Saving Bravo Read online

  6

  Ernie Banks

  Hambleton knew he couldn’t stay in the middle of the rice field. In the flat landscape, he would be like a bug on a tablecloth. The navigator scanned the horizon and spotted what appeared to be a ditch at the edge of the field. A barrage of rifle fire clattered overhead. He ducked down, then began running, crouched low.

  When he reached the ditch, he dove in and lay lengthwise. The shallow trench would hide him from anyone scanning the fields from a distance. He looked to his north and west and saw groups of NVA soldiers walking or milling around. They seemed to be everywhere; he estimated there were 150 to 200 enemy soldiers just in his immediate vicinity. If the soldiers moved closer, the ditch would be useless. He had to find better cover.

  His heart was racing. It occurred to him then that despite training for World War II, fighting in Korea and Vietnam, and playing his part in the long, dread-filled wait for all-out nuclear war against the USSR, he’d never experienced actual combat, not once in all those years. “I’m sitting in an airplane six and a half miles up,” he said, “far removed from all the dirt, screams, and hollering, mud and muck.” Now he would surely see war, smell it, wallow in it. He would be required to survive among the people he’d been helping to strafe and bomb and quite honestly obliterate for the past seven months. The Air Force would drop over twice as much ordnance on Vietnam as the total used in World War II, and Hambleton was about to witness the results of that astonishing bombardment, and perhaps answer for it, too.

  Capture is what he worried about most. If Hambleton was caught, he believed he would almost certainly be tortured to reveal his secrets. Every American airman in Vietnam had heard the stories that had filtered out from the prisons in the North. The hooks suspended from the ceiling of the Hanoi Hilton where prisoners were hung, their hands and feet tied together like butcher’s samples until their limbs swelled to twice their normal size and turned the color of eggplant. The four-by-four-foot tiger cages, made of bamboo, where men were imprisoned for months, left to rot in their own excrement, unable to sit up or lie down. The beds where the legs of POWs were locked in irons, cutting into the tendons, where they lay for weeks and months, prey to rats and sadistic soldiers. The guards at the prison were often chosen from the families of those killed by American bombs; they took their revenge nightly.

  The story of Captain Glenn Cobeil was particularly well known among the airmen. He’d been a pilot in an F-105 who’d been shot down in the Red River Delta and brought to the Hanoi Hilton. Loudspeakers blared propaganda in the cells at all hours and a single light bulb burned throughout the night. Cobeil was beaten mercilessly in sessions that lasted as long as fourteen hours; his interrogators carved an X in his back with a rusty nail and pounded his face with a fan belt until one eyeball popped out of its socket. The rumor was that Cobeil had lost his mind after months of such treatment.

  For those most intimately involved in the wizards’ war, the risks were even higher. One such electronic warfare officer, Captain Jay Jensen, found his F-105 targeted by a SAM in February 1967. The shootdown was considered a “most important victory” for the North Vietnamese, and the men who executed it were awarded the Combat Achievement Medal, First Class, a high honor. Jensen was almost immediately singled out for special attention. At the Hanoi Hilton, the camp commander entered his cell and informed the airman that, as Jensen later recalled, “I had information that they must know, so they would have to make me talk.” He was told a firing squad would arrive in five minutes, then three men entered the cell and bound his hands and feet and screwed iron handcuffs into his flesh and veins. They tied a rope around his neck and choked him, then rotated his bound arms over his head until his joints creaked with the pressure. “The pain was unbearable,” he said.

  His captors brought in another interrogator; Jensen believed he was a Russian.

  The Soviet Union had been deeply involved in the war since 1965. The Kremlin’s leaders were determined to outmaneuver their Chinese rivals, who were providing arms and troops to North Vietnam, and they hoped to sway governments in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines toward the communist camp. For the Kremlin, the road to Southeast Asia ran through Vietnam. The Russians supplied the North with iron ore, medical supplies, rockets, antiaircraft guns, trucks, tanks, and supersonic jet fighters. In 1968 alone, they sent half a billion dollars’ worth of aid to their allies. Along with the supplies came thousands of advisers and trainers, some of whom actually fought and died on the battlefield. And every year, thousands of North Vietnamese officers flew north to attend military colleges in the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev and his peers had entered the war with misgivings, but they were committed to fighting it as long and as fiercely as the Americans did, even as they tried to improve relations with Washington.

  One of the returns that the USSR sought for its billions was information about top-secret American technology. The Soviets sent KGB agents to Hanoi to advise their North Vietnamese counterparts on interrogating Americans, though the relationship between the two intelligence services was often tetchy. Moscow also sent a team of specially trained operatives to scour the battlefield for armaments. These operatives scooped up parts of radar systems, missiles, and classified weapons from airplanes that had crashed, crated them up, and sent them back to government laboratories for further study. At one point they even located and recovered the intact cockpit of a downed USAF F-111 in the Vietnamese countryside, which they shipped back to the USSR for further examination. American experts soon spotted knockoffs of American weapons emerging from Soviet factories, including versions of the Sparrow-3 guided missile and highly advanced aircraft engines. The war booty had allowed the Russians to leap ahead years in their weapons development. They were using Vietnam not just as a proxy war to battle American aggression but as a way to steal secrets.

  The man who entered Captain Jensen’s cell began questioning the American about the electronic jammers and the SAM countermeasures. “How could we find and attack their SAM sites?” he asked the airman. “What electronic equipment did we have?” Jensen found that he was able to trick the Soviet interrogator by passing on information about a “multi-megacycle oscillator with a push-pull amplifier and a squirrel-caged motor,” which was a piece of absurdity made up by his classmates in electronics school.

  Though he was a navigator and not an EWO, Hambleton was a much more experienced officer than Jensen, with far more exposure to classified information, including “six or seven” generations of American radar systems. It was highly unlikely such nonsense answers would help in the navigator’s case, and it was reasonable to think the Soviets would take a keen interest in him. The secrets Hambleton was keeping didn’t just concern Vietnam; they could affect the Cold War itself.

  The navigator raised his head and looked back at the rice field. His parachute lay spread over the furrowed ground. He briefly considered racing back out and gathering it up, but the thump of a heavy mortar sounded nearby. He decided to wait. There was no rush. Hambleton still had no idea that an invasion was unfolding around him. He fully expected to be rescued within the hour.

  He began inspecting his body, checking for injuries. He found a deep cut on his right index finger; he must have caught it on an edge as he was being ejected from the plane. Hambleton rooted around in his survival vest until he found the first-aid kit. He spread some disinfectant on the wound, bandaged it up. He realized that he was still wearing his reading glasses, which had miraculously stayed perched on his nose throughout the violent ejection. He reached into the pockets of his flight suit and felt around to see what else had survived the descent. The things he’d carried with him when he left Korat—cigarettes, lighter, gum—were gone. Hambleton sighed. Some good Virginia tobacco would have soothed his nerves. Deciding the glasses were a good luck charm, he left them on.

  The day was warm and humid. Above him, the fog hid the sun. Hambleton knew that was a bad omen. The big-bodied HH-53 helicopters that picked up downed aviators w
ould have trouble making it through the thick clouds.

  Jankowski, circling thousands of feet above him, now came back on the radio. He told Hambleton to switch from the “guard” channel, which was heavily trafficked, to a discrete frequency where they could communicate more clearly. Jankowski knew the NVA might be monitoring this new channel, but he needed to authenticate Hambleton’s identity before initiating rescue operations. Once they’d made the switch, he asked Hambleton the first question: “What is your dog’s name?”

  Hambleton blinked in confusion, then remembered that he’d filled out a form with secret questions before coming to Vietnam. He gave the dog’s name—Pierre—envisioning the headstrong little French poodle as he did it. Jankowski asked him to spell the name, then confirmed. Next was his favorite athlete. “Ernie Banks,” Hambleton said. Jankowski confirmed.

  Jankowski began executing runs across Hambleton’s hiding place so as to pinpoint his location. As he dropped below the clouds, in full view of the enemy troops, the FAC watched while the earth below erupted with gunfire. Tracers swept up at him in long orange waves; Jankowski could actually hear the rounds cutting through the air. “It started to look like the Fourth of July,” he recalled.

  Down below, the parachute nagged at Hambleton’s thoughts. It was practically a billboard advertising the presence of an American airman in the area. He decided to retrieve it. Hambleton stuck his head above the edge of the ditch, then came up in a running crouch. Suddenly, tracers cut across his path and he could hear the bullets snicking past. He stopped and reversed course. He didn’t believe the fire was aimed his way, but he was too close to an active firefight to risk getting shot.

  The navigator began searching for a better hiding spot for the night. Half a mile away, he made out what looked like a line of brush. Hambleton memorized the features of the landscape, trying to make out landmarks in the drifts of fog. He took a compass reading. Then he stretched out on his back and stared at the sky, waiting for full darkness.

  7

  Blueghost 39

  Orbiting above the American, Jankowski switched back to the “guard” channel and broadcast a call for help. The crew of an Army helicopter, call sign Blueghost 39, heard the emergency call and flew toward the rescue zone. The Huey was piloted by First Lieutenant Byron Kulland and Warrant Officer John Frink. The crew chief was Specialist Fifth Class Ronald Paschall, twenty-one years old, from a small town in Washington; he’d already been in Vietnam for three years. And manning the door gun was a handsome, wiry nineteen-year-old from San Diego, Specialist Fifth Class José Astorga.

  Born in Tijuana, Mexico, Astorga had immigrated to the United States and grown up poor and fatherless; as a boy, he’d worked two paper routes to support his family. The United States had not exactly been a paradise for him and his family, and he hadn’t enlisted in the Army strictly out of patriotism, though that was part of it. What Astorga really wanted was to be a mechanic, which he believed might lead to a better job when he left the service. Yet after training him as a mechanic on the Chinook helicopter, the Army informed him he was going to become a Huey door gunner, one of the most dangerous assignments in Vietnam. It was said that the NVA were content to capture pilots and the rest of the Huey crews, but they hated door gunners so much they shot them on sight.

  Astorga wasn’t even supposed to be on the flight that day. He was sleeping in his hooch that morning when Paschall—a good friend—had shaken him awake.

  “What’s-his-name’s sick,” Paschall told him, meaning the other gunner. “You wanna fly?”

  “Sure,” Astorga said. Then Hambleton went down, and the routine flight had turned into a rescue mission. They’d changed pilots—Kulland took over—and headed for the downed airman.

  Byron Kulland was one of those small-town golden boys obsessed with flight who seemed to be everywhere in Vietnam. He’d grown up in rural northwestern North Dakota among the Scandinavian and German families who’d, in many cases, been there since pioneer times. His family was Norwegian; his grandfather had come later than the frontier people, arriving at Ellis Island with fifteen dollars to his name, and made his way out to the badlands of the Dakotas. He’d homesteaded there on the land that Byron grew up on.

  Byron was gregarious, a touch more confident than his brothers and sisters. “We would walk down the street in New Town and he might see someone and say, ‘Gee, that guy looks familiar,’ ” said his sister Karen. “And he’d go right up and talk to them! He really enjoyed people.” He’d gotten an ear for music from his mother and formed his own band as a teenager, the Silver Daggers, which played sock hops and high school dances, with Byron on guitar and lead vocals. He had a temper, too, and was stubborn as a mule. “We used to wrestle,” says his oldest brother, Harlan. The bigger and stronger Harlan could usually manage to pin Byron to the ground in fairly short order, “but I could never make him give up.”

  When he was sixteen, says his sister Karen, Byron began dating a girl named Leona “from across the Missouri.” They stayed boyfriend and girlfriend even when he went away to North Dakota State for college and joined ROTC. They got married and Byron enlisted in the Army.

  There wasn’t much controversy about the war in North Dakota; people there trusted that the government knew what it was doing. “It was like it was out there somewhere,” his sister says, “but it wasn’t going to touch us.” Byron had no hesitation when it came time to leave for Vietnam. “They were told, we have to do this to save democracy,” Karen says. “I think he was proud to serve.”

  While Byron was in flight school at Fort Wolters, Texas, the Army was running a program that brought Vietnamese aviators over to become familiar with the aircraft they’d be flying. There were frequent misunderstandings. One instructor told the Vietnamese trainees that if they got sick in the plane, they should take off their helmet and vomit into that. This was standard operating procedure for nausea in the cockpit. One day, a Vietnamese pilot went up, executed his maneuvers, landed the plane, stepped out onto the tarmac, took off his helmet, and vomited into it. The look on that hard-assed instructor’s sunburned face . . . It just killed Byron every time he thought of it.

  Byron and Leona grew close to Hai, one of the Vietnamese aviators. The couple took him everywhere they went, giving him a firsthand introduction to the country: drive-in movies, BBQ restaurants, shopping plazas, you name it. Showing him the real America, away from the cities. “One day we had gone someplace after dark,” says Leona. “And we were just driving down the road. Hai says, ‘We couldn’t do this in Vietnam.’ ” Byron asked the pilot what he meant, and he explained that you couldn’t drive after nightfall because the VC might pop out of a thicket and kill you or your whole family. That stuck with Byron. Later that evening, he brought it up with Leona. “That makes it that much more important that I go to Vietnam,” he told her, “so that they can enjoy what we can enjoy.” He didn’t care much for politics, but the idea that a man couldn’t even drive down a road near his house out of fear of being stitched across the chest with Vietcong bullets, well, it got to him. That he could understand, and he held on to it.

  In the early evening of April 2, Kulland in his Huey along with an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter headed toward Hambleton’s position, about half a mile north of the Mieu Giang River. Kulland was told he wasn’t to go north of the river without fighter planes to protect him; the concentration of enemy firepower there was just too strong. The A-1s and F-4s were pounding away on the enemy gun emplacements as Kulland flew across the Mieu Giang. It was hoped that the fighter planes would eliminate enough of the guns so Kulland could get in and snatch the navigator.

  The Huey came in low, Kulland keeping its skids just above treetop level. José Astorga stood at the open doorway with his Minigun, staring down at the flat, dark jungle speeding by. He was wearing a “chicken plate,” a piece of ceramic body armor across his chest to guard against ground fire. One thousand feet behind the lightly armed Huey, the Cobra crew were watching the ground, ready to
hit any gun that started firing.

  The only sound in the Huey was the murmur of radio traffic and the thudding of the rotors above. The instrument lights from the cockpit cast a soft glow into the crew compartment. The chopper flew toward the glint of the Mieu Giang.

  On the ground, Hambleton had the flares laid out next to him. He was anxious. Jankowski’s voice called “Bat 21 B” on the radio. “Rescue choppers are airborne.”

  Hambleton confirmed. He felt a surge of jubilation. He’d spotted an open area nearby. When Kulland told him to move, he would run as fast as he could, lighting the flares as he went. The Huey would come down ahead of the spurting fire, and they would be off the ground in a matter of a minute or two, winging toward Da Nang Air Base, where he would stand his rescuers a round of drinks. Airman tradition.

  He heard the faint whup-whup-whup of a helicopter. He got ready to make his dash. He reached out and turned up the volume on the radio so as not to miss the order.

  Kulland’s chopper crossed the Mieu Giang. As soon as it passed a line of huts built close to a tree line, guns opened up in what seemed like a single explosion of fire. Astorga gazed down in astonishment as thousands of tracers swam up at him in lazily drifting lines. “Worst I’d ever seen,” he said later. Hambleton listened to the varying registers of AAA erupting from all directions: 23 mm, 37 mm, 57 mm, each one distinct in the deafening barrage. What in the hell? Hambleton wondered. Where had all these NVA come from? He thought the A-1s had wiped them out.