Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  As they rolled back to Delaware State in Butch’s maroon 1965 Chevy Impala with the 327-cubic-inch engine—Butch always managed to get his hands on the hottest cars—their laughter bounced off the white leather interior. The Marines thought they had the two boys from Delaware all wrapped up for delivery to Vietnam. Hell, they were college students now! But the more Butch and Larry talked about it, the less they laughed. Why not join the Marines? they thought. What exactly did middle-class life and the church and a job with GE or Palmolive or what have you offer to a pair of twenty-two-year-olds nearly bursting with testosterone?

  They signed up. When Butch fell half an inch short of the five-foot-six height requirement, the slightly taller Larry took his friend’s license (which, in the state of Delaware at that time, didn’t include a picture) and walked onto the base’s medical office to impersonate his pal. Butch got Larry infatuated with the Marines, but Larry got Butch into the Corps.

  Some members of the Potts family were distraught. Why in God’s name would Larry, who had before him a gleaming array of possible futures that many young black men in America could barely conceive of—lawyer, doctor, engineer, preacher—volunteer to join the Marines? And go to Vietnam? If the conflict was unpopular in white neighborhoods, it was downright scorned in some black ones. Muhammad Ali had gone to jail to avoid the draft, and here was Smyrna’s own Larry Potts signing up to put his life on the line in a white man’s war. Why?

  The family never got a good answer. “I want to say that he really wanted to save his country,” says his nephew Trent. Larry Potts believed in America despite its George Wallaces and its Strom Thurmonds, and he was going to fight for it no matter what anyone thought. Others met him and got the impression it was the Marine Corps that had him in its spell. “We had just a few encounters,” says Gus Evans, a fellow Smyrna man who joined the Marines because of Larry’s example, “and after I talked to him I knew that Larry was ready and willing to die for the Corps.” Then again, just before his deployment Larry had split up with his most serious girlfriend yet, who he’d found out was his third cousin. “It broke his heart,” Butch said. Maybe Larry wanted to forget all about it and Vietnam was a ready-made distraction. Maybe a lot of things went into it.

  But there was something else. His best friend remembers Larry sidling up to him one day at the Marine base in Quantico, where they were the only black dudes in their respective platoons, and in that quiet way of his saying simply, “Butch, I want to be where the action is.”

  In 1972, to young Americans like Larry Potts, Vietnam was still a place to find out just what kind of man you were.

  Bruce Walker’s past could hardly have been more different from Potts’s. His fate was seemingly set in place the moment he was born. He was the son of Colonel Charles Walker, a natural-born aviator, a man with “golden hands,” as they said in the Air Force. Bruce would follow him into the service.

  Bruce Walker didn’t give off an air of entitlement or rock-jawed arrogance. He had friendly hazel eyes and a surprisingly high voice and came across as bitingly honest but open and friendly. “I couldn’t imagine him having an enemy in the world,” said a pilot who went through flight training with him. Walker’s younger sister recalls him returning to Paris, where their father was stationed, after college and hauling a batch of 45s in his luggage so that she would have the latest American music and feel closer to events back home. She never forgot that gesture. What kind of older brother thought of such things?

  While an undergraduate at Southern Colorado State College in Pueblo, Bruce met Martha Lorin, a self-described “weird bird,” a fiery redheaded student who was at that moment having problems with a geology professor. When she’d tried to join his seminar, the man had told her, Well, we’re not really open to women in this field. That was all Martha needed to hear. “I was impossible in that class,” she remembers fondly. “I did everything to drive that guy nuts.”

  When she met Bruce—unwillingly at first, invited by a friend to go for pizza—she was intrigued by his friendly manner, his stories of growing up all across Europe, how different he seemed. Bruce was small, but he was strong and fit, a “rings” man for the SCSC gymnastics team and a ski coach up at Monarch Ski Area, where he could be seen cutting curves into the powder. He was bursting with vitality; “ruddy” is the word Martha used. And he had the most beautiful hands she’d ever seen.

  The attraction was instantaneous, at least for her. When they first met, Martha was wearing cowboy boots and a Pendleton flannel shirt. Bruce thought she was “a dyke.” But the next time he saw her she had changed her look completely and had on a nice dress and a long curly wig, all for his benefit. They were dying to make love. And they did.

  Four months after they met, the two were married. And suddenly Martha Lorin Walker was an Air Force wife, something she was not particularly suited for. She hated “socializing with drunken women” while their husbands were trying to survive the instructors at Air Training Command, whose methods were neatly summarized by the guys as “Fear, Sarcasm, and Ridicule.” The wives had afternoon parties where the gossip would begin as soon as you walked through the door and the liquor—gallons of it—arrived soon after. Martha was turned off. “I didn’t give a damn if they drank. I just didn’t want drinks pushed into my hand.”

  The two of them occasionally fought. Bruce resented the fact that she spent so much time with her mother, gambling at the dog track. One time Bruce dumped all her clothes on the front lawn and told her to get out. When he went to her mother’s house to try to make up, Mrs. Lorin blocked her daughter’s bedroom door. “It was like my presence was going to defile some holy temple,” says the character based on Bruce in Did I Say Goodbye, a play Martha wrote later. “It was insane. She was insane.” They broke up. Bruce drove back to his folks in Virginia, where his dad was now working at the Pentagon, until Martha called him to apologize and to beg him to come back.

  But they were close, “almost psychic.” When he was on a training mission one day, a feeling overcame her. “Lucy,” she said to her friend, “I think Bruce just almost crashed.” Her friend scoffed: How could she possibly know that? But later that night, she found out Bruce had been flying at that very moment when out of the corner of his eye he spotted a flock of turkey buzzards heading toward one of his intakes. He snapped the stick left and dove away, barely avoiding a crash.

  Martha got pregnant. While they were on a weekend school break in Corpus Christi, she waded into the surf, happy and content despite Bruce’s warnings that the waves could induce labor. At dinner that night, she felt the first contractions. They were 150 miles away from the base hospital. Bruce packed her into his Ford Falcon and sped across the wastes of south Texas, praying she wouldn’t give birth in the desert among the rattlers and the mesquite. They just made it. Their baby daughter was named Lorin Marie.

  As he came closer to getting his wings, Bruce had to decide what he would do. His instructors wanted him to stay and teach new recruits at Air Training Command. It was as safe as flying for Pan Am, a golden out. He could serve his country without ever hanging his ass over Vietnam. Martha told him she’d support him no matter what he decided.

  But Bruce Walker was a born combat pilot, and the fate of his country was being decided in Southeast Asia. It was a matter of bloodline and duty. He was going to Vietnam. “Whatever you want,” Martha said.

  Martha was often a dissident from Air Force culture, but she knew its traditions. When she and Bruce drove to McClellan Air Force Base on the day of his shipping out for Vietnam, she walked with him toward the transport plane. At the appropriate spot, she stopped along with the other spouses and girlfriends, kissed her husband, then turned smartly and walked away. It’s considered unlucky for Air Force wives to look back.

  On April 7, Walker climbed into his OV-10 on the Da Nang flight line and flew to Hue to pick up Larry Potts, the artillery observer who would fill his backseat. Potts was celebrating his birthday. He was a bit edgy that morning; it was unch
aracteristic—Potts was usually so positive. “It was a kind of a hot area,” said his fellow Marine Gus Evans. “Larry wasn’t nervous, but he was a bit apprehensive about it, a little shaky.” Word had finally gotten out to the rank and file that the skies above Gene Hambleton were a veritable shooting gallery.

  The Marine settled into his seat in the OV-10 behind Walker and the two set off, flying north. They were directed to an area around four miles north of the city of Dong Ha and ordered to inspect a firebase that had been abandoned during the North Vietnamese invasion.

  As the two flew over the base, looking down at the green landscape, Potts was on the radio, talking to an artillery liaison officer on the ground. He was getting ready to start calling out artillery targets for one of the Navy ships offshore when, just after 11 a.m., the liaison officer heard Potts blurt out “Mayday! Mayday!” A SAM missile had hit the OV-10. The officer on the ground asked Potts to confirm the aircraft was in trouble. Potts said something—a string of rushed words—but he was speaking so fast that the officer couldn’t make sense of them. The officer called again and again but Potts never came back on the radio.

  A few seconds after the missile hit, Potts and Walker punched out of the burning plane and popped their chutes. Some of his fellow soldiers believe that Potts, who was terribly nearsighted, lost his glasses in the violent ejection. “I really worried about him being down there,” said Lieutenant Colonel D’Wayne Gray. “Being in the badlands in immediate threat of capture and not being able to see would be a terrible thing to go through.” Most likely, Potts’s thick prescription glasses were lost and he hit the ground half-blind.

  The efforts to move Walker to the river, where Tommy Norris might be able to reach him, soon failed. The Air Force determined that NVA units were too thick on the ground for him to get through. A fighter plane dropped a Madden pack to him, but it got lost in the elephant grass and he couldn’t find it. It took four days for them to drop another. Famished, he ate the food and guzzled the water. But the supplies quickly ran out.

  Martha had decided to pay a surprise visit to Bruce’s parents in Clovis, New Mexico, in early April. It would give them a chance to see the baby. She was in the kitchen on April 8 when Bruce’s father walked in.

  “Do you want something to eat?” she asked him.

  The older man shook his head. Then he said, “I’ve gotten a telex.”

  Martha turned to look at him. The expression on the older man’s face . . . she knew immediately. Every detail, every color in the room seemed to imprint themselves on her mind, from the shade of paint on the wall to the dress she was wearing to the “ugly yellow color” of the sunlight streaming in the window.

  “Is he dead?” Martha said.

  Bruce’s father recited the details in the telex. Bruce was down, alive. and on the run in enemy territory. When he looked up, he could see the panic in Martha’s eyes. “Oh, no,” he said hurriedly, “they’ll get him out of there.” Bruce’s father knew the code the airmen lived by. He believed the Air Force would stop at nothing to save his son.

  But the Hambleton rescue had changed everything.

  By April 16, the airman had been on the ground for nine days; he was undernourished and drinking muddy, contaminated water to survive. The weather had turned increasingly cold and wet. Sometimes at night, Walker would climb into the trees to hide from NVA patrols. The next day, rescue planners suggested moving Walker toward the east, traveling at night. Depending on Walker’s location, Tommy Norris and his team would use the streams in that area or the shoreline itself to go up and snatch him.

  Bruce’s father talked to the base commander in Da Nang every day, getting updates. Martha stayed in her bedroom with the baby. She wasn’t a “pokey” person, not someone who asked a million questions. “I separated myself from everything. Just closed down. Sucked it all in.” She kept wondering if it was possible the Air Force would get him out. She felt numb.

  The message from the Air Force was always the same: he’s in good physical condition, we’re talking to him daily, “we are continuing to try and effect his rescue.”

  But Bruce’s father was becoming increasingly alarmed and embittered. Why hadn’t the Air Force been able to save his son? Where were the rescue choppers? “He felt that Bruce was a pawn in order to get Hambleton back,” said Martha. “They basically left Bruce with no protection. He was expendable.” The conversations with the commander at Da Nang became so contentious that the man stopped answering Colonel Walker’s calls.

  The Air Force would have vehemently denied that they didn’t do everything in their power to retrieve Walker. The skies around the pilot were still being raked with SAMS; one day, observers in the Navy ships offshore counted eighty-three launches in the area around the Mieu Giang. The Air Force did institute a small no-fire zone around Walker (whose exact position they didn’t know, as he was constantly on the move), but the sector was declared unsafe for fighter planes or FACs, let alone the lumbering Jolly Greens.

  The Hambleton mission had altered search and rescue policy in significant ways. The Air Force sent no helicopters in after Walker; there were no B-52 airstrikes to clear his way, though the big bombers were active in the area, hitting the NVA invasion forces. The commanders of the Seventh Air Force had learned a terrible lesson with Hambleton and were not eager to repeat it.

  On the seventeenth, Walker agreed to the plan to move to the coast. He was going to rest that night and the following day, then strike out to the east. But when the FAC arrived back the next morning, Walker was gone. Something had happened during the intervening hours; perhaps the pilot had been spooked by enemy activity or he’d been discovered in the darkness. He’d set out through rice paddies and groves of trees and brush under cover of night.

  After hours of slipping through the sleeping countryside, Walker stopped at a dike built by local farmers. As he rested there, he spotted an elderly Vietnamese peasant named Ta Van Can watching him. Walker approached the man and tried to communicate with him, but neither spoke the other’s language. The pilot shook Can’s hand and tried to ask for help, showing the farmer his Air Force ID card. Walker then reached into his pocket and pulled out some silver coins and tried to hand them to Can. The Vietnamese man refused but didn’t run off.

  Finally, after a few hours, and with morning breaking in the east, Walker began heading toward the coast with Can following behind him. The American soon outpaced the older man. Unbeknownst to the pair, Can’s wife had spotted the two talking, and when they moved off, she ran back to the village, found the local Vietcong leader, and told him about the American pilot. The man gathered some fighters from the hamlet and set off in pursuit.

  That morning, a young FAC, First Lieutenant Mickey Fain, drew the assignment of escorting Walker, who went by the code name Covey 282. Fain flew toward Walker’s last known position in his O-2 just after daybreak and soon heard the American calling on the radio.

  “Roger 282,” Fain answered, “this is Bilk 35. How are you doing this morning?”

  “I’m in a heap of trouble, Mickey.”

  Static fractured his words. “Say again. Over.”

  “I’m in much trouble,” Walker came back. “I’m in deep shit.” The pilot’s voice was edged with panic. The fighters from the village had quickly tracked him to a rice field and were in pursuit.

  “Push it all the way up!” Walker shouted. “Indigenous personnel coming . . . believed to be VC.”

  Fain radioed a FAC flying an OV-10, and the pilot dropped down from altitude and began firing his .30-caliber machine guns at the cluster of VC. Walker was watching the men advance. But the men didn’t back away. “I am surrounded at this time,” Walker radioed.

  The FAC had few options left. He warned Walker that he was coming in with some white phosphorus rockets. “Hurry up,” Walker said. “Just put it in right in close. They’re coming at me. They keep coming at me.”

  Fain raced toward Walker’s position. When he saw the American below him, he shov
ed his stick forward and descended to a dangerously low altitude, shooting phosphorus rockets at the VC soldiers. He felt the impact of bullets slamming into the O-2 as the enemy turned their guns on him. The phosphorus exploded in intense white flower bursts that left a cloud rising in their wake. But the soldiers emerged from the smoke and continued moving toward the American.

  Walker keyed down the transmitter and Fain’s ears filled with the sound of bullets. “They’re shooting at me, babe,” Walker cried. “They’re shooting at me!”

  Fain turned the O-2 and spotted Walker surrounded by VC. “Go ahead, Covey,” he said.

  Walker was holding down the radio transmit button. Fain could hear him screaming against a background of rifle fire.

  “282, are you all right, babe?” Fain called.

  There was no answer. Fain looked down and saw Walker sprawled in the grass hundreds of feet below. Out of Fain’s sight, a VC fighter named Vo Van De was on his hands and knees, moving toward Walker with his AK-47 trained on the pilot. When he was twenty feet away, he fired six rounds with his AK-47 into Walker’s body.

  A flight of F-4s arrived over Fain, and he directed them to drop their bombs in the field around Walker. Pushed by the wind, the white phosphorus smoke from Fain’s rockets drifted past the airman. When it moved away, Fain looked down and saw the pilot’s body had disappeared. Low on fuel, Fain turned the O-2 toward Da Nang.

  The final act of the Hambleton rescue mission was over.

  Martha Walker was dazed by her husband’s death. She wasn’t a crier; she never shed tears for Bruce, except when she was alone. She later channeled her emotions into a play, Did I Say Goodbye. “It’s just not very good anymore,” she wrote in it, talking about the time after her husband’s death. “Nothing seems to be.” At a loss for what to do next, she agreed to move to Germany with Bruce’s parents; his father had been appointed commander of the Hahn Air Base there.