Two Souls Indivisible (8 page)

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 dangerous. 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?"

"What was your target?"

Halyburton shook his head, and the interrogator slammed his fist on the table. He took back the paper, wrote out more questions, and slid it back. Again, the American ignored it. His defiance angered the guards, and one walked over and put the barrel of his rifle against his head. At this point, Halyburton didn't care if he was shot—he was not going to answer any questions. His attitude had less to do with loyalty to country than with crude calculations about his fate. He had heard horror stories about American POWs in South Vietnam: they had been executed and found with their heads severed, their genitals in their mouths. He had not heard how POWs in the North were being treated, but he thought he might prefer death.

He shoved the paper back. The gunman jammed the barrel against his head but didn't shoot. Halyburton soon noticed that the onlookers behind him were in the line of fire and realized that the soldier's job was to intimidate, to bluff. The gunman finally walked back to the door, though Halyburton felt the hatred in his eyes. The interrogator continued his work, but if anything, Halyburton felt even more belligerent. When the paper was again pushed his way, he shoved it back violently.

The move prompted the same gunman to return and put the rifle to Halyburton's head—but this time he moved a bullet into the chamber. Everyone scattered, and Halyburton thought, He's going to kill me. He heard the Vietnamese, civilians and soldiers, talking anxiously, apparently also not sure what to do. Halyburton thought of how much he loved his family, how much he would miss his wife and daughter, but he also believed that death right now might be better than life. He waited to die.

The gunman, however, didn't move. Others in the room calmed him down and finally removed him from the building.

Halyburton was unaware that any village capturing an American would be rewarded if it turned the prisoner in to the authorities. To him, it seemed a miracle that he wasn't dead, though his survival remained tenuous. When he was taken from the building, his arms still tied, the villagers gathered to throw rocks and clods of dirt and spit on him. He was put in the Jeep and spirited away.

It was dusk, and by the time the vehicle stopped, Halyburton was blindfolded. When the cloth was removed, he found himself in a room with two sawhorses, a board, a bed mat, and a bucket for a toilet. He was given some water. Everyone he saw had a weapon, so he assumed he was in the hands of the military. He figured if they had planned to kill him, he'd be dead by now; but he also reckoned that his treatment was going to get worse. Exhausted, he fell asleep but was awoken before dawn, again blindfolded, and taken away in the Jeep. This time, though, he could see beneath his mask, and he recognized Dave Wheat, an RIO who had flown on the same mission. He was thrilled to see another American.

The long journey continued until he saw tall, arched gates, high walls with barbed wire, and imposing buildings. This was no village. Then he saw something incongruous—raised flower beds in a courtyard. But there were no signs of welcome at the Hanoi Hilton.

Halyburton was locked in a room with a spigot. Craving water, he drank directly from the faucet—a huge mistake, he later realized; all the water at the prison was boiled before consumption. He felt bleary, but before he collapsed of exhaustion, he was taken into another room for questioning.

His first interrogator was Colonel Nam, the chain-smoking commander called Eagle who tried to convince the POWs that he was a MiG pilot. Halyburton sat on a low wooden stool and, as a sign of respect, was made to sit straight, his legs and arms uncrossed. When either was crossed, a guard would knock his arm. The early interrogations were perfunctory. Eagle asked about his plane, squadron, ship, and targets; the American stuck to name, rank, serial number, and date of birth.