Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  (And what you must understand in order to fully enter into the mind of an Air Force combat pilot circa 1972 is that the inkblot thing wasn’t a problem for most of them. It was part of the attraction. They weren’t flying puddle jumpers or “buses”—transport planes—that lumbered through the sky like oversized bread boxes, things a man would be ashamed to be seen in, let alone fly. You were strapping yourself into the hottest, loudest, most violent machines on the face of the earth, machines so powerful they would not just zorch you across the open skies at Mach 1+ but could magically change you from a solid to a gas—or at least a loose assembly of particles suspended in a gas—in the blink of an eye. You had to admit it was intriguing.)

  There were reminders at Korat, too, of the bad things. A large plaque hung on the wall of the briefing hut with the name of every squadron member who’d gone MIA or KIA in the war, and the men passed it every day on the way to learn about their next mission. And there was Roscoe, a big long-haired brown dog of no recognizable breed. Roscoe had the freedom of the base, attended briefings or didn’t, according to his mood, ate in the kitchen of the Officers’ Club, and toured the grounds by his own mysterious schedule. You could pet Roscoe all you wanted and offer him treats, which he’d accept, but if you tried to get him to become your dog—and many dudes did—you were shit out of luck. Because Roscoe had once belonged to a pilot who flew out of Korat, and that pilot had been shot down and never returned. That night, Roscoe had waited as usual by the man’s hooch for him to land. When he failed to arrive, the dog refused to leave. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t be comforted or coaxed away. He wouldn’t, that is, forget.

  The guys on the base absolutely adored Roscoe. They secretly hoped any living thing loved them as much as that goddamned dog loved that goddamned missing flyboy. And yet it was hard to look at Roscoe and not contemplate the fact that his master was at that moment hiding somewhere in the northern Vietnamese jungle or was boxed up in a prison being ravaged by dysentery and enduring periodic torture by the NVA. At best. Chances were the aviator had become “monkey meat,” as the dudes said. That is, he was dead.

  That afternoon, Hambleton reported for his crew briefing in the Operations Center. The building’s interior walls were lined with high-resolution maps of target areas in Laos, Cambodia, South and North Vietnam, as well as overhead recon photographs, all laid out in precise order. Sometimes you would see pilots and their navigators stalking a slow path about six feet from the walls, staring intently at the photographs. From that distance, the pictures showed what you would see from your window at ten thousand feet up, so the two men would be “flying” the route in their minds, memorizing the landmarks as they crept along. The place was usually crawling with airmen, and today was no different.

  When he checked in, Hambleton learned that two EB-66s—electronic countermeasures planes that kept the SAM missiles off the big bombers—were needed to accompany three B-52s to bomb an area below the DMZ, west of a town called Cam Lo. NVA battalions were attacking the South Vietnamese bases in the area and the B-52s were being sent to hit them as they advanced.

  Hambleton was in charge of scheduling the squadron navigators, and he was in a fix. One of the planes was all set to go. But the navigator scheduled to fly in the other aircraft, a man named Thomas McKinney, wasn’t on the base. The Red Cross had informed McKinney that doctors near his home in Boston had discovered a congenital defect in his three-year-old son’s heart; McKinney had received emergency permission to travel stateside and was now somewhere in the air on his way to Massachusetts. Short a navigator, Hambleton had to make a decision, and he decided he would take the seat behind the pilot and fly the mission himself.

  The briefing was fairly standard. The North Vietnamese hadn’t launched an organized offensive in two full years; there was a sense, at least among the airmen, that the war was winding down. The aircraft would leave Korat in the afternoon and rendezvous with a tanker plane to refuel before heading toward the target point. The officer in charge mentioned the destination was in a hot zone, but that in itself wasn’t unusual.

  There were SAM sites in North Vietnam and reports of them as far south as the DMZ, but none had ever been spotted in South Vietnam. Hambleton’s plane would spend only fifteen minutes over the target; if everything went according to plan, Hambleton and the B-52s would fly over, drop their bombs, turn around, and be back in Korat in time for a round of Manhattans and some good-time Air Force drinking.

  Hambleton and his crew left the meeting and headed to the Life Support Shop. There they found everything they needed for the mission: survival vests, helmets with their black glass visors, oxygen masks, ejection harnesses. The men talked and joked as they suited up. “Our conversation usually runs to sharp banter and relentless kidding,” said one Vietnam pilot. (Talking about the dangers of the mission was, of course, completely forbidden.) The men adjusted the harnesses, fit their oxygen masks to their helmets, and tucked away the requisite flight cards and maps in their flight suits. They removed anything from their pockets that would give away their rank or details of their mission, in case they were captured. Carrying their helmets in their bags, the six men filed out of the shop into the muggy heat.

  On the aircraft parking ramp, the crew spotted their assigned aircraft, an EB-66C, painted in jungle camo, looking long and lean in the late morning light. The plane stretched seventy-five feet, weighed 42,000 pounds, and was capable of a top speed of 643 mph. Introduced in 1954, it had originally been designed as a light bomber, but now its hold was chock-full of state-of-the-art electronic equipment designed to locate and avoid enemy radar and missile sites. The mission of the plane and its crew was to help protect the B-52s on their bombing run.

  The technology was fairly simple. When the enemy turned on its radar systems, the equipment onboard the EB-66C picked up the signal. The navigator, as well as the “crows”—the electronic warfare officers, or EWOs, in the back of the plane—would get an amber light on their monitors. When the SAM guidance system came online, they got a green light. When the missile lifted off, there was a flashing red light and the message “launch, launch, launch.” Amber, then green, then red.

  The Russian SAMs were needle-shaped missiles thirty-five feet long, twice the thickness of telephone poles, and topped with warheads wrapped in metal chain. By 1972, they’d become icons of the Cold War. It was a SAM that had shot down Francis Gary Powers in his spy plane over Russia in 1960—a major embarrassment to the Eisenhower administration, which initially lied to cover up the purpose of Powers’s mission—and the appearance of SAM sites in Cuba that had alerted JFK to the presence of missiles there. The SAM was, even to the dudes of the USAF, who admitted to fearing nothing, something that motivated regular attendance at the base chapel. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Hambleton said. “A SAM coming up at you is a hell of a feeling.”

  The US government was intensely interested in the missile. The CIA had secretly bought a Fan Song radar from the Indonesians, the same model that guided the SAMs to their targets, just to study the system and try to game its flaws. But they quickly realized there was no way to shoot a SAM down once it had been launched. There were no antimissile missiles, no lasers that would intercept the SAM mid-flight. And so the Air Force had developed the technique known as “jinking.”

  It was a simple, if terrifying, process for an Air Force pilot. First, an electronic warning buzzer would blare in your headset, or your backseater would yell out the dreaded words “SAM on scope!” On hearing these warnings, you had to immediately snap your gaze earthward and search the sky below until you spotted the fat white contrail of a missile rocketing your way from the earth. Ideally, you would then maneuver your plane so that the SAM was coming up either on your right at two o’clock or on your left at ten o’clock. At the same time that you were positioning your aircraft for optimal vision, you’d increase your power and drop the nose for extra speed. Now came the difficult part, the part that would prove your blood ran colder than Anta
rctic ice melt and that you were not a disgrace to the holy name of Chuck Yeager. You had to sit quietly in your cockpit as a SAM carrying a ginormous load of TNT came rocketing toward you at Mach 3.5, its shape growing larger and larger with each passing second . . . and do nothing. Zero. Just sit there and count, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, like some eight-year-old boy playing hide-and-seek with his hand over his eyes back home in Indiana or Wyoming or wherever you were from. You knew you had precisely ten seconds from when the NVA operator launched the missile to the moment when the warhead ignited in a burst of super-hot gases. As you counted, you let your hand rest on the stick, inert, while the missile loomed up in your windscreen until it was close enough—but precisely how close was a matter of personal judgment, as this was all done by feeling, by a sense of internal timing—and then you “jinked,” that is, snapped the stick left or right and dove toward and under the oncoming SAM. This was also called a “SAM break.” You checked the SAM to make sure it was following your descent. When it was fully committed, you pulled the nose up and hoped the missile didn’t snap its nose back up and track you again.

  Most pilots executed the break right after counting one thousand five. It had happened in the past that a pilot lost his nerve and broke too soon, turned the plane over on one thousand three, and discovered to his horror that the missile’s guidance system had sensed the evasive maneuver, corrected for the new course, and found the escaping plane in its ninety-degree dive, following it right on down until it blew the pilot and his fellow crew members out of their seats and sent bits and pieces of them raining down over the Vietnamese rice fields. If you broke too late? Letting it hang out there till one thousand eight, perhaps? The same thing.

  But if you held on until the missile was almost ready to detonate and then and only then did you snap your stick hand over all the way, the SAM would shoot harmlessly out into the cold ether. Instead of feeling the first wave of overpressure and seeing the bloom of the fireball as it expanded toward your windscreen, the rocket would either whisper past you to detonate with a satisfying krrruummmp in the distance or begin to roll and tumble, spraying various Soviet components all over the Vietnamese countryside in a gratifying display of American technological superiority.

  It all came down to those ten seconds, whether you would make it or not. “Every day,” said one airman, “was like going to the OK Corral.”

  4

  The Boys in the Back

  One by one, the crew members ducked under the tail of the plane, found the rectangular hatch cut into the fuselage, and stepped on the lowest rung of the drop-down stairs that led upward into the EB-66C, which carried the call sign Bat 21 for this mission. There was one pilot, Major Wayne Bolte, one navigator, and four crows. Hambleton climbed aboard and took the navigator’s seat, just behind and to the right of Bolte, a blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed thirty-seven-year-old Oklahoman who looked for all the world like a pilot from an Air Force recruiting poster; the only things that were missing were a toothy smile and a vigorous thumbs-up. The four crows were behind and below Hambleton, in the belly of the plane.

  As Bolte taxied out to the runway, Hambleton flicked on the radar switch. Once the monitor warmed up, he clicked it to high-power mode. Then he leaned back into his seat and lit a Lucky Strike. He was relaxed, calm. Years of experience, the ambient cockiness of the airmen around him, and the winking space-age equipment of the EB-66C all told him that he would be practically invulnerable during the flight. “There is no way a SAM could hit my airplane,” he thought to himself.

  Bat 21 taxied down the tarmac. At 3:20 p.m., it lifted into the air and joined the four other planes on their way north.

  The crows sitting behind Hambleton, out of sight, were mostly mysteries to the navigator. Squadron dudes, just like him. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Levis was a thirty-nine-year-old Texan who’d gone to the 1955 Sugar Bowl as a member of the US Naval Academy football team and had become a favorite of the maids at Korat, passing them extra cash to help them through emergencies and even sitting on his bunk listening to them pour out their stories of errant husbands or ungrateful children. First Lieutenant Robin F. Gatwood was a dark-eyed twenty-five-year-old from Hickory, North Carolina, who’d left a young wife and a one-year-old son to fight. Born and raised in Louisiana, Major Henry M. Serex was a forty-year-old Naval Academy graduate known to his family as “Mick”; he had a wife and two young daughters at home waiting for him.

  The men, by and large, had the support of their families and loved ones, if not the country they fought for. But the tension that the war had created back home was clearly traceable in the life of the crew’s final member. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Giannangeli was a forty-one-year-old math whiz, first-generation Italian American, Catholic, a funny, gregarious, meticulous man who loved nothing more than to go fishing with his sons. The memories of their trips would remain with his boys all their lives. Once, the airman took his sons out to a fast-flowing mountain stream in Colorado, hoping to catch some cutthroat trout. Giannangeli and his sons stood there hour after hour, waiting for the tip of the pole to bob up and down. Such was the force field of competitive desire that emanated from their father’s body that afternoon that his oldest son, Robert, found himself praying for the line to jerk and for his father to bag a fish. “He wanted,” Robert says, “to catch that fish so bad.” In his mind, Robert pleaded with God to intervene in the natural world just this once and direct a good-sized trout to his father’s hook so that the man’s brow could unclench and he could be completely happy, at least for a moment. It wasn’t just that Giannangeli loved fishing; it was more that these trips were so brief, squeezed in between military assignments, and he wanted them to be a success.

  In 1972, Robert was sixteen. Secretly, without his father’s knowledge, he’d become an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War. “My father would have been livid had he known,” thought Robert. So he hid his feelings. The Giannangelis were living in Colorado Springs at the time, a military town that almost—but not quite—seemed cut off from the roiling mood of the rest of the country. One day, Robert got word that an antiwar march was going to be held the next day and the route would take it to the Air Force base—actually, to the very building where his father worked. Robert decided to go.

  The next afternoon he found himself striding toward the base, chanting antiwar slogans with other men and women of all ages and hoisting their signs decrying the bombings and the napalm runs and the deaths of innocent civilians. When they reached his father’s building, Robert saw military snipers on the roof, watching the crowd and ducking to speak into their walkie-talkies. There were the disapproving faces of Air Force officers in the windows as well, but what Robert feared most was the heart-stopping possibility that a friend of his father’s might spot him and tell the old man and he would learn that Robert despised what he was doing in the service of his country. Robert knew a confrontation between him and his dad was inevitable, but he could no longer countenance the burning hooches and dead children he saw on the CBS Evening News. And so he refused to stop what he was doing.

  If Robert was hiding his true feelings from his father, so was Lieutenant Colonel Giannangeli hiding his role in the war from his sons and daughters. He’d implied to his children that his work wasn’t that dangerous; in fact, he’d basically told them he had what amounted to a desk job. But Robert had intimations that all was not as it seemed. Months earlier, Giannangeli had gone to a rigorous jungle survival school in the Philippines that all airmen were required to complete, the same one that Gene Hambleton had gone through on his way to the war. When he returned home to Colorado Springs, Giannangeli brought back a knife, a sharp-toothed, dangerous-looking thing. Robert had found the knife and he’d been fascinated, almost obsessed, by it ever since, especially the special hook that his dad informed him was to cut a parachute cord if you got hung up in a tree. One night Robert secretly went to his father’s room and took the weapon and brought it back to his bedroom, where
he hid it on a shelf in his closet, a totem of unspoken things. He’d felt guilty about it ever since. On April 1, Robert had a dream in which his father came to him and asked for the weapon back.

  As the EB-66s flew north that afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Giannangeli, who was deeply religious, may have said a prayer. Then he likely settled into his seat and caught some sleep, which was standard for crows on long missions. Rest was hard to come by, and you grabbed some whenever you could. Colorado was fourteen hours behind. Giannangeli’s children were asleep, as was Gwen Hambleton.

  The planes drew closer to the target, flying in the thin air of thirty thousand feet. They were joined by two jet fighters that would watch for approaching MiGs, along with two F-105G fighter-bombers with special missiles mounted on their wings designed to hit SAM sites on the ground. The nine aircraft now flew in a loose formation as the bright sunshine of afternoon softened and the first hints of dusk darkened the line of hills on the horizon.

  It was quiet inside the plane; there was a feeling of seclusion. Hambleton’s tight-fitting helmet and rubber earphones, along with the thick soundproofing on the EB-66C, blocked the hiss of air rushing past outside the metal skin of the airplane. Hambleton could hear his own breathing and the breathing of Bolte; occasionally the navigator chatted with the pilot, updating him on their course. When they were ten minutes from the target, Bolte called back to the EWOs. “You crows in back wake up. Crank up your jamming equipment . . . Stand by to dispense chaff.” Hambleton heard a click in his headset, one of the crows acknowledging. He bent over his monitor, his reading glasses perched on his nose. It was about 4:50 p.m.