed his chewed-up Jolly Green days before, briefed the men. The primary mission, as he understood it, was to resupply Hambleton with a Madden kit, a rescue package containing food, water, and fresh batteries dropped by one of the escort A-1s. It was not to save him. “I briefed the crew that they should not make an attempt on this mission,” Crowe said. “I thought we should wait a couple of days.” He made it abundantly clear to Chapman that it “would take an extraordinary combination of circumstances” to make a rescue feasible.

  Early that afternoon, the teams gathered and began boarding their aircraft. Doug Brinson, the pararescueman, was slated to fly in the third helicopter, which would trail behind the low and high birds going in first. As he walked toward the aircraft, he spotted Jolly Green 67 sitting on the tarmac.

  The standard crew for the rescue helicopter was five men. But as he moved to his aircraft, Brinson spotted a sixth figure waiting to board Jolly Green 67. The man had his flight helmet on and the visor pulled down, but Brinson recognized him. It was Jim Alley. The photographer stepped up into the open cargo door and disappeared into the darkness inside. In the short time between the meeting and loading, Alley had somehow overcome the premonitions that had haunted him since he’d left Plantation five years before.

  The aircraft headed to a point southeast of Quang Tri. The two Jolly Greens, low and high, and two of the A-1s executed slow loops above the jungle from the target as the other A-1s flew to Hambleton’s position to survey the terrain. The mission’s on-scene commander, Captain Fred Boli, would decide if the rescue was a go. The two aircraft flew over the rice paddies and villages for half an hour, firing the 7.62 Miniguns mounted under their wings at any gun emplacements Boli spotted.

  The response was spooky. The villages and fields remained placid. The American pilots streaked over them again and again and they stayed quiet, almost sleepy.

  On the ground, Hambleton was watching for the planes. The weather was clear; he could see much farther into the countryside, past the village, which hadn’t been po
ssible before. “The good Lord was showing His favor,” he thought. The radio was popping with the voices of men in the different aircraft. All told, there were about forty aircraft in the air preparing to rescue him and Mark Clark. Forty aircraft for two airmen; it might take your breath away if you thought about it.

  Boli arrived over Hambleton’s hiding spot. He hit the release for the Madden kit packed with food and water, but it failed to drop (something Boli would learn only when he returned to base). He probed more enemy emplacements with his guns and ordered his fellow A-1 to unload cluster bombs on the positions. The bombs erupted and orange fire burned through the trees, but no AAA arced up from the ground. Where was the enemy, Boli wondered? Why had the NVA suddenly gone silent?

  Boli called out the plan on the radio. Everyone involved—including Clark and Hambleton—listened. An A-1 would go first, laying down smoke rockets leading to Hambleton’s position, while another fired white phosphorus to create a smokescreen, behind which the helicopter could hide during its run-in to the survivor. Following close behind him, and guarded by two additional A-1s, Jolly Green 67 would rush in and grab Hambleton. If the ground fire remained light, the helicopter would then head east toward Clark’s position and retrieve him. If 67 couldn’t make the second snatch, Jolly Green 60, waiting a mile back, would swoop in and complete the mission.

  With everything in readiness, Boli decided to fly a final pass. The artillery fire halted and Boli swept down, close to tree level, above Clark and Hambleton. He slowed the plane to just above stalling speed, fired rockets near Hambleton’s position, then pulled up. The target was now marked.