“This is Blackbird One to flight,” said the pilot, breaking radio silence. “Don’t switch on your underbelly lights until you’re thirty seconds from rendezvous, and remember, I’m going in first.”
A green tracer of bullets shot in front of the cockpit, and the rear gunners immediately returned fire.
“The VC have identified us,” said the flight leader crisply. He dipped his helicopter to the right and Nat saw the enemy for the first time. The VC were advancing up the hill, only a few hundred yards away from where the chopper would try to land.
Fletcher read the article in the Washington Post. It was an heroic episode that had caught the imagination of the American public in a war no one wanted to know about. A group of seventy-eight infantrymen, cornered in the North Vietnamese jungle, easily outnumbered by the Vietcong, had been rescued by a fleet of helicopters that had flown over dangerous terrain, unable to land while encountering enemy fire. Fletcher studied the detailed diagram on the opposite page. Flight Lieutenant Chuck Philips had been the first to swoop down and rescue half a dozen trapped men. He had hovered only a few feet above the ground while the rescue took place. He hadn’t noticed that another officer, Lieutenant Cartwright, had leaped off the aircraft just as he dipped his nose and rose back up into the sky to allow the second helicopter to take his place.
Among the bodies on the third helicopter was that of the officer in command, Captain Dick Tyler. Lieutenant Cartwright had immediately assumed command, and taken over the counterattack while at the same time coordinating the rescue of the remaining men. He was the last person to leave the field of battle and climb on board the remaining rescue helicopter. All twelve helicopters headed back to Saigon, but only eleven landed at Eisenhower airfield.
Brigadier General Hayward immediately dispatched a rescue party, and the same eleven pilots and their crews volunteered to go in search of the missing Huey, but despite making repeated sorties into enemy territory, they could find no sign of Blackbird Twelve. Hayward later described Nat Cartwright—an enlisted man, who had left the University of Connecticut in his freshman year to sign up—as an example to all Americans of someone who, in Lincoln’s words, had given “the last full measure of devotion.” “Alive or dead, we’ll find him,” vowed Hayward.
Fletcher scoured every paper for articles that mentioned Nat Cartwright after reading a profile that revealed he had been born on the same day, in the same town and in the same hospital.
Nat leaped off the first helicopter as it continued to hover a few feet above the ground. He assisted Captain Tyler as he sent back the first group to board the Huey while a wave of bullets and mortars shrieked across the nose cone.
“You take over here,” said Tyler, “while I go back and organize my men. I’ll send up half a dozen at a time.”
“Go,” shouted Nat as the first helicopter dipped to the left before ascending into the sky. As the second helicopter flew in, despite being under constant fire, Nat calmly organized the next group to take their place on board. He glanced down the hill to see Diek Tyler still leading his men in a rearguard action while at the same time giving orders for the next group to join Nat. When Nat turned back, the third chopper was dropping into place to hover above the small square of muddy ground. A staff sergeant and five soldiers ran up to the side of the helicopter and began to clamber on board.
“Shit,” said the staff sergeant looking back, “the captain’s hit.”
Nat turned to see Tyler lying facedown in the mud, two soldiers lifting him up. They quickly carried his body toward the waiting helicopter.
“Take over here, sergeant,” said Nat, and then ran down toward the ridge. He grabbed the captain’s M60, took cover and began firing at the advancing enemy. Somehow he selected six more men to run up the hill and join the fourth helicopter. He was only on that ridge for about twenty minutes, as he continued to try and repel the waves of advancing VC, while his own support group became fewer and fewer because he kept sending them up the hill to the safety of the next helicopter.
The last six men on that ridge didn’t retreat until they saw Blackbird Twelve swoop in. As Nat finally turned and began to run up the hill, the bullet ripped into his leg. He knew he should have felt pain, but it didn’t stop him running as he had never run before. When he reached the open door of the aircraft, firing as he ran, he heard the staff sergeant say, “For fuck’s sake, sir, get your ass on board.”
As the staff sergeant yanked him up, the helicopter dipped its nose and lurched starboard, throwing Nat across the floor before swinging quickly away.
“Are you OK?” asked the skipper.
“I think so,” gasped Nat, finding himself lying across the body of a private.
“Typical of the army, can’t even be sure if they’re still alive. With luck and a tail wind,” he added, “we should be back in time for breakfast.”
Nat stared down at the body of the soldier, who had stood by his side only moments before. His family would now be able to attend his burial, rather than having to be informed that he had been left to an unceremonious death in an unceremonious land.
“Christ Almighty,” he heard the flight lieutenant say.
“Problem?” Nat managed.
“You could say that. We’re losing fuel fast; the bastards must have hit my fuel tank.”
“I thought these things had two fuel tanks,” said Nat.
“What do you imagine I used on the way out, soldier?”
The pilot tapped the fuel gauge and then checked his milometer. A flashing red light showed he had less than thirty miles left before he would be forced to put down. He turned around to see Nat still lying on top of the dead soldier as he clung to the floor. “I’m going to have to look for somewhere to land.”
Nat stared out of an open door, but all he could see was acres of dense forest.
The pilot switched on all his lights, searching for a break in the trees, and then Nat felt the helicopter shudder. “I’m going down,” said the pilot, sounding just as calm as he had throughout the whole operation. “I guess we’ll have to postpone breakfast.”
“Over to your right,” shouted Nat as he spotted a clearing in the forest.
“I see it,” said the pilot as he tried to swing the helicopter toward the open space, but the three-ton juggernaut just wouldn’t respond. “We’re going down, whether we like it or not.”
The whirring of the blades became slower and slower, until it began to feel to Nat as if they were gliding. He thought of his mother and felt guilty that he hadn’t replied to her latest letter, and then of his father, who he knew would be so proud of him, of Tom and his triumph of being elected to the Yale student council—would he in time become president? And of Rebecca, whom he still loved and feared he always would. As he clung to the floor, Nat suddenly felt very young; he was, after all, still only nineteen. He discovered some time later that the flight lieutenant, known as Blackbird Twelve, was only a year older.
As the helicopter blades stopped whirring and the aircraft glided silently toward the trees, the staff sergeant spoke, “Just in case we don’t meet again, sir, my name’s Speck Foreman, it’s been an honor to know you.”
They shook hands, as one does at the end of any game.
Fletcher stared at the picture of Nat on the front page of the New York Times below the headline AN AMERICAN HERO. A man who had signed up the moment he’d received the draft notice, although he could have cited three different reasons for claiming exemption. He’d been promoted to lieutenant and later, as a warrant officer, he’d taken command of an operation to rescue a stranded platoon on the wrong side of the Dyng River. No one seemed to be able to explain what a warrant officer was doing on a helicopter during a front-line operation.
Fletcher knew he would spend the rest of his life wondering what decision he would have made if that plain brown envelope had ended up in his mailbox, a question that could only be properly answered by those who had been put to the test. But even Jimmy conceded that Lieute
nant Cartwright must have been a remarkable man. “If this had happened a week before the vote,” he told Fletcher, “you might even have beaten Tom Russell—it’s all in the timing.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” said Fletcher.
“Why not?” asked Jimmy.
“That’s the weird thing,” Fletcher replied. “He turns out to be Tom’s closest friend.”
A fleet of eleven helicopters had returned to search for the missing men, but all they could come up with a week later were the remains of an aircraft that must have exploded the moment it hit the trees. Three bodies had been identified, one of them Flight Lieutenant Carl Mould’s, but despite an extensive search of the area, no trace could be found of Lieutenant Cartwright or Staff Sergeant Speck Foreman.
Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor, asked the nation to both mourn and honor men who exemplified the courage of every fighting soldier at the front.
“He shouldn’t have said mourn,” remarked Fletcher.
“Why not?” asked Jimmy.
“Because Cartwright’s still alive.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“I don’t know how I know,” Fletcher replied, “but I promise you, he’s still alive.”
Nat couldn’t recall hitting the trees, or being thrown from the helicopter. When he eventually woke, the blazing sun was burning down on his parched face. He lay there, wondering where he was, and then the memory of that dramatic hour came flooding back.
For a moment a man who wasn’t even sure there was a God prayed. Then he raised his right arm. It moved like an arm should move, so he wiggled the fingers, all five of them. He lowered the arm and raised the left one. It too obeyed the telegraphed message from his brain, so he wiggled his fingers, and, once again, all five of them responded. He lowered the arm and waited. He slowly raised his right leg and carried out the same exercise with the toes. He lowered the leg before raising the other one, and that’s when he felt the pain.
He turned his head from side to side, and then placed the palms of his hands on the ground. He prayed again and pressed down on his hands to push himself giddily up. He waited for a few moments in the hope that the trees would stop spinning, and then tried to stand. Once he was on his feet he tentatively placed one foot in front of the other, as a child would do, and as he didn’t fall over, he tried to move the other one in the same direction. Yes, yes, yes, thank you, yes, and then he felt the pain again, almost as if until that moment he had been anesthetized.
He fell to his knees, and examined the calf of his left leg where the bullet had torn straight through. Ants were crawling in and out of the wound, oblivious to the fact that this human thought he was still alive. It took Nat some time to remove them one by one, before binding his leg with a sleeve of his shirt. He looked up to see the sun retreating toward the hills. He only had a short time to discover if any of his colleagues had survived.
He stood and turned a complete circle, only stopping when he spotted smoke coming from the forest. He began to limp toward it, vomiting when he stumbled across the charred body of the young pilot, whose name he didn’t know, the jacket of his uniform hanging from a branch. Only the lieutenant’s bars on his epaulet indicated who it had been. Nat would bury him later, but for now he had a race with the sun. It was then that he heard the groan.
“Where are you?” shouted Nat. The groan went up a decibel. Nat swung around to see the massive frame of Staff Sergeant Foreman lodged in the trees, only a few feet above the wreckage. As he reached the man, the groan rose yet another decibel. “Can you hear me?” asked Nat. The man opened and closed his eyes as Nat lowered him onto the ground. He heard himself saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you home,” like some schoolboy hero from the pages of a comic book. Nat removed the compass from the staff sergeant’s belt, looked up at the sun, and then he spotted an object in the trees. He would have cheered if only he could have thought of some way of retrieving it. Nat dragged himself over to the base of the tree. He somehow jumped up and down on one foot as he grabbed at a branch and shook it, hoping to dislodge its load. He was about to give up when it shifted an inch. He tugged at the branch even more vigorously, and then it moved again and suddenly, without warning, came crashing down. It would have landed on Nat’s head if he hadn’t quickly fallen to one side. He couldn’t jump.
Nat rested for a moment, before slowly lifting the staff sergeant up and gently placing him on the stretcher. He then sat on the ground and watched the sun disappear behind the highest tree, having completed its duty for the day in that particular land.
He had read somewhere about a mother who had kept her child alive after a car crash by talking to him all through the night. Nat talked to the staff sergeant all night.
Fletcher read in sheer disbelief how, with the help of local peasants, Lieutenant Nat Cartwright had dragged that stretcher from village to village for two hundred and eleven miles, and seen the sun rise and fall seventeen times before he reached the outskirts of the city of Saigon, where both men were rushed to the nearest field hospital.
Staff Sergeant Speck Foreman died three days later, never discovering the name of the lieutenant who had rescued him and who was now fighting for his own life.
Fletcher followed every snippet of news he could find about Lieutenant Cartwright, never doubting he would live.
A week later they flew Nat to Camp Zama in Japan, where they operated on him to save his leg. The following month, he was allowed to return home to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to complete his recuperation.
The next time Fletcher saw Nat Cartwright was on the front page of the New York Times, shaking hands with President Johnson in the Rose Garden at the White House.
He was receiving the Medal of Honor.
15
Michael and Susan Cartwright were “bowled over” by their visit to the White House to witness their only son being decorated with the Medal of Honor in the Rose Garden. After the ceremony, President Johnson listened attentively to Nat’s father as he explained the problems Americans would be facing if they all lived to the age of ninety and were not properly covered by life insurance. “In the next century, Americans will spend as long in retirement as they do in work,” were the words LBJ repeated to his cabinet the following morning.
On their journey back to Cromwell, Nat’s mother asked him what plans he had for the future.
“I can’t be sure, because it’s not in my hands,” he replied. “I’ve received orders to report to Fort Benning on Monday, when I’ll find out what Colonel Tremlett has in mind for me.”
“Another wasted year,” said his mother.
“Character building,” said his father, who was still glowing from his long chat with the president.
“I hardly think Nat’s in need of much more of that,” was his mother’s response.
Nat smiled as he glanced out of the window and took in the Connecticut landscape. While pulling a stretcher for seventeen days and seventeen nights with snatches of sleep and little food, he had wondered if he would ever see his homeland again. He thought about his mother’s words, and had to agree with her. The idea of a wasted year of form-filling, making and returning salutes before training someone else to take his place angered him. The top brass had made it clear that they weren’t going to let him return to Vietnam and thereby risk the life of one of America’s few recognized heroes.
Over dinner that night, after his father had repeated the conversation he’d had with the president several times, he asked Nat to tell them more about ’Nam.
For over an hour, Nat described the city of Saigon, the countryside and its people, rarely referring to his job as a warrant officer. “The Vietnamese are hard-working and friendly,” he told his parents, “and they seem genuinely pleased that we’re there, but no one, on either side, believes that we can stay forever. I fear history will regard the whole episode as pointless, and once it’s over it will be quickly erased from the national psyche.” He turned to
his father. “At least your war had a purpose.” His mother nodded her agreement, and Nat was surprised to see that his father didn’t immediately offer a contrary view.
“Did you come away with any particular abiding memory?” asked his mother, hoping that her son might talk about his experience at the front.
“Yes, I did. The inequality of man.”
“But we’re doing everything we can to assist the people of South Vietnam,” said his father.
“I’m not referring to the Vietnamese, father,” Nat replied, “I’m talking about what Kennedy described as ‘my fellow Americans.’”
“Fellow Americans?” his mother repeated.
“Yes, because my abiding memory will be our treatment of the poor minorities, in particular the blacks. They were on the battlefield in great numbers for no other reason than that they couldn’t afford a smart lawyer who could show them how to avoid the draft.”
“But your closest friend…”
“I know,” said Nat, “and I’m glad Tom didn’t sign up, because he might well have suffered the same fate as Dick Tyler.”
“So do you regret your decision?” asked his mother quietly.
Nat took some time before he responded. “No, but I often think of Speck Foreman, his wife and three children in Alabama, and wonder what purpose his death served.”
Nat rose early the next morning to catch the first train bound for Fort Benning. When the locomotive pulled into Columbus station, he checked his watch. There was still another hour before his meeting with the colonel, so he decided to walk the two miles up to the academy. On the way, he was continually reminded that he was on a military base, by how regularly he had to return salutes from everyone below the rank of captain. Some even smiled in recognition when they spotted the Medal of Honor, as they might with a college football hero.
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