been alternatively embracing the hope of a terrible nightmare, and then trying to reject the all-too-evident reality. By now, the chronology of my final flight from the Kitty Hawk was clear: The struggle to control my disabled plane, the high speed, topsy-turvy ejection, the mad confusion of my capture, the unwitting strafing attack by our own A-1 Skyraiders as we scurried back to the shore as fast as the scrawny oarsman could propel us. And finally, the nagging uncertainty of Bob’s fate.
We hadn’t been together all that long. He had recently completed the transition syllabus in the training squadron where I had been an instructor for three years. I had taught him and others—pilots and bombardier-navigators—to know and operate the aircraft systems, and the flight tactics of the aerial reconnaissance mission. As I had rotated back to sea duty, I was pleased we had been paired up as a crew. Bob was good, and our Trans-Pac flight of a Vigilante from central Florida to Japan and finally aboard the Kitty Hawk confirmed his skills. Our three-day layover in Atsugi, Japan—hotsi baths and massages, and liberty time with our new squadron mates—had drawn us closer. His young wife, Pat, a schoolteacher, and Bea were probably in touch right now, sharing the uncertainty of their husbands’ fates, and supporting one another as much as possible.
How many times had I relived it these past few days, that brief glimpse of Bob, alive in the water and closer than I to the shoreline and the approaching boats? Obviously he, too, had cheated the odds for surviving an ejection so far outside the accepted speed and stability parameters of the system. But had he survived the hairtrigger contempt of our captors? The straffing attack? Had his life been spared as miraculously as mine from the deadly swarms of 20mm slugs rained down upon us by the planes of our RESCAP (Rescue Air Patrol)? God, he was my responsibility! Have I gotten him killed? What could I have done differently? What emergency procedure or flight tactic might have saved us? God, please let Bob be alive. Please be with him, wherever he is.
I sat there in the half-light of the awakening stable, mentally wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth imagining all the things I might have done differently to avoid my present predicament and the apparent loss of my friend. The possibilities were endless.
Had I continued to harbor this line of thought, I would have become a member of a deadly club; a few POWs I would come to know who assumed personal blame for the loss of one or more crewmen in their aircraft. And with the self-blame would come a consuming guilt. In the coming years, I would find enough more immediate reasons for guilt without laying this on myself as well.
Somehow I realized, even at this very early stage, that what had happened was well within the range of risk we had all embraced. I was certain that had our positions been reversed, with Bob in command of the aircraft and responsible for our fate, he too would have accepted the addition to our mission with a positive nod and a thumbs-up just as I had. I struggled to the conclusion that if I was to maintain faith in myself to survive this ordeal—the ramifications of which I could not yet begin to fathom—I must learn to keep events in perspective and to keep the past behind me.
The crispness of the morning air around my upright body seemed to sharpen my recollections, subordinating for the moment at least my awareness of the painful stiffness of my calcified body.
Now, I couldn’t seem to erase the scene from my mind. Our guys had been relentless in their attack, hoping, I’m sure, to keep the boats from reaching us farther out in the Gulf, where the wreckage probably had been and where they thought we would be as well.
I had pulled myself up along the shallow gunwale of the boat watching the A-l Sky Raider aircraft roll in pass after pass, their bullets raining down. White plumes of water walked their way across our bow and then close aboard the stern. My captors never flinched, and returned the fire with their own weapons. The acrid smell of cordite stung my nostrils.
I couldn’t imagine how the boat I was in made it safely to shore. The instant the bow had touched the sandy beach, we jumped into the shallow surf and ran toward the safety of the berm on the far side of the beach. The next strafing attack caught us halfway. With my bright yellow flotation gear left in the boat, there was nothing to differentiate me from the enemy. I scrambled like hell just as they did.
As others were frantically half dragging, half pushing me across the beach between wooden fishing boats and fan-shaped nets spread to dry, two or three went down around us. The mere sound of steel impacting flesh and bone seemed to slam their suddenly lifeless bodies to the sand.
I tried to coordinate my steps with the two who were jerking and pulling me across the soft sand. I would gladly have run like hell, but they wouldn’t allow it. They were out of sync with each other, too, so we stumbled and scrambled toward the far side of the beach. God, it took forever. As the geysers of sand erupted around me, I instinctively tightened my sphincter as if to suck myself in and disappear. At least the tensing seemed to make me feel like a smaller target. Small comfort! Cradling my injured right arm tightly to my body, I had flung myself behind the levee, rolling as I hit the soft earth.
With my brain still numb from the concussion, I was in a strictly reactive mode. I seemed to be on the outside of all this—a detached observer—no pain, no fear, no other emotion, just a body trying instinctively to survive.
Just before they pushed my face down into the mud, I followed the terrified, over-the-shoulder glances of the last stragglers across the beach. There, boring down straight toward us, was the head-on view of an A-4 Skyhawk—the smallest and deadliest light-attack aircraft in the Kitty Hawk’s air group. In the space of a second I half-saw, half-imagined the face of my shipmate up there. Had we passed each other in the passageway that morning? Had he sat across the white-linened table in the wardroom last night? Right then in my mind’s eye I saw his right eye quadrisected perfectly by the glowing crosshairs of a gunsight between us. I took into the mud with me the rapidly enlarging image of the warbird, wing roots engulfed by blue flame and smoke from his cannons. With my eyes closed, the sudden, rending scream of the 2.75 rockets was unexpected and even more terrifying—like the violent ripping of a sheet but magnified a million times. The rippling explosions were immediate. Four times in quick succession my body convulsed upward with the earth around me, my face making a new print in the mud each time I crashed down. The rain of sand kicked up by the 20mm slugs was replaced by heavy dirt clods and bits of wood and smoldering net. A rusted oarlock still threaded through a jagged piece of wooden gunwale plopped down on its edge a few inches from my face.
I remained still for a long time with heaving lungs and pounding heart, my body unwilling to release its straining clutch on the ground. The Vietnamese on either side of me were in no hurry to let go either, and I was aware of the commonality of our instinctive response to the prospect of instant, violent death.
Long after the last decibel of jet engine had faded into the distant sky, the Vietnamese who seemed to have assumed my charge eased off on the pressure of his rifle, which had pinned my neck and shoulders to the ground. Tentatively, I raised my head and looked down the levee to my left. We seemed like turtles, heads poking from shells, testing the air for more danger. The beach was strewn with the smoldering splinters of several boats and debris of fishing paraphernalia. It was scarred by deep craters, the damp sand yielding to the rapid seepage from the sea. But I was conscious mostly of several bodies that seemed to jump out at me in vivid color from this otherwise black-and-white war movie I was observing.
Strange, I had thought, here I am thirty-two years old and, not counting funerals, these are the first dead people I have ever seen. One was rocking gently in the shallow waves, while others were partly obscured by sand and wreckage. I still seemed to be detached, and they registered to me only as other people, people like me whose blood made the sand red and sticky.
With much shouting and jabbering, and with no one in particular in charge, they led me roughly along the edge of the beach toward the little fishing village and up what appeared to be its central lane. Others were running, wide-eyed, past us toward the
