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  Hambleton realized with a jolt that this must be Highway 561, a main north-south artery that he’d seen on his maps. But now it was thick with enemy. For the first time it began to dawn on the navigator that he had landed in the midst of a major invasion.

  This was bad news, terrible news, for his rescue, but it did give him a chance to be useful. He was not just a man on the run; he was a soldier of a nation at war. While he waited to be rescued, he could act like one. He radioed the FAC above and started calling in what he was seeing.

  Minutes later, he heard the sound of the O-2 growing louder above him. The enemy guns opened up. The pilot shot smoke rockets to mark the roadway. As soon as the rockets were away, the plane arced upward and the drone of its propeller faded. White smoke billowed over the highway yards from Hambleton, mixing in with the exhaust of the transports.

  Hambleton could hear the engines of other planes above. The ground beneath his belly shook as nearby antiaircraft batteries opened up. Their muzzles flashed orange against the gray sky as they aimed streams of bullets and shells toward the descending fighters. Hambleton flicked his radio on and lowered the volume. He began listening in to the traffic of the pilots.

  He heard a faint buzz that grew louder. An American fighter. Suddenly it was right above him. It released its bombs and the terrain in front of him erupted in rolling balls of orange fire. Explosions sent pressure waves through his body, “heaving, rocking, crashing” the earth around him. He gave up any thought of sleeping. A shock wave distorted the black-green landscape before him. The sound of the detonation was quickly overtaken by the whine of other aircraft, unseen in the night, and the concussions of bomb after bomb on the trail of vehicles.

  Gas tanks went up in bright white flashes. Black smoke billowed upward. Hambleton keyed his radio button and called in more directions. A plane whipped in low with its 20 mm wing-loaded cannons spurting fire and smoke. The pilot raked the line of trucks and swept upward, its roar merging with the sound of the AAA guns.

  Hambleton watched the tracers and tried to orient the guns in the half-dark landscape. His survival map was useless; there weren’t enough details to give coordinates. He radioed the FAC. “Roger, Bat 21,” the voice came back. Hambleton gave the coordinates of one of the emplacements. “I told them to make the same runs on the same IP, same heading, but to move over right fifty or sixty yards and hold the drop until two seconds later.”

  A new sound above him, a shrieking, wind-sucking howl. It was, he knew, the F-4 Phantom, the apex American fighter, able to fly at twice the speed of sound. He’d never seen one in combat, though he’d met plenty of the pilots in the Officers’ Club back at Korat. “Blowtorch jockeys,” he called them.

  The sound grew and the Phantom came in, a “monstrous” black shape against a blacker sky. The position he’d just called in was lit up by an orange plume. Hambleton saw the silhouette of a heavy 100 mm artillery gun jump into the air and spin lazily against the flame. He reported a direct hit. The trucks still rolled forward; there was no backing up, nowhere to escape to. Hambleton called in strike after strike—“Next pass a hundred yards east of the last one”—and watched the shape of the trucks disintegrate in the fire.

  Finally, the F-4s ran out of ordnance. He listened to one of the pilots call in to the FAC and then heard the massive twin engines cycling high as they flew off. The remaining AAA guns fell silent; there was quiet now. The excitement that had lifted him through the past hour or so dropped away; the adrenaline slipped out of his bloodstream.

  As his ears acclimated, he picked up other sounds. There were fires crackling on the roadway as transport trucks burned out. Beneath that sound, he could hear soldiers screaming in the darkness, calling out in Vietnamese for a medic. Young men bellowed in pain. He could smell the sharp tang of cordite in the air, the nauseating stench of burning rubber and flesh.

  The sky was growing lighter. Hambleton peered through the hedgerow and saw dead bodies thrown across the roadway. Limbs were scattered in the bushes and in the ditch at the side of the road, their green uniforms torn open, their faces cut by shrapnel. Some of the jackknifed figures were close enough that he could make out the features of the young men. It was his second time seeing the enemy soldiers up close, but these faces were slack and empty.

  Hambleton found the amount of devastation hard to comprehend. His directions, which he’d relayed to the FAC above with such excitement, had left men torn apart and wriggling in the mud. The pilots who’d dropped the bombs were cruising back homeward, thinking of their first Manhattans or of sleep, as he had, many times. But here he could almost reach out and touch the dying.

  The navigator felt repulsed. He thought to himself that for thirty years his idea of war had “almost been a computer game—his electronic sophistication matched against that of the enemy in the crisp blue skies of the upper atmosphere.” He’d imagined that winning glory would be somehow painless, almost mechanical. “Dropping a bomb from a plane is not an emotional experience,” he said. “I got on the ground and found out what war was.”

  What was it? What had really been happening six miles below his plane as he dreamed of making his name as a warrior? “Turning healthy human beings,” he said now, “into fertilizer.”

  Hambleton ran a hand across his face; his skin felt clammy. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick.

  Part II

  Dark Knights

  10

  Joker

  The Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, had been built by the French in the 1920s, in the first lethal, romantic years of flight. It had been a tiny outpost then, with one crude runway and some low-slung buildings servicing the biplanes that carried French businessmen, military officers, and the odd colonial administrator to their new homes. At the time, Vietnam, along with the kingdom of Cambodia, was known as French Indochina, a profitable, restive colony that pumped millions of francs into the empire through the sale of opium and rice alcohol, while the French denied the Vietnamese any semblance of self-rule.

  By 1972, Tan Son Nhut had been taken over in large part by the United States military; as they’d inherited the war, so had the Americans inherited the airfield. It had become a sprawling military base that housed, among other units, the Joint Rescue Coordination Center, radio call sign “Joker.” Joker had been established early in the war to coordinate search and rescue of American service members caught behind enemy lines. Now that the quick snatch by Blueghost 39 had failed, the officers at Joker began to plan a fully mounted rescue mission to retrieve Gene Hambleton. In the humid air, Joker’s office buzzed with voices.

  Downed American airmen were a top priority for the US military. General Creighton Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam, had made it clear that his men were to be brought back at any cost. “I had clear instructions,” said Major General John Carley, Abrams’s operations officer, “no matter what else was going on, that we would stop what we were doing . . . to recapture prisoners of war or to rescue our people. He left no doubt in my mind.” The extraordinary nature of those words—no matter what else was going on—hadn’t been fully reckoned with before the shootdown of Gene Hambleton.

  Colonel Cecil Muirhead, Joker’s commander, listened to the rolling reports of Hambleton’s situation coming in over the radio. He ordered the FACs to stay above the navigator’s position twenty-four hours a day and attack any enemy fortification or gun emplacement they could find. The firepower around Hambleton had to be degraded before more choppers could go in. Muirhead, rather astonishingly, hadn’t been informed that the Easter Offensive was under way, but he was by now aware that the NVA forces around the navigator were formidable.

  Master Sergeant Daryl Tincher was the noncommissioned officer in charge on the Joker desk that night, along with two radio operators, a weatherman, and a soldier manning the telephones to different command posts. Tincher had no ground troops to call on; the Army battalions and most of the Marines had left mont
hs ago. By 1972, the war was seemingly at a stalemate. The country was divided roughly at the 17th parallel, and neither side seemed able to deliver a decisive blow to the enemy. The ferocious 1968 Tet Offensive, in which the North Vietnamese attacked more than one hundred cities in the South, had shocked Americans and their allies and initiated a gradual drawdown of US forces. The following year, American paratroopers successfully retook Ap Bia Mountain from enemy forces in the Battle of Hamburger Hill but were later forced to abandon their position, dealing another blow to public support for the war. The secret peace negotiations between Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, had ground to a halt over the issue of removing the South Vietnamese president from power, which the Americans balked at, and the withdrawal of enemy forces from the South, which Hanoi refused to consider.

  It was a different war for the Americans now, a war fought largely in the air. And the men fighting it suffered far less from the ills of the late sixties than their land-based brothers did. Gone were the tunnel rats, the fraggings of officers, the racial agita (for the most part), the troops dazed on smack in their miserable hooches, the seeming derangement of the American psyche on a foreign battlefield. What Neil Sheehan wrote about Army aviators was true for the Air Force servicemen as well: they “were the sole combat element . . . that did not come apart under the stress of the war in Vietnam . . . As the French parachutists became the paladins of that earlier war, so the . . . aviators became the dark knights of this one.”

  Now Tincher was busy calling in dozens and dozens of these dark knights to save one of their own. When an airman was down behind enemy lines, Joker’s power expanded at a stupendous rate. “At my side, I had an Army liaison,” said Tincher. “I had Air Force, I had Navy, I had Marines. We could call the Navy and say, ‘We need some fast movers’”—that is, fighter planes—“and boom, they’re in the air . . . When we had a rescue mission, everybody backed off. We had everything in Southeast Asia right there at our fingertips.”

  As well as assembling a veritable armada of aircraft, Tincher also ordered a no-fire zone established around the navigator. These were standard for all rescue missions; in order to clear the area for rescue teams to work, artillery batteries stood down, bombers and fighters weren’t to bomb, and the Navy ships floating offshore in the South China Sea were ordered not to fire their guns into the zone without coordinating with the rescue forces first. The size of the no-fire area varied according to a number of variables: landscape features such as mountains or roads, enemy activity, the presence of friendly forces. A typical zone was a few miles in radius. But that morning, Tincher settled on a zone of sixteen miles’ radius. That was much, much larger than usual.

  The officers at Joker, unaware that the invasion was under way, were trying to give the pararescuemen and the Huey crews the widest possible area in which to work. But the zone covered much of the area that the NVA was pouring through in its massive attack on the South. Without knowing it, Joker had effectively decreed that a huge chunk of the available American firepower in this crucial zone would be dedicated to the rescue of Gene Hambleton and not to countering the North Vietnamese offensive.

  The idea of “leave no man behind” is ancient, going back at least as far as the Greeks, who wrote lyrics about young men who ventured behind enemy lines to save their fellow soldiers. On the American continent, a unit called Rogers’ Rangers—frontiersmen and woodsmen fighting for the British during the French and Indian War of the 1750s and 1760s—refused to leave their brothers in the hands of the Native American warriors they considered to be savages. “This has been part of American society,” says the historian Paul Springer, “before there was an American society.” The oath is even encoded in the USAF’s Airmen’s Creed, which every airman recites when entering the service. “I am an American airman,” it reads. “Wingman, leader, warrior. I will never leave a fellow airman behind.”

  But the truth was that airmen and Marines and sailors had been left behind in World War II and Korea and long before that, when circumstances made their rescue too costly or dangerous. Had Hambleton been caught far behind enemy lines at the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918 or during the invasion of Sicily in 1943, there is every chance he would have stayed there until he was captured. A rescue operation as large as the one launched in 1972 would have been almost inconceivable to the military commanders of those times. And it wasn’t just the technology—the choppers that could drop in and pick up a lost aviator in a matter of minutes—that was different.

  Joker was aware of Hambleton’s top-secret background. “We knew who he was,” said Tincher. “We knew he had a lot of highly classified material.” But the pilots and the navigators and the FACs working the rescue didn’t know who Hambleton was, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Hambleton could have been some pogue lieutenant or a dumb-ass private who’d fallen out of a Jolly Green and they would still have gone out to save him.

  Why? What motivated these men to throw themselves at defenses so ferocious that many had never seen anything to compare them to? It wasn’t just esprit de corps and three hundred years of tradition. It was the nature of the war in Southeast Asia.

  Many of the officers and airmen who were being called in to save Hambleton were on their second or third tours in Vietnam. When some of them had returned home between deployments, they’d encountered the ferocious gauntlet of antiwar sentiment. Some had been shouted at, spat on, and called “mercenaries.” If you parked your car with its Air Force base sticker on an American street, even in a military-friendly town, it might be egged or keyed by the time you got back. In the late sixties, some Army soldiers had bought long-haired wigs to cover up their military haircuts. Not all that much had changed since then.

  About their allies the Americans were, for the most part, unenthusiastic. There were brave, good men fighting on the South Vietnamese side, but there had been too many instances when their allies had melted away during battle or shirked what the Americans saw as their duty. One nickname for the South Vietnamese Air Force, the VNAF, was “the Very Nice Air Force,” based on its pilots’ habit of hauling ass for base whenever challenged by the enemy. When one airman arrived in-country early in 1972 the first thing his squadron commander told him was “There is nothing over here worth an American life.”

  In this environment, the rescue of a fellow American acquired an urgency that raised it above almost every other thing. One OV-10 pilot who flew the Hambleton mission found only one thing that gave his service meaning, and it wasn’t Vietnamese democracy. It was rescuing his brothers from behind enemy lines. “I would have ripped that country up from all sides,” he said, “to get our POWs back.” This was a widespread sentiment within the USAF. “The feeling when you get those guys out must be like winning the Super Bowl,” said one Air Force commander. “You just get this tremendous high.”

  The men at Da Nang that spring would have loved to fight for values like freedom and liberty on behalf of a grateful republic. But as it was, their leaders were feckless, their country had forgotten them, and their allies rarely felt like allies. It wasn’t 1944, and this wasn’t France. All they had, many airmen felt, was their unbreakable bond to one another.

  As Hambleton waited to be rescued, Joker’s order for a sixteen-mile no-fire zone on all sides around his position went out to the different commands in Vietnam. It quickly reached the American officers who were embedded with the South Vietnamese units in the Dong Ha area, the men who coordinated US Navy gunfire and airstrikes for the troops fighting the war on the ground. These officers knew about the Easter Offensive. It was all around them.

  American helicopter pilots flying south of the DMZ saw waves of NVA troops running toward the firebases below them, hundreds and hundreds at a time. The enemy soldiers would sweep through the jungle, disappearing for a moment under the dark green of the tree canopy, then reemerge, firing their rifles. They would climb over the dead bodies that were caught in the barbed wire and charge toward the guns
shooting at them. For the pilots, it was a bewitching sight, almost beautiful, these flowing rows of men silently rushing forward over long expanses of pitted earth. For the men on the ground, it was terrifying. One crew flying a nighttime mission approached a firebase that had been under attack for many hours. They dropped flares to illuminate the terrain below, which was hidden by night fog. When the flares finally penetrated through the mist, the crewmen saw lit up in the orange-colored gloom dozens of bodies lying on the ground in postures that showed they’d died under intense fire. The pilots realized that there was no one at the firebase left alive, and pulled away.

  At the Ai Tu Combat Base in Quang Tri, headquarters of the Third ARVN Division, the Vietnamese soldiers were engaged in one of the fiercest ground battles since World War II. Major David Brookbank, the Air Force air liaison adviser, was in a command bunker as artillery shells thudded into the concrete structure. He could hear the cries of men being shot. “We were in full-scale war,” he said. Firebases were falling one after the other; soldiers were surrendering and dying by the hundreds.

  It was in this atmosphere that the no-fire order was handed to Brookbank. He took the piece of paper and began to read. The sixteen-mile zone where airstrikes and artillery were now forbidden encompassed the entire battlefield in front of him. Brookbank went back and looked at the words again. “He read the message carefully,” wrote one military historian, “but could not believe what he was being told.” At this crucial moment, when North Vietnam was invading South Vietnam in an attempt to annihilate its army and win the war, he was being instructed not to fire at the enemy. The battle against the invading forces was to take a backseat to the rescue of a single man.

  It isn’t true, Brookbank thought to himself. It couldn’t possibly be true. You couldn’t ask the war to take a backseat.