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  When Hambleton arrived at Redstone, he began working on the Jupiter family of rockets, designed by von Braun himself, one of which, the liquid-fueled Jupiter-C, was used on the first nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missile. The airman was then assigned to the two-stage Titan family, which eventually lifted astronauts into the atmosphere during the Gemini program, the forerunner to Apollo. With his security clearance, Hambleton was briefed on the highly classified list of Soviet cities, airfields, and military headquarters inside the USSR that would be struck first in a nuclear exchange. “I’d been in targeting for most of my career,” he noted later. “I knew almost every target that was going to get a bomb if we ever went to war.”

  Once he’d finished his nine-month training at Redstone, Hambleton flew to Turkey and began his duties as a “launch maintenance officer” at the Cigli Air Base, where Jupiter missiles had been deployed in April. The Jupiters were kept as a deterrent to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, putting him on warning that any invasion of Germany and the rest of NATO would be met with a fierce nuclear-tipped response.

  On October 14, 1962, five months after Hambleton began his tour in Turkey, Major Richard Heyser, flying above Cuba in a U-2 spy plane, took a series of 928 photographs of the terrain below. When the photos were developed, analysts spotted the telltale marks of an SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile site under construction near the city of San Cristóbal. Khrushchev had decided to deploy the missiles partly as a response to the placement of the Jupiters in Turkey and Italy. Two days later, President Kennedy was informed and the Cuban Missile Crisis began.

  That week, schoolchildren across America practiced their duck and cover drills as Cuban families gathered together in crowded Havana apartments to await “the end of the world.” As the standoff intensified, the missile installation at Cigli became both a flashpoint and a bargaining chip. Had nuclear war broken out, Hambleton and his men would most likely have been ordered to launch the Jupiters at their targets deep in the USSR, if the men and their missiles weren’t vaporized by incoming Soviet missiles first. As the negotiations continued, it became clear to both sides that a quid pro quo arrangement might lower tensions and decrease the chance of war. On October 28, US attorney general Robert Kennedy hand-delivered a note to the Russian ambassador agreeing to the terms of a deal. The Soviet Union withdrew its missiles from Cuba, and President Kennedy pulled the Jupiters out of Turkey. Hambleton had nearly played a part in the arrival of Doomsday, but the moment passed.

  After spending more than a year at Cigli, Hambleton returned to the States and began to climb the Air Force ziggurat. He worked his way up to missile launch officer and then commander at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho before being appointed squadron commander of the 390th Strategic Missile Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He was now in charge of several of the enormous, tetchy Titan IIs that dotted the complex, missiles that carried the largest warhead ever deployed by SAC. As part of his duties, Hambleton strapped a .38 revolver to his thigh; if any of his subordinates disobeyed the order to launch the ICBMs, he was authorized to shoot the man on the spot.

  Finally reunited with Gwen, Hambleton bought a comfortable home in Tucson, joined a Lutheran church, and played endless rounds of golf at the local courses.

  By 1971, Hambleton was fifty-two years old. He had over two and a half decades of service in the USAF, and he began to think of retiring to enjoy the desert air and his circle of friends. But events in Southeast Asia intervened.

  With American ground troops leaving the combat theater in huge numbers as part of Richard Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization, the burden fell on the Air Force to support the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN. There was a pressing need for more pilots, more navigators, more helicopter mechanics, more of everything. Hambleton was pulled away from his Titan II facility and arrived at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in northeast Thailand on September 4, 1971. He assumed the duties of staff navigator for the Forty-second Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron.

  Hambleton and his fellow officers had been enlisted in the “wizards’ war,” the secret duel between Soviet and American scientists that was under way in the skies over Vietnam. Southeast Asia had become a proving ground for the technology that would decide the next great battle. In preparation for it, the two adversaries were pitting their advanced fighters, radars, laser-guided bombs, and top-secret electronic-war systems against each other in the field. It was a war within a war, and Hambleton found himself privy to its secrets.

  The navigator was hardly the bright-eyed airman who had signed up for flight school three decades before. Most of the men around him were twenty or thirty years younger. He was still rail-thin, but he’d grown overly fond of Manhattans and cigarettes, a three-pack-a-day man. He did keep in shape, with some jogging here and there and the occasional bike ride, but it was exercise more appropriate for a suburban bank examiner than it was for a soldier on the front lines. On his best day, Hambleton probably couldn’t run a hundred yards without hacking up a lung.

  But Vietnam offered opportunities. Not only could he cap off his career by making full colonel, with all the benefits and prestige that offered, but also he still yearned to prove that he was a significant person, a man who might burnish the ancient name of Hambleton in combat. It was just that all the John Wayne moments had passed him by.

  As Hambleton headed to Vietnam, Tommy “Flipper” Norris was already there. Fifteen years younger than the navigator, the Navy SEAL had grown up in the heart of government suburbia, in Silver Spring, Maryland; he’d even had a paper route delivering the Washington Post. As a boy, he was surrounded by the pale secretaries and the harried mid-level bureaucrats who made American officialdom hum. But Tommy Norris was, from early on, pointed toward a more extreme vocation.

  When he was a young boy, Tommy and his brothers heard on the radio that a rare hurricane was approaching Maryland. While his parents prepared, a thought occurred to the ten-year-old: What would it feel like to stand in the middle of a really big storm? I would like to know that. Norris didn’t want to experience the hurricane on the ground, watching rain cut horizontally across the beautifully manicured yards; he wanted to feel the storm as if he were part of it. Tommy coaxed his little brother into joining him, then climbed up a large oak tree near the family’s house, “high enough so I was above the roof line and could really feel the wind.” He waited. The hurricane blew in, its winds shearing across the shingle roofs, snapping branches as they went. Norris felt the storm trying to pluck him from the limb and whip him toward southern Pennsylvania. He thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

  It was an ordinary American childhood. Norris’s dad taught him to hunt and fish, and he managed to make Eagle Scout, so he had some exposure to the outdoors. But there was one thing that stood out in his childhood, and that was Tommy’s willpower. “More than the other boys,” his mother said, “he could be just plain stubborn.” It showed in his pursuits. Tommy was short and thin, too small to play the popular sports in high school, which were basketball and football, so he took up wrestling. And he was a menace. By being almost demonically resistant to defeat, he managed to win two Atlantic Coast Conference championships while at college. Even at the height of his sports success, however, Tommy Norris was a shrimp, weighing in at only 115 pounds.

  Early on in life, Norris had become entranced with the idea of becoming a fighter pilot, and in 1968, he finally applied to flight school. During his physical exam, however, he failed the crucial depth-perception test. Norris was crushed; he’d been so convinced that he would be flying the A-4 Skyhawk that he hadn’t even thought of a plan B. But the young man quickly decided on a very Tommy Norris solution: he would refuse to accept the results. He resolved to conquer the test, no matter what it took. Norris went to an ophthalmologist and “worked on” his vision (how he did this he never quite revealed), spending hour after hour trying to improve his score. After a great deal of time and effort, he somehow managed to pass the test and went
back to Andrews Air Force Base in triumph. He was going to be a pilot no matter what the doctors said.

  But the military exam turned out to be tougher than the civilian one and Norris flunked it. So he went to Quantico and attempted to pass the Marine test. No go. He schlepped over to the naval hospital in Bethesda and tried the Navy version. Fail. Norris still wasn’t done; he joined the Navy as a navigator, hoping to slip by the eye test down the line and make pilot after all. When he came in for the exam, he stood in line and memorized the answers the guys in front of him were giving. “I rattled off the same thing they were saying . . . and the doctor gave me a thumbs-up.” Norris was ecstatic. He’d beaten the system! He was going to fly jets! It didn’t seem to occur to him that being unable to properly judge depth while operating an aircraft capable of 673 mph might not be a very good idea.

  The young recruit entered pilot training. But when he attempted to land his plane on an aircraft carrier that was heaving up and down on ocean waves, Norris’s vision problem finally caught up with him. He washed out. “It was devastating,” he said. “I’d never failed at something I wanted to do.”

  At loose ends, Norris remembered an article he’d seen in Reader’s Digest about a secretive unit known as the SEALs, which was barely known to even most military men at the time. When he found a pamphlet that spelled out a SEAL’s duties, he got fired up all over again. “That’s what I want to do!” he said. Norris wrangled a transfer to the program and entered the six-month training class.

  It was and is a process strongly predicated on failure. Three out of every four recruits never made it through the course, and trainers were initially convinced that Norris would be one of them. Early in the program, they nearly shitcanned him for being “too small, too thin and not strong enough.” But it turned out that the Maryland kid was deceptively fit and, as his mother could attest, almost unbelievably stubborn.

  During Hell Week, when prospects are denied sleep, forced to swim in ice-cold ocean waters, man boats, and lift heavy logs for excruciatingly long periods, Norris came down with a stomach virus, this during a series of days when trainees are burning seven to eight thousand calories every twenty-four hours just to maintain their weight. Food was the only comfort you were provided, and Norris couldn’t keep a thing down. Already thin, he dropped to about a hundred pounds; by the end of the week he was medically malnourished, a “barely coherent” skeleton. But he wouldn’t ask to be released.

  After doing everything they could to get the recruit to drop out, the trainers realized that his gentle exterior wasn’t the whole story of Tommy Norris. He might look like a slightly overgrown paperboy, but it turned out he was “as tough as one man could be,” in the words of an airman who knew him. Norris didn’t care how big, how fast, how well armed you were; he would not stand down. “Tommy’s the nicest guy in the world,” said one Air Force officer, Darrel Whitcomb, “but there’s something about him that says, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’”

  There was something else, too. Men who later served with Norris came to believe that he was a psychological oddity, wired differently than they—or most human beings—were. Particularly when it came to what might be called fear management. This was a skill that most SEALs excelled in; these were guys, after all, who signed up to be sent into the hairiest, most dangerous scenarios the American military encountered all over the world. But even among this highly select group of young men, Norris was an outlier. You as a SEAL team member might be facing a machine gunner zeroed in on your exposed position and you might think you were doing great by concealing the abject fear you felt; then you looked over at Tommy Norris, who didn’t seem to comprehend what fear was.

  Of the approximately seventy-five men who began the course that year, fifteen graduated, and one was Tommy Norris. He certainly stood apart from the other fourteen. He rarely drank, and if he did, he always stopped at one beer. He didn’t curse—this became a source of wild amusement to the other SEALs, who could be almost unconscionably foulmouthed—and he had a donkeyish laugh that could make those unacquainted with him think he was a little simple, which he wasn’t. “A real gentleman, very engaging, always smiling and giggling” is how one airman portrayed Norris, a description perhaps never applied to another SEAL, living or dead. Only Norris’s thick, muscular neck and a certain stone-breaking look that came into his eyes when he was angry indicated that he might be something other than the quiet young division chaplain. He even ended up setting several records in the training course, though there was one area related to the Hambleton mission that he did not excel in: the dude from Silver Spring always came last in swimming.

  Still, Norris had made it. “Probably more than any of the rest of us,” said one of his classmates, “he wanted to be a Navy SEAL.”

  3

  Korat

  The morning of April 2, 1972, Gene Hambleton awoke in his hooch. He could hear the hum of air-conditioning as he lay between fresh white sheets and rubbed his eyes. The navigator got up and readied himself for the day. He took a shower, soaking his lean frame under a steady stream of hot water, then had a leisurely shave with his electric razor plugged into the base’s grid. As he did so, he might have spotted in the corner of his mirror the Thai maid assigned to his hooch flitting soundlessly here and there in the background. He knew that when he ventured out, the maid would take the time to collect his dirty clothes, launder, fold, and return them, while at the same time refilling his refrigerator with fresh pineapple and other delights. Did Gene prefer the taste of Tiger Beer (imported from Singapore) or perhaps the smoother yet still potent San Miguel (brewed in the Philippines)? Whichever it was, chilled bottles would be waiting for him on his return, along with clean sheets on the bed.

  He hit the latrine, careful to avoid the snakes the Thais nicknamed “two-steppers” because by your second step after being bitten by one, you’d be dead. After making his way back to the hooch, he donned his freshly washed flight suit, then strolled out onto the base grounds. At the dining hall, which was perhaps the finest of its kind in Southeast Asia, he greeted his squadron mates and chose from a buffet that featured SOS (creamed hamburger on toast), eggs scrambled, fried, or soft-boiled, pancakes, sausage, toast, fried potatoes, and much more. He selected bacon and eggs with coffee and took the tray to a nearby table. There he ate leisurely while shooting the shit with some aviators.

  After his last cup of java, he headed out. Maybe he dropped a letter to Gwen at the post office, or jumped on a bicycle—you could buy one cheap in the nearby town of Korat—and pedaled around the base. Did he want a new bespoke suit? Gene was careful with money, but you could go to the tailor’s shop and pick out any material you desired (a light cotton blend was popular with the squadron dudes) and soon be the owner of a sharp-looking jacket and pants that would cost you a fraction of what they did back in Tucson. He could even snap up a bolt of Thai silk for his wife to have a few dresses made.

  Had an American war been fought from such an enchanted place, ever, in the history of the republic? It was hard to imagine. Movies? Nightly at the base cinema. Gems? Jewelers from Bangkok arrived regularly to sell the airmen pearls, opals, emeralds, and sapphires for their wives and daughters back home. A spot of exercise, perhaps? The swimming pool sparkled in the bright Thai sun. Bronze statues? Hand-woven tapestries? Siamese dancing dolls? Elephants carved from ivory tusks? They were all at hand, and for a song.

  When the warm evenings arrived, you could stroll over to the Officers’ Club. What didn’t the dudes get up to in that place? The club was filled with go-getters and former college quarterbacks and hot-rodding speed freaks turned Air Force pilots and navigators; it was like walking into an exceptionally rambunctious foreign chapter of Chi Psi. At the top of the social pyramid were the fighter jocks, instantly recognizable by the way they used their hands to describe a particular maneuver, flattening their hands out and holding them together and away from their bodies, imitating their aircraft as their fingers ducked and soared in a circle of cool-eyed
men.

  The dudes were treated like pale gods here in Korat. And they did tend to run amok. Some drank like fishes. They were pure death on the Thai waitresses, though no one ever remembered Hambleton—still smitten with Gwen—participating. And every so often they threw a party that required structural repair to the club itself.

  Once, before Hambleton’s time, a visiting American nurse at another Thai base had been having dinner when she objected to all the drinking and carousing and loud hoo-hawing emanating from a group of eight Air Force dudes who were no doubt a few bottles into their evening. She was eating her dinner, for God’s sake, and she demanded that the airmen quiet down and behave like officers and gentlemen. After she returned to her table, the boys looked at one another, stood up as a group, walked over to the nurse’s table, scooped her into their arms, flipped her skirt up, slapped some green paint on her backside, and raised her with a great tribal bellow to the ceiling of the club, where they pressed her cheeks against the wood and left two fat green blotches there as a memento of the evening.

  Everything was provided for at Korat. It was almost as if the Air Force were trying to make up for the fact that the war not only was stupendously unpopular back home but also, after seventeen years, had become deeply frustrating to fight. The troop withdrawals were continuing, and many airmen were hoping that their one-year tours would soon be cut short and they could return home. No one wanted to be the last man to die in Vietnam.

  But there were still combat missions to be flown, and no one was deceived about what they were doing in the skies over Southeast Asia. It’s not as if the service didn’t try to warn you what could happen. Far from it. One aspiring jock remembered the moment during undergraduate pilot training when he was directed to the doctor’s office and found a nurse bent over, laying eighteen-inch paper squares on the floor. She proceeded to ink up the soles of his feet and told him to stand on the squares. What the hell for? he wondered. The young man could make neither heads nor tails of the whole procedure until another candidate took him aside and explained that when you’re piloting an F-4 Phantom II, say, and you crash through the forest canopy going 1,400 mph and smash into the earth while carrying several thousand pounds of aviation fuel, the only thing that tends to remain of your physical person are the bottoms of your feet sitting inside your jungle boots. So that’s what the Air Force used to identify you.