Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  Inside the Cobra, the pilot could feel the bullets banging into the underside of the chopper. The windshield in front of him exploded in a burst of flying Plexiglas. Warning lights flashed on the instrument panel; the gunfire was eating through the components that kept the chopper airborne, the ground fire so intense that the Cobra “was being rapidly converted into a piece of torn wreckage.”

  The Cobra pilot called to Kulland to turn back and told him that he was aborting. He began his turn and saw Kulland doing the same. Then the pilot spotted a stream of thin blue smoke billowing from just below the Huey’s rotors. Blue smoke usually meant a hit to the engine.

  Kulland struggled to keep the chopper aloft, but the Huey began to lose altitude. “Sir, there’s a lot of smoke coming out of the engine,” Astorga called out nervously from the back of the chopper. Kulland, his voice calm, said, “OK.”

  A bullet thudded into Astorga’s ankle, then ricocheted up. It clipped his knee and smashed into his leg, snapping his femur before slamming into his ceramic chest plate, “nearly tearing my head off.” He fought to keep his balance. Standing upright on his broken leg, he kept his finger on the Minigun trigger and poured fire down on the enemy gunners. He could feel Kulland start to pull the chopper up. “He wanted to get us out of there.”

  Then, without warning, the noise of whirring machinery stopped. There was perfect quiet inside the chopper. The engine had failed.

  The gunner in the Cobra, looking back at the Huey, watched as the chopper suddenly pitched nose-up and made a violent ninety-degree turn, its airspeed so low that it was almost hanging midair. Pitching left, it sank toward a village about a mile to the north of the river. As the helicopter fell out of the sky, Kulland cried out that he’d lost the tail rotor. “I’m trying to control it with the pedals,” he shouted.

  The chopper fell toward the earth. “We were coming down like a rock,” Astorga said.

  The craft seemed to tilt, left to right. Kulland wrestled the Huey down, but the chopper was on the verge of being out of control. The wind roared in through the cargo door.

  Astorga felt a flutter of panic. “We knew we were in trouble. We knew we were going down.”

  The chopper plummeted through the humid air. Astorga braced for the collision. “I heard a boom.” Astorga slammed back onto the steel floor and quickly lost consciousness.

  A minute or two later, he came to. The chopper was silent, resting in a field. The rotors had stopped turning.

  “Is anyone alive?” Astorga shouted.

  A voice, close by: “I’m alive. I’m trapped.” It was the co-pilot, John Frink. Astorga crawled across the wreckage and into the cockpit. There he found Kulland still strapped in his seat, unmoving, his eyes closed. “The color of his skin was real pale.” The pilot from North Dakota, the teenaged singer from the Silver Daggers, was dead.

  In the co-pilot’s seat, Frink, who’d just arrived in-country a few weeks before, was conscious and talking. Astorga pulled the release on the safety harness and got him out of his seat. Frink handed Astorga two survival vests and told him they might have to leave the other two men behind; enemy soldiers would be coming soon. Astorga crawled from the wreckage into the field, carrying the two vests. Frink followed.

  Someone was screaming from inside the chopper. “I can’t get out!” It was Astorga’s buddy, Paschall. Astorga, his leg broken, stumbled toward the wreck and made his way to the crew chief. His leg was trapped under some debris. Astorga pulled at the metal, but it wouldn’t give. “There was nothing I could do.” He had to leave him for the moment. Astorga crawled back out of the chopper.

  Frink turned back—Astorga believes he was going for the radio, to call for a rescue. Astorga heard a burst of gunfire from behind him. Someone—Paschall or Frink—shouted, “VC!” Astorga heard the snipsnip of bullets passing over his head and rocking the fuselage of the Huey. “Get out of there!” he called to the two men. The Huey had just been refueled before they made the rescue run.

  As Astorga watched, a tracer struck one of the Huey’s five fuel tanks, and it was as if the air around the chopper drew in its breath and then the Huey erupted in an enormous wall of flame. Astorga ducked down and the fire passed over him. “I felt the heat on my skin.” When he looked up, Paschall and Frink had disappeared and flames were licking up toward the sky.

  He stood up and tried to run, but his leg buckled under him. He would struggle up and take a step and then fall on his face; again and again, he tried to get away, but he was barely making any progress. He heard rotors cutting the air and looked up. A Cobra was hovering above him. He stood up and waved, but nobody onboard saw him. The pilot pulled away. Astorga turned to look at the terrain around him and saw figures running toward him.

  Astorga was losing blood; he could feel the first wave of shock daze his nerves. A group of NVA soldiers ran closer to him. Their body postures, their movements . . . Astorga could tell the men were furious. “They weren’t taking any prisoners,” he said. “They wanted to kill me.” A hand grabbed him roughly and shoved him into a hole in the rice paddy, perhaps a crater from an American bomb. Astorga tumbled in. From the muddy bottom, he looked up and saw the soldiers gathered a few feet from the lip of the hole, black silhouettes looking down, their guns outlined against the sky. Astorga knew the rumor about what happened to door gunners as well as anyone. He was sure he was going to die.

  Something heavy landed next to him. Astorga turned his head and saw that an enemy soldier had jumped into the hole. The man stood there for a moment, then reached down and grabbed Astorga by the uniform and pulled him to his feet. The ends of the broken bone ground together; Astorga cried out. The other men reached down into the hole and pulled at his flight suit, lifting him up. The mud streaked his uniform as the men dragged him over the lip of the hole. He nearly fainted from the pain. The men pointed their AK-47s and gestured. They wanted him to march.

  Astorga had no idea why the Vietnamese soldier had decided to save his life. He moved off. He could hear the breathing of the fire as it ate through the aviation fuel and the metal, but no voices.

  Unaware that Blueghost 39 had crashed, Hambleton rose to a crouch and began walking quickly across the rice field toward the copse of trees. He hurried over the furrows, glancing left and right to see if he was being observed. The presence of the rice paddy told him he was near a settlement, a village of some sort, and there must be locals nearby. Any one of them would turn him in, or shoot him if they couldn’t catch him.

  The thick hedge loomed up. His heart beating fast, Hambleton dove for it and burrowed his way beneath the branches. He lay there for a moment, listening for pursuers, then sat up. He couldn’t hear any footsteps or voices.

  Convinced he’d made it to the trees undetected, Hambleton decided to take stock of what items he still had on him. He began going through his flight suit and taking out everything he found there, laying the items out neatly in front of him. The name tag he’d worn around Korat had been stripped off the flight suit, as was standard for every mission over Vietnam, but there was still a pair of silver leaves sewn into the shoulders, the mark of a lieutenant colonel. He briefly considered ripping them off but decided he would be rescued soon, and it wouldn’t be worth it.

  He placed his bulbous flying helmet on the ground first. Then he turned to his survival vest. It was astonishing how much the Air Force had packed into the countless pockets of the little vest: gadgets and weapons and survival paraphernalia of every kind. Hambleton went through the pockets one by one and sorted the items in his lap. After a few minutes, he inventoried his bounty: one tourniquet, one first-aid kit, two bulky survival radios, one set of spare batteries, a number of rescue flares, a water bag, now empty, a hunting knife, a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, twenty bullets, a signaling mirror, an infrared strobe light, a mosquito net, a tiny compass, a can of insect repellent, and a two-foot rubber map of Vietnam.

  Hambleton surveyed his haul, feeling a rush of pleasure. If the choppers couldn’t ge
t through tonight, it would be a relief to have some survival gear. He stuffed the items back into their respective pouches, leaving the .38 out so he could grab it if he heard an enemy soldier approach. He looked around him and crawled toward the thickest part of the bushes, then pulled the knife out of its scabbard and began digging a hole. He carefully scooped up the displaced dirt and spread it evenly around the roots of the bushes to disguise his work. He scavenged about and collected a pile of leaves and dead brush, which he piled near the hiding place. Then the navigator backed into the hole, pulling the leaves in after him. He was now completely invisible to anyone walking more than a few feet away.

  As dusk deepened, Hambleton noticed a change in the register of the fire around him. The popping of the small-arms guns disappeared and was replaced by the full-throated reports of heavy artillery. “It was almost like the time for the shift change at General Motors,” he thought. Mosquitoes found his hiding spot and began vectoring in. Hambleton pulled out his insect spray and applied it liberally.

  Then, voices. Hambleton froze. They were speaking Vietnamese. He couldn’t see through the thicket or the fog beyond it, but from their pace he guessed it was a patrol out searching for him. “They were looking and looking hard,” said Hambleton. He held his breath, his heart beating so fast it was almost painful. The unseen soldiers passed by the thicket without stopping. He relaxed and closed his eyes, hoping to sleep. His flight helmet served as a hard pillow.

  A few minutes later, another patrol approached. Hambleton could hear the soft footfalls of their feet on the muddy ground. The voices drew closer, then stopped ten feet from his hiding place. Hambleton felt a rush of panic. “It was dark as pitch but I could almost feel the dull silver of the leaves on my shoulders looming brightly.” He was sure the soldiers would spot him. How could they not?

  Something flared in the black. The soldiers had lit cigarettes, which moved in orange arcs to their lips as Hambleton watched. When the soldiers pulled on the cigarettes, “their faces would leap from the darkness in the brief light like grotesque masks on Halloween.” Each cigarette rose in turn and revealed its holder. Hambleton studied the men’s features. It was his first time seeing NVA soldiers up close; here they were, the enemy, with their high slanting cheekbones and dark brown eyes. After a few moments, he’d counted seven of them.

  The glowing specks began to drop to the ground. The NVA soldiers crushed the butts beneath their boots. Hambleton could hear them pushing the branches aside with their hands and their rifles, searching for something. Finally, the sounds grew dimmer and the voices faded.

  At Korat, an alert klaxon blared and the rescue teams on standby dashed for their aircraft. Major Dennis Constant was the aircraft commander of a “King” HC-130, a hulking search and rescue plane that could orbit over a downed airman for hours. “My crew and I ran out to the airplane,” Constant said, “hit the starters, and blasted off.”

  Eighty minutes after the shootdown, Constant and his crew arrived over Hambleton and took up the role of airborne mission commander, orbiting southwest of Hambleton’s position. The cloud ceiling was fifteen hundred feet—high enough that aircraft could operate—and it was raining lightly. Another airman raised Hambleton on the radio and got him talking; the crew wanted to be sure that the navigator hadn’t been captured and that rescue forces weren’t being led into a trap. Hambleton answered his questions by whispering into his survival radio. He reported his injuries and described the terrain around him. His voice was even and calm. “I was thinking this guy sounds cool as a cucumber down there,” Constant said. “I’d have been scared silly.”

  Constant’s crew called Saigon and asked if there were any friendly ground forces around the survivor. The Seventh Air Force controllers told them no, nothing unusual was happening in the sector near the Cam Lo bridge and there were no SAM sites nearby. But Hambleton was reporting “gomers”—North Vietnamese soldiers—all over the place, hundreds of them just in his immediate area. He could see flashlights in the near distance as searchers moved closer to him. It became abundantly clear to Constant that Saigon was feeding him wrong or outdated information, and he began to get upset about it. “I kept calling back to Saigon and saying, ‘What the hell’s going on? Where are all these people coming from?’” But intel insisted he was misinformed. Nothing remarkable was happening in the sector.

  The commander decided to grab what assets he could. “This is King,” he called on the emergency channel, using his code name. “I got a guy on the ground.” Voices replied out of the ether, pilots identifying their aircraft and drawling their approximate position. Constant gave them his coordinates and asked them to get to him as fast as possible. He was calling in every piece of airborne equipment he could find in the skies over Southeast Asia. He wanted Hambleton off the ground before dawn.

  Slowly, planes appeared out of the clouds and gathered above Hambleton, their navigation lights winking green and red in the dark sky. F-4s loaded with air-to-air missiles arrived to guard against North Vietnamese MiG fighters; A-1 propeller-driven planes flown by pilots who were specialists in rescue operations swept in and assumed on-scene command. Fighter jets rocketed past, heavily laden with bombs hung on their wings; the big HH-53 Jolly Green rescue helicopters hovered out over the South China Sea, waiting to swoop in and gather up the airman; O-2 and OV-10 FACs buzzed in tight orbits. “It was the whole world out there,” Constant said.

  Bat 22 remained on station to guard the more vulnerable planes from the SAM sites. It had lost pressurization on account of a hydraulic failure; protocol dictated the plane return to base. But the pilot got on the radio and said they would remain. “We’ll stay here,” he told Constant, “till this damn thing falls out of the air.”

  The fighters began hitting the AAA batteries and SAM sites so that the choppers could come in and snatch Hambleton. The pilots of two A-1 attack planes heard the call. They were flying alongside two U.S. Army UH-1H ”Huey” helicopters, their tops and sides painted in jungle camouflage, their bellies painted light blue so they’d blend in with the sky. The choppers hovered south of the city of Quang Tri while the A-1s roared north. The pilot of one of the A-1s, Captain Don Morse, anticipated an ordinary recovery without too much trouble. Hambleton was down in the DMZ, not up near Hanoi, where rescues were nearly impossible because of the high number of AAA guns that ringed the capital.

  The two A-1s found Jankowski orbiting in his little spotter plane. He showed them Hambleton’s hiding place, a small grove of trees. Jankowski now took off south, hoping to gather more aircraft for the rescue mission. Morse gazed down on the dark fields surrounding Hambleton and was taken aback. “I’d never seen so much ground fire in my whole life,” he said. Thousands of tracers rose like embers from a burning forest. The noise was deafening, the sky streaked with flame. “Every hill looked like a Christmas tree,” a reporter later wrote, “from the numerous sparkles of NVA machine-gun fire.” Morse couldn’t understand. Nobody was supposed to be down there except farmers and maybe some lightly armed VC. What was going on?

  Rounds began crimping into the fuselage. Morse tried to dodge the streams of flak but found that they were so thick he couldn’t avoid them. He realized that he could only hope to take the hits where they did the least damage. Any one of the shells could strike a fuel line or another piece of vital machinery and send him corkscrewing into the jungle below.

  Orbiting above, Constant watched as airstrike after airstrike hit the guns firing from the ground. The A-1s dove down and dropped their bombs, which sent balls of orange fire rolling up from the jungle canopy. As Constant watched, a plume of smoke erupted on the ground near Hambleton’s position: a SAM where no SAMs were supposed to be. It was quickly followed by more. One OV-10 pilot, Captain Gary Ferentchak, found himself targeted by a swarm of missiles. He counted them as they whisked by. “I’d gotten five and couldn’t see number six.” He screamed at his backseater, “Where is it?” The answer came back: “Off your nose.” Ferentchak swiveled hi
s head and rolled the aircraft upside down, jettisoning his external fuel tanks and rocket pods. He searched the blackness, hoping to spot the SAM before it exploded. There it was, straight ahead, “just dead locked on.” Ferentchak dove for the forest canopy in the darkness, waiting for number six to blow his plane apart.

  When the missile detonated, “it looked like somebody took a strobe light and lit it off in your face.” The explosion thumped the fuselage, blasting off the flare pads and spare fuel tanks, but the plane stayed aloft. As Ferentchak sped earthward, his finger pressed the “present position” button, which locked his altitude into the navigation system. Later, he checked and found he’d pulled out of the dive at 250 feet above the ground. “That put my heart in my throat.” In the pitch darkness of the Vietnamese night, he’d been perhaps a second and a half away from smashing his plane into a rice paddy.

  Constant, too, heard the blaring SAM warnings in his ear. He peered into the darkness and spotted what looked like five headlights speeding toward him above the cumulus. He was shaken. The massive HC-130 wasn’t known for its maneuverability, and the missiles were streaking toward him at Mach 3. They came straight up, leveled off at about twenty thousand feet—the same altitude as Constant—and turned toward him. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, man.’ I figured I’d wait until they were about to hit me and do some kind of Hail Mary maneuver.”

  As the first SAM grew in his windscreen, Constant pulled the throttles back to idle, dumped his flaps, and did a wing-over, tumbling straight toward the ground. As the plane screamed earthward, completely inverted, Constant waited for the burst of overpressure. Waves buffeted the plane as the SAMS went off, “boom, boom, boomboomboom.” One of his engines failed—he guessed it was because of a SAM—but he finally made it to the South China Sea, its lines of waves thin and pale in the moonlight.