Saving Bravo Page 8

  Constant sensed something gathered around Hambleton’s position that the intel officers had no idea was there. “We really came close to getting nailed,” he said later. “It was grim.”

  Jankowski got on his radio. “Bat 21,” the forward controller said. “Can you dig in for the night?” There would be no more rescue attempts that evening. Hambleton felt a wave of depression wash over him. He confirmed Jankowski’s transmission, but the reply stuck in his throat. Would he be a free man in the morning? Would he be alive?

  The flames from José Astorga’s chopper burned out of sight of Hambleton’s hiding place. He had no idea that three men were dead or that Astorga was a POW beginning his odyssey northward. The FAC orbiting above knew, but no one told the navigator, or at least Hambleton didn’t remember being told. Perhaps he blocked out the deaths; perhaps he was kept in the dark to keep up his morale.

  One by one, the planes that had swarmed the skies above Hambleton now turned and slipped back to their bases. The Cobra that accompanied the Huey on its run over the Mieu Giang had been shot to pieces and made it to a landing spot thanks only to a remarkable piece of flying by the pilot. It was abandoned on the tarmac, never to fly again. Captain Morse in his A-1 had spent three hours over the scene; by the time he broke off, his plane was barely flyable. He just managed to put it down at the airfield at Da Nang, climbed out, briefed the intel guys, then walked to his hooch to rest.

  Morse lay on his cot and stared at the ceiling. Nothing in his training or in his previous flights over Southeast Asia had prepared him for what he’d seen just north of the Mieu Giang. “It was the worst night of my life,” he said. “I was scared to death. It was just horrendous.” He lay shaking in his bed, seeing again the long bursts of AAA floating up toward his wings, the fire that seemed to leave no room for an aircraft to fly through. He didn’t sleep that night.

  8

  Tucson

  Gwen Hambleton was cleaning up after morning coffee with some friends in her suburban Tucson home. It was the afternoon of April 3. In another week she would be joining Gene for R&R, and she had a long list of things to accomplish.

  Gwen was in a hurry but not in a rush. Supremely organized, she had a checklist of everything she had to do before she boarded her flight to Thailand. Cancel the newspaper; turn the ice maker off; ask the neighbors to water the plants. She also had to remember to bring her golf clubs on the trip. Gene, a self-confessed “golf nut,” had scouted out a new course for them to play. She was looking forward to Thailand and the first sight of her handsome, mischievous husband.

  Gwen, at forty-eight, was close to the Hellenic ideal of an Air Force wife. She dressed well, despite being fantastically thrifty, perhaps a result of her Depression childhood. She was highly sociable and joined one club after another. Gwen actually seemed to enjoy the coffee klatches, the committees, the blood drives, the dinners at the commanding officer’s house, and all the rest of it.

  Gwen was checking an item off her list when the doorbell rang. She went to the door and looked through the side window and saw her best friend, the base chaplain, and a nurse standing on her doorstep. Like any good Air Force wife, she understood immediately what the visit meant.

  “Oh, Lord, not that,” she thought.

  In the hours that followed, old friends responded to a jangle on the Air Force gossip network, and called her, asking what they could do. But Gwen found it hard to be soothed. The thought of losing Gene was horrible. “There isn’t anything that can comfort you,” she said. “At the end I thought he would just disappear and I would never know what happened to him.” She found the thought “terrifying, really.”

  She called the Casualty Center in San Antonio and spoke to an officer there. She talked on the phone with her mother, sisters, and brother, received her Air Force friends and made them coffee. All the women had been rehearsing the same routine in their minds ever since their husbands joined the service. With the Marines or the Army, it was unlikely that your husband would be killed stateside, but an Air Force wife whose man was flying knew that a gust of wind or a flock of birds could take him just as easily as a missile. The tension was constant, a gray tripwire waiting in the background of the ordinary suburban day.

  That afternoon, word of the downing of Bat 21 and the crash of Blueghost 39 spread to other towns and cities across the country. A telegram arrived at the home of Ronald Paschall, the crew chief onboard the Huey. It read:

  THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON, SPECIALIST FIVE RONALD P. PASCHALL, HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING IN VIETNAM SINCE 2 APRIL 1972. HE WAS LAST SEEN WHILE THE CREWCHIEF OF A MILITARY AIRCRAFT ON A MILITARY MISSION WHEN THE AIRCRAFT WAS FIRED UPON BY A HOSTILE ACTOR, CRASHED BUT DID NOT BURN. SEARCH IS IN PROGRESS. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED . . . PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY DURING THIS MOST TRYING PERIOD. VERNE L. BOWERS, MAJOR GENERAL USA.

  The aviators who’d watched Blueghost 39 go down assumed that Paschall was dead. But it was the Army’s informal policy to report their men missing in action. There were a number of reasons for this, but the simplest was that miraculous things often happened in war. One time near Hanoi, several airmen had watched a badly damaged F-105 fully engulfed in flames go cartwheeling over and over above the jungle foliage, until it dove and disappeared into the ground fog below them. Everyone who’d watched the crash agreed the pilot must be dead, but three hours later he was sitting in a hospital in South Vietnam, suffering only from two broken legs. He’d managed, somehow, to fly the aircraft out and bail out over the South China Sea.

  And what if a man survived and was taken prisoner and spent years being brutalized by the North Vietnamese and then boarded a flight home with thoughts of the first embrace of his wife, only to find her living with his best friend or his insurance salesman, because his buddies had reported him dead? No one wanted that on his conscience. So first reports almost always eschewed the terms “presumed dead” or “killed in action.” Soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen went “missing.” And they often stayed that way until their remains could be positively identified.

  During World War II, Ruth Paschall, Ronald’s mother, had lost her brother in a bomber accident over the South Pacific. As a young girl, she’d watched her mother answer the doorbell one afternoon, observed the dumb show of chaplain and telegram and tears. Her brother had never come home from the war. But when she read her telegram, the one addressed to her and her husband, Mark, Ruth fixed on that one word: “missing.” It gave her an immediate and completely unwarranted amount of hope.

  Her husband later said that “99 percent of the family,” after hearing the details of the crash, accepted that Ronald had been killed. But his mother did not. “Ruth,” Mark said, “could never really let it go.” If Ronald was missing, he could be found.

  In the small Minnesota town of Wadena, Karen Wallgren—the sister of Byron Kulland, the one who’d been so amazed by how he’d go right up and talk to near-strangers—was at home doing laundry. She’d married and had moved away from North Dakota with her husband; she was pregnant with her third and last child.

  The phone rang. It was Karen’s father, who told her about the visit he’d just gotten from some Army personnel. They’d informed him that Byron was missing. Karen felt her heart skip a beat, but she tried to be positive, for her father’s sake. “I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t mean they won’t find him.’”

  To take her mind off the news, Karen took the clothes from the washing machine and went outside. She walked to the clothesline and began pinning the shirts and children’s dresses on it, but her thoughts quickly turned back to her brother. Karen sensed that Byron was dead, and she thought of the things that he’d wanted to do but that would never happen now. A ranch out west, “to go live where the cowboys are.” Sheepherding by helicopter, a pipe dream of his. Children. Time.

  The only consolation she could find was that Byron had been living his life as he saw fit. “He was flying a helic
opter and he loved that. He was married to a woman he loved. And he had enough money and was able to pay cash for a car.” Karen thought to herself that the men in her family went bald early and put on weight. But Byron? He was strong and lean. Handsome, too. He’d died a good-looking man.

  She pinned more clothes on the line. The thought came to her that wherever her brother was lying at that moment, he could no longer feel the wind on his skin, the animal pleasure of being alive. “I thought, ‘Oh, he might not ever see the blue sky again, just to enjoy being outside.’” She tried to dismiss the thought but was unable to. She put down the shirt she’d been trying to pin, brought her hand to her mouth, and wept.

  In Colorado Springs, the younger Giannangeli children were preparing for their day at Catholic school. The airman’s oldest son, Robert, was struggling to put on a tie. His friend had been riding his bike in the neighborhood days before when he was struck by a car and killed. Robert was dressing for the boy’s funeral. He was feeling doubly unsettled, not just because of his friend’s sudden passing but because of the dream he’d had two nights before, the one about his father’s survival knife.

  The doorbell rang. Robert gave up trying to fix his tie and went to answer it. Opening the door, he spotted in the driveway a blue Ford Falcon, which he immediately recognized as an Air Force base car. Standing on the porch of their ranch house was the base commander and a chaplain. Robert said hello to the men. They nodded and asked to speak to his mother. He went and got her and told her who was out front.

  “I’ll never forget that moment,” he says. “The look on my mom’s face.”

  The base commander handed his mother a yellow telegram saying that her husband had been shot down. His voice was subdued, soft; he was trying to avoid, apparently, having the children hear the news, but they gathered around the open doorway anyway and listened. The chaplain broke in to say that he was returning to his chapel to say a mass for Giannangeli. Their mother thanked the men and closed the door.

  Mrs. Giannangeli was clearly upset, but the children couldn’t tell how upset. They’d never seen their mother cry, and even now she maintained her composure. She told her second son, Dennis, that he was going to school that day; all the kids were. She made it clear that as soon as Dennis arrived at the school, he was to go to the principal’s office and ask the people there to make an announcement saying that their father was missing. There was a certain way Air Force families did things at such times, and the Giannangelis were not going to deviate from it.

  At the school, Dennis walked into the principal’s office. One of the nuns who worked there spotted him. The visit by the base commander and the chaplain had thrown off the precisely calibrated timing of the Giannangelis’ morning, so Dennis was a few minutes late. The nun glared at him and said, “What are you doing here?” Dennis tried to answer but found himself unable to speak; he began to sob. The nun’s expression immediately changed. Colorado Springs was a military town, and the war was regularly claiming airmen; perhaps she guessed the truth. When he was able to tell her what had happened, the woman looked mortified by her harsh words. She told Dennis they would make the announcement.

  The voice on the intercom was informing the school what had happened as Dennis walked into his homeroom class. “It was the strangest feeling,” he said. “I was so distraught and everyone was looking at me.” But no one spoke to him about the announcement or asked for details about his missing father. They spoke to him kindly but acted as if all that had been broadcast that morning on the intercom was the weather report and details of the school day. Dennis’s track coach did come to the class and mentioned the news about his father but told him that it would be best if he took his mind off the incident by going to practice. Some wind sprints would be the best thing for him. Dennis passed through the day in a half-remembered fugue.

  But he followed his coach’s advice. For the next few months, Dennis would take refuge in sports, shooting hoops obsessively on the street in front of his house, where a streetlight lit the backboard all evening long. “I’d be out there in the middle of the night,” he said. “I was angry about losing my dad, and about Gene Hambleton. Why did you get to eject? I thought. Why did you get to go early?”

  9

  Blowtorch Jockeys

  Hambleton napped fitfully in his dugout, never sinking into deep sleep. It was full night now. The blackness was like a shroud over his head; he’d never experienced anything like it. “It was dark dark.”

  He woke and raised his head. He could hear the buzz of the orbiting plane above. The sound was a comfort to him. He thought of the FAC aboard as his personal guardian. “I felt he was mine. All mine.”

  The sky in the east began to show a thin line of light. Hambleton spotted lights across the fields from the south. One set to his east, one to the south, and one, farther away, between the two. Villages, clearly. He saw people emerging from their huts. “I could faintly hear people talk excitedly.” The sound grew louder. Peasants from the three villages seemed to have come out of their homes and joined together in a single group. Among them, Hambleton spotted men dressed in the pea-green uniform of the NVA. It appeared that the army had organized some kind of meeting. Hambleton wondered if he was the subject of it.

  The cluster broke up and the villagers began walking toward him. They reached the edge of the rice paddies and stopped there, apparently uncertain which way to go. The villagers had flashlights, and he could see them flashing this way and that.

  Hambleton got on the radio and whispered a request for gravel mines. These were small hand-sized bomblets made up of camouflaged pouches stuffed with lead azide and thirty grams of ground glass, held apart by thin sheets of plastic. Soaked in liquid Freon, the bombs were dropped frozen. It took between three and eight minutes for them to thaw out, and then they shot out a web of tripwires that became “shock-sensitive.” If your foot brushed against one of them as you walked, the little things would explode and take your arm or leg with them.

  Hambleton listened to the sounds of the planes in the sky overhead, each identifiable by the pitch of its engines. He recognized the sound of a Douglas A-1 dive-bomber that dated from World War II. He could hear the buzz of the plane’s big propellers. The A-1 swept overhead, dropping a load of gravel. The bomblets spread out in the air and fell to the earth. Hambleton was now sitting in a minefield with his hiding place at its center.

  He watched as the villagers fanned out and headed into the rice paddies; the bobbing lights reminded him of a “field of fireflies.” There was no doubt they were headed his way and eager to find him. “The urgency of their voices made me ill at ease,” he said. Hambleton knew that if the villagers discovered him, his gun would be of little use.

  He studied the villagers’ movements. They would come over the furrows toward him, but when they arrived at a certain spot, near the middle of the rice paddy, they would stop and deliberate. Hambleton suspected they’d heard the A-1 flying low and guessed that the fields nearer him were littered with the gravel mines. A Vietnamese villager in 1972 would have been intimately acquainted with the weapon; it had left many men and women amputees or worse. The people feared coming any farther. After an hour, they turned back to their huts.

  Dawn was approaching. The FAC had assured him that the choppers would take off at first light. He decided he had to save his energy for the burst of speed he might need to reach them when they landed. He might have to sprint for the doors before the NVA soldiers could zero in on him with their rifles.

  He drifted off to sleep. About an hour later, a noise woke him. He glanced up and saw what looked like Roman candles exploding in the air above him. One would blaze to life in the inky murk with a fffffffttttt, then slowly die out.

  They were flares. The villagers must be searching for him again.

  But when he sat up and gazed toward the village, he saw people walking parallel to his position. Now he picked up the squeak of treads, along with the roar of trucks revving in the near distance. Aft
er listening intently for a few minutes, Hambleton realized that the NVA were moving vehicles down the road with their lights off to avoid American fighters. The flares were being used as navigational aids.

  He radioed the FAC and told him about the lines of trucks and tanks making their way south. The voice rogered back. Soon Hambleton heard the scream of a plane cut through the humid air as it dove on the vehicles. Immediately, the noise of antiaircraft shells erupted from the fields around him. It was like an enormous kettledrum sounding continuously, an “overpowering rumble” that temporarily deafened him. A shell burst overhead. “Tiny pieces of pot metal, thick as BB shot, rained down on me.” He dove for the ground and burrowed in.

  Then, quiet. He could hear the far-off clanking and grinding of machinery coming from ground level. He peeked out between the branches in front of him. He couldn’t see the trucks, but they were out there. What if they’re friendlies? He had to find out.

  Hambleton stood up and made his way down the hedgerow. There was no one out now in the fields. As he came closer to the noise, which seemed to grow in volume, he went down on his stomach and crawled through the undergrowth. When he saw light streaming through the leaves of the last bush, he reached out and pushed his hands through it, moving the branches to one side.

  He caught his breath. Ten feet away was not a road but a highway, and it was lined with military vehicles of every type and description. There were the enormous Soviet T-54 battle tanks in jungle camo clanking along, followed by jeeps pulling howitzers, SAM missile batteries, transports filled with NVA soldiers. The invasion force was a modern Soviet-equipped mechanized corps. It looked like . . . Stalingrad or something, some World War II battle relocated to the rice fields of Vietnam.