Two Souls Indivisible Page 6

  And the Vietnamese were crafty in their defenses. On a night raid, Halyburton would see the lights of a town in the distance, but the Vietnamese had early-warning radars and could hear the low-flying jet. As the F-4 approached, the town's lights shut off, the countryside went black, and the target disappeared. Trucks that carried supplies to the South were difficult to pinpoint as well. As Halyburton later discovered, the Vietnamese camouflaged the top of their vehicles with a green canopy. When a driver heard a jet, he drove to the side of the road, making the truck indistinguishable from the countryside. At night, the driver simply turned off his lights. Even when the Americans did hit a truck, they couldn't be certain whether it was military or civilian. Once Olmstead bombed a vehicle that Halyburton feared could have been an ambulance, but Olmstead believed he had no choice. They had been under antiaircraft fire, and he concluded that the civilian designation was meaningless when an entire country was shooting at you. "They're all Communists," he told Halyburton.

  The bombing restraints were suppose to induce the enemy to the negotiating table, but in Halyburton's view the restrictions simply emboldened the Vietnamese, allowing them to move or safeguard vital assets, like oil tanks and factories. He was disappointed that they did not encounter any Soviet MiGs. Shooting down an enemy aircraft is every fighter crew's dream, and it also provides the greatest test for an RIO, who has to home in on a moving target. While Halyburton was still useful on bombing raids, with navigation, communication, and spotting landmarks, he felt less essential.

  He was further distressed by the dishonesty of the flight reports. When the airmen returned from their missions, they were debriefed by an intelligence officer. One day Halyburton read a notice describing the different ways in which an aviator could describe an attack. But each outcome pertained to a successful hit, such as inflicting collateral damage, cratering a road, or destroying the target. Missing was not an option.

  During one debriefing, Halyburton acknowledged that his bombs did not strike the target: "I think we missed."

  "You're not supposed to say 'missed,'" the official responded. "Well, you can say whatever you want. I'm telling you we missed."

  Counting hits, real or imagined, was part of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's statistical obsession, the belief that he could quantify his battlefield successes to justify the further escalation of force, even if the numbers were meaningless.

  Nonetheless, Halyburton was proud of his flight performance—he would fly on seventy missions—and still believed that communism had to be stopped in Southeast Asia. But by the second week of October he was glad his tour would be over soon. He had one more stint on the line; then the Independence would be leaving on November 21, arriving home by Christmas. He could volunteer for another tour of combat, but he had already decided against it. He had done his duty, and the separation was becoming painful. He told Marty on a tape,

  Most of the time I don't feel sorry for myself ... I feel like I'm doing something real worthwhile and not just for myself ... You get a good feeling about it. But being away from you is just about more than I can take. I look at your pictures and read your letters and wonder what you are doing, what you are wearing, who you are with. I guess I'm really homesick now.

  Marty was getting equally nervous. She watched the news three times a day and saw a report that an A-6 Intruder from the Independence was shot down, its crew presumably captured. "Oh, I just pray something can be done to bring an end to this fighting," she wrote to him.

  Finally, on October 16, Halyburton received some good news. He was going on an "Alpha strike."

  Alpha strikes carried high military importance—in this case, a bridge in the town of Thai Nguyen, a target that had previously been on the restricted list. The bridge, seventy-five miles north of Hanoi, was a major rail link between China and North Vietnam, for the railroad moved weapons that were ultimately brought into the war. The importance of the mission was made clear at the briefing, which was attended by Admiral Grant Sharp, head of the Pacific Command, whom Halyburton had never seen before. Halyburton's previous missions usually entailed four aircraft, but this one would involve thirty-five—a massive strike force. No one ever explained the change in strategy, and Halyburton didn't care. All along, he believed the Navy was dissipating its resources by trying to strike individual trucks or other incremental assets instead of attacking "hard targets" and inflicting real damage. Now was their chance.

  On the morning of October 17, a Sunday, the strike force departed, with Halyburton's F-4 at the very end of the formation. The jets flew at three thousand feet above the water, refueled above the Gulf of Tonkin, and reached the coast forty miles north of Haiphong, avoiding its missile installations. Then they descended, dropping so low that, in the words of one pilot, "I could see individual grass spears." The low altitude enabled them to fly undetected by the radar at SAM installations, but it also put them in easy range of antiaircraft fire.

  The size of the mission created another tradeoff. It added firepower but also integrated different types of jets—which specifically hurt Halyburton's fast F-4. That aircraft, by itself, would normally fly at about 550 knots, but because it flew this mission with the plodding A-4 Skyhawk, encumbered with heavy bombs, the F-4 had to travel at about 360 knots, which also decreased its ability to maneuver. Halyburton and Olmstead had bad luck as well with the position of their plane at the rear of the formation, increasing their exposure to enemy fire. The airmen were assigned not to hit the primary target, the bridge, but to destroy the surrounding antiaircraft sites used to shoot down planes.

  The strike force, flying west for twenty minutes at treetop level, penetrated deep into North Vietnam—much farther than Halyburton had ever flown before. He knew how exposed they were and how they would have little means to resist or dodge enemy bullets or "flak," little gun bursts that would explode near a jet, spraying it with shrapnel. Fifty miles from the target and forty miles northeast of Hanoi, the jets flew over a hill and into a valley. They were suddenly about fifteen hundred feet aboveground, and Halyburton, looking straight ahead, saw karst ridges, the sheer limestone cliffs that were the marker for their next turn.

  "Stan, we're coming up to our next point," Halyburton said while peering at his map. "We're within five miles of karst ridge."

  "Roger."

  Then Halyburton saw three puffs of black smoke as enemy gunmen, waiting near a railroad intersection, fired exploding projectiles at the American onslaught. The snipers may have had radar, hidden by the valley, that alerted them to the jets; the pilots later described the ammunition as the size of tennis balls. Then Halyburton felt a thump. The F-4 was still flying straight, but he knew they were hit. He tried to key his microphone, in his oxygen mask, to notify the other airmen, but when he pressed the button he realized that the mask had been blown off.

  It was the first indication that he had seriously underestimated the impact of the shrapnel. He then leaned to the side and looked through a small tunnel into the cockpit. He saw Olmstead's head slumped over, his helmet off, papers blowing all over, and holes in the canopy. The cockpit had been hit from below, causing metal fragments to rip through the top. Halyburton realized that Stan was either dead or mortally wounded. He thought that if he had a control stick, he could turn the plane around and eject with some chance of being rescued. But there was no control instrument in the back seat of an F-4, and he knew the aircraft was doomed, though it continued to fly straight. Halyburton saw he was heading right for the karst ridge. In the seconds before impact, it occurred to him that he might be better off staying in the plane, that death might be better than ejecting into enemy hands. But he realized that wouldn't be right.

  He was wearing flight gloves, but when he looked down he saw that a piece of metal was sticking out of his hand. He pulled it out. Then he reached up for his ejection handle but instead felt twisted metal—remarkably, his knee board, which had been strapped to his leg, had flown up and somehow impaled itself around the handle. The
ridge was fast approaching, and he had only seconds to escape. He then reached between his legs for the backup ejection handle. If it didn't work, he would be dead in moments. He yanked it, the canopy blew off, and he shot out of the plane, his seat falling away. His parachute opened as he heard his plane, with Stan Olmstead, explode as it crashed into the karst.

  Halyburton was saved but hardly safe. Descending, he heard bullets whip by. He hit the ground and tumbled into some scrub brush, suffering cuts and bruises. He pulled off his helmet and parachute harness and took from his pocket a green "survival radio," connected to a battery. Still dazed, he began yelling into the device. "Mayday, mayday! I've been shot down!" He heard nothing, however, not even static.

  It was a warm, sunny day, and he began looking for a place to hide. He had few options. He took a step toward some bushes, but stopped after he saw a snake heading the same way. Trying to distance himself from a nearby village, he scrambled up a hill, where he could partially conceal himself. He wanted to keep running, but he was breathing heavily, his mouth was cottony, and a tall white American had no place to hide in a country of diminutive Asians. A rescue helicopter was his only hope, so he tried the radio again, screaming, "I'm on the ground! I'm in danger of being captured!"

  But the radio's battery was dead, which infuriated Halyburton. The Independence didn't have enough radios for each aviator; he was simply given one before a flight, but he wasn't able to test it. Before a mission, the ship could not send out radio signals, which might reveal the carrier's position. This policy baffled Halyburton, as the Independence was already sending out scores of electronic signals and one more from a radio would hardly jeopardize it. Nevertheless, an airman never knew if his radio worked, and Halyburton's fears that he would have a defective one in a moment of crisis had just been confirmed.

  He sat and listened for a rescue helicopter or a plane, but all he heard were villagers closing in on him. He had his .38 pistol, but it was a signaling device, shooting tracers, not a weapon with bullets. He decided to destroy his radio, lest the enemy recover and repair it, then use it to ambush American planes. Halyburton pulled out his knife, smashed the face of the radio, and cut the battery cord—a painful task. Even though the radio was useless, breaking it ensured that he would not be found and rescued.

  Minutes later, he was surrounded by thirty or forty men, armed with rifles, machetes, or pitchforks. He stood up, raised his arms, and surrendered.

  There was good reason why no rescue mission was sent for Halyburton. First, the Navy didn't know he'd been shot down; then it thought he was dead.

  Shortly after his F-4 was hit, another Phantom was also struck, but the pilot, Tubby Johnson, radioed the strike to the rest of the mission. Moments later, Halyburton's jet exploded, leading most of the other airmen to believe that Johnson's plane had crashed. In fact, that jet, while losing an engine, was able to circle back and return to the Independence. However, none of the airmen saw Halyburton's parachute—most of them were too far ahead—so no one knew he lay in Vietnamese brush.

  Only after all the crews had returned to the ship did they realize that Halyburton and Olmstead had been shot down. By then two other F-4s had suffered the same fate over the same valley on their way out of Vietnam. Incredibly, the mission took the same course leaving the country as entering it. While it was the most direct route, repeating it allowed the same gunners to shoot down two more jets. The four airmen from those jets were seen in their parachutes. Rescue helicopters searched in vain for them; they were listed as missing in action.

  But Halyburton, obscured by the ridges and trailing the strike force, went unnoticed. As Lieutenant Al Carpenter, piloting an A-4 on the mission, wrote in his log: "Another not so good day for the Independence. In a big strike on a highway bridge at Thai Nguyen, we lost three F-4s ... On the way in we ran into flak. Crossing a valley with a highway and a railroad in it, Cmd. Olmstead caught a good hit evidently and immediately ran into a karst hill and exploded. Very spectacular. No chutes observed."

  There was one other way that Halyburton could have been found. He landed with a seat pan attached to his parachute harness; inside the pan was a radio that emitted a beeper signal, which would have been picked up by the airmen on the Alpha strike flying out of North Vietnam. But the signal was never detected because, one assumes, it was never sent. (More than thirty aircraft flying over the radio could not have missed it.) Halyburton thus landed with two radios, and both malfunctioned.

  With no sighting of a parachute or evidence of a radio signal, the commander of Halyburton's squadron, Lewis'S. Lamoreaux, concluded that he had been killed in action. The commander wrote in his final evaluation:

  LTJG Halyburton was an outstanding young officer, of great potential and value to the service. [He] flew more than 65 sorties against communist forces in Southeast Asia. For this he was awarded 6 Air Medals, the Navy Commendation Medal, and was recommended for the Distinguish Flying Cross. He lost his life when his aircraft was shot down by enemy ground fire while on a strike deep in enemy territory north of Hanoi on 17 October 1965.

  The mission itself failed to destroy the bridge at Thai Nguyen. A1 Carpenter wrote in his log: "BDA [bomb damage assessment] showed the bridge heavily damaged but still standing. No spans knocked down." Meanwhile, the antiaircraft site that Olmstead and Halyburton were to hit was instead targeted by Ralph Gaither, a young F-4 pilot who saw their jet crash. Gaither was also supposed to fire his rockets at an antiaircraft site near the bridge, but he couldn't find it. So he sought out the Olmstead-Halyburton target instead. When he drew near, however, the site was quiet—there was no gunfire. It was, Gaither concluded, nonoperational, a decoy, adding a painful coda to the mission: Halyburton and Olmstead were shot down trying to destroy a target that didn't exist. Gaither, for his part, was no luckier than Halyburton. He piloted one of the two other planes shot down on the Alpha strike, and he and his RIO, Lieutenant (j.g.) Rodney Knutson, were captured.

  Despite the loss of three planes and six men (three captured, two killed, plus Halyburton) and the failure to knock out the bridge, the attack was heralded as a success. When the Independence returned to Norfolk on December 13, a front-page article in the Virginian-Pilot noted that the enemy had suffered mightily from 10,309 sorties that had dropped or fired more than nine million pounds of steel or explosives. Only one mission received specific praise—that of October 17, in which pilots "were credited with the first destruction of an active, mobile surface-to-air missile site in North Viet Nam."

  The peasants surrounding Halyburton spoke no English, but he could usually figure out what they wanted. They stripped him of his flight vest, pistol, Winston cigarettes, anti-g suit, and boots. Tying his arms behind his back, they began marching him through low, rolling hills toward their village, almost two miles away. At the outset, he heard the fighter jets from his mission flying over the valley. The peasants pushed him face down on the side of the road and sat on him, but he could still hear the antiaircraft fire that would shoot two of the planes down. After the jets were gone, the group stood up and walked the rest of the way to the village.

  Halyburton didn't know its name, but his treatment there was relatively benign. A large crowd met him, strained to get a better look, and followed him to a hut with mud walls. He figured he was the only white man who wasn't French that the villagers had ever seen, and he felt as though he were from another planet. With his hands still tied, he was a source of curiosity. As the villagers peered inside, he sat in a corner, had his hands untied—one was still bleeding from the cut in the plane—and was offered one of his own cigarettes. He pulled out a Zippo lighter, which was promptly confiscated. They feared he was going to ignite the thatched roof.

  Desperate for water, Halyburton kept motioning that he needed to drink. The villagers initially brought some rice and soup, which Halyburton tasted out of respect; finally he was given water. The Vietnamese jammed inside the hut and poked through his belongings, which were fascinating but also dange
rous. A farmer who picked up his pistol inadvertently fired it, sending a tracer through the hut. No one was hurt, though Halyburton feared that had anyone been shot, he would have been blamed. Such a mishap could have easily caused his execution. Meanwhile, his seat pan contained an inflatable eight-foot raft, and he was afraid the villagers toying with it would activate it. Anticipating pneumatic turmoil, Halyburton persuaded them to drop the device.

  Shortly, some militiamen arrived and placed Halyburton in a Jeep, his gear in back. They drove through rugged country and eventually stopped at a stream. A soldier untied Halyburton's hands and gave him a canteen cup. But when he walked to the stream, he noticed that a militiaman stood with a camera, poised to click. Halyburton didn't want a photograph of him drinking water used for propaganda, but his thirst was overwhelming, so he began to scoop up the water—then stopped. The photographer took the picture, and Halyburton quickly drank before the cameraman could rewind. The ploy worked several times. Halyburton never knew how the pictures were used, but at least they did not show him drinking water.

  The cat-and-mouse tactics soon ended. Halyburton was driven to a larger village, dropped off at a brick building, and told to sit at the end of a large table. Two guards stood at the door with Soviet AK-47s; others milled about the room and peered through two windows. An older man with a notebook and pen, a political cadre, sat to his left, and Halyburton knew this encounter would be rougher. His adversary couldn't speak English, but he had a book of translated English phrases. He copied down several questions and pushed the paper toward Halyburton, who read them to himself.

  "What is your rank?"

  "What kind of airplanes did you fly?"