Lieutenant Colonel Iceal Hambleton was 53 years old, a navigator with a lifetime in the Air Force behind him and a love of golf. On Easter Sunday, 2 April 1972, he was also the only man to get out of an aircraft blown apart by a Soviet-made missile just south of the Demilitarized Zone in Vietnam, and he came down right in the path of an invading army.

What followed was one of the most costly rescue efforts of the Vietnam War. Aircraft were shot down trying to reach him and men died trying to bring him out. In the end it came down to two men in a sampan, and to a code built out of golf holes.

Easter Sunday over the DMZ

On 30 March 1972 North Vietnam launched the Easter Offensive, sending divisions of infantry, tanks and artillery south across the Demilitarized Zone. Three days later, an EB-66C electronic warfare aircraft flying with the callsign Bat 21 was escorting B-52s near the DMZ when an SA-2 surface-to-air missile destroyed it. Six men were aboard. Only Hambleton ejected and survived; the five other crewmen were never recovered.

He landed near the village of Cam Lo, about a mile from the Cam Lo Bridge, in the middle of the advancing North Vietnamese forces. He was also, as the Air Force well knew, an expert in surface-to-air missile countermeasures with access to highly classified information. Losing him to capture was not an option anyone wanted to consider.

Paper Skies on the Bat 21 rescue, often described as the most expensive rescue in U.S. Air Force history.

The price of trying

A forward air controller found him and stayed overhead, talking to him by radio and directing air strikes around his hiding place. Capt. Harold Icke, one of those FACs, spent many hours orbiting Hambleton's position, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. But the enemy was everywhere, and every rescue attempt flew into the teeth of an army on the move.

The cost was brutal. On 6 April, the HH-53C rescue helicopter Jolly Green 67 was shot down and all six men aboard were lost. An OV-10 Bronco, Covey 282, was shot down the next day; its pilot was killed and its Marine observer captured, later dying in captivity. A U.S. Army UH-1H, Blue Ghost 39, crashed with three killed and one captured, and another OV-10, Nail 38, was downed, leaving one of its crew, 1st Lt. Mark Clark, on the run too. By the most widely cited count, five aircraft were lost, 11 men killed and two captured because of the effort to reach Bat 21; some accounts put the toll higher.

After the loss of Jolly Green 67, Gen. Creighton Abrams ordered that no more helicopters be sent in for Hambleton and Clark. If they were to be saved, it would have to be on foot.

Golf holes and a river

The plan, drawn up by Marine Lt. Col. Andy Anderson of the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, was to bring the two Americans to the Mieu Giang river, where a small ground team could reach them. The problem was telling Hambleton where to go without the North Vietnamese, who were listening to the radio, understanding.

The solution was inspired. Hambleton was a keen golfer, so his rescuers described his route as a series of golf holes on courses he knew. Hole No. 1 at the Tucson National course, for instance, meant moving about 400 yards south-east, towards water. The National Museum of the USAF says that after "playing" nine holes, and close to collapse from hunger and exhaustion, Hambleton reached the riverbank.

A first-hand account of the Bat 21 Bravo rescue from Harold Icke, one of the forward air controllers overhead.

Two men in a sampan

The ground team was led by U.S. Navy SEAL Lt. Thomas Norris, advising a group of South Vietnamese commandos. They reached Mark Clark first, pulling him from the river after a North Vietnamese patrol passed between them. Further attempts to reach Hambleton followed, and the team took casualties from mortar and rocket fire.

For the last attempt, Petty Officer Nguyen Van Kiet volunteered to go with Norris. Disguised as fishermen, the two men paddled a sampan up the river and, on the night of 13 April, found Hambleton alive on the bank. On the way back, Norris called in an air strike, and A-4 Skyhawks from the carrier USS Hancock helped suppress the enemy guns. An armoured personnel carrier carried the three men to Dong Ha.

Norris received the Medal of Honor from President Gerald Ford in 1976. Kiet received the Navy Cross, a rare honour for a South Vietnamese sailor. Hambleton's own decorations included the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.

A rescue that changed the rules

The story of Bat 21 Bravo has been told many times since, in books such as Darrel Whitcomb's The Rescue of Bat 21 and in the 1988 film Bat*21 with Gene Hackman as Hambleton. Its lasting legacy, though, was inside the services. It forced hard questions about how much risk a rescue force should accept for one man, and about when a small, quiet team on the ground can do what a fleet of aircraft cannot.

Dark Docs on Norris and Kiet's final night on the river to bring Hambleton home.

For Hambleton, the arithmetic of those eleven days must have been impossible to carry. For the people who went in after him, it was simpler. An American was down in enemy territory, as Norris later put it, and they went.

Sources: Wikipedia (Rescue of Bat 21 Bravo), National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Defense Media Network (Fabry, 2010), Congressional Medal of Honor Society