It was sometime between 3:00 and 3:30 AM on January 31, 1968, and “the sky had turned to lead”. Major Gordon Van Amburgh, Ranger, U.S. Army, was in a fight that few would have thought possible, at a level of ferocity he had never before seen. Inside an earthen berm about the size of three football fields designed to be defended by 200 men, he was holding his position in the command bunker with only 50 men – the rest were off celebrating Tet, the Vietnamese lunar holiday. His job was advisor to the 8th regiment of the 5th ARVN Division, assisted by a U.S. Captain and an enlisted radio operator, but his current duty was to keep the regiment from being wiped off the planet. The berm had been breached by about 100 of the 500 troops that assaulted it, coming through a break created by the mortar fire that was still continuing. These enemy troops were armed with automatic weapons, flame throwers, and RPG’s – rocket-powered grenades – and the fighting was “nose-to-nose”. This was the Tet Offensive, a battle some list as one of the most significant in military history.
Adding to his difficulties in defending the berm was that about 10 of the occupants were civilian officials. Although Major Van Amburgh was able to “activate” them to some degree, they still represented more of an obligation than an asset. He was not without some luck, as the assault was less coordinated than intended. A planned attack on Saigon had not yet occurred, and the enemy troops, most of whom were in peasant garb, stopped at one point to eat rice that had been left to dry between two howitzers.
Major Van Amburgh was able to radio the U.S. Division Headquarters and request artillery and air support, but his situation continued to deteriorate. Of his three-man advisory team, the radio operator was wounded and the Captain was mortally wounded – hit in the face with a grenaide. While he coordinated the defense, a couple of ARVN soldiers attempted to protect him, but there was “killing within arm’s reach”. The Vietnamese Regimental Commander ordered his men to abandon the command bunker. The Major was not scared – this was a professional soldier with an Airborne patch on his sleeve, a field-grade officer in the elite, all-volunteer Rangers. He was “on autopilot” and was not aware later that at least two and a half hours had passed, but somewhere in the part of his brain that was monitoring less immediate functions, he was aware that he had about ten minutes to live.
During the Viet Nam era the term for an attempted rescue of a downed pilot was SAR, for search-and-rescue. One of the primary directives for the lead pilot of the SAR, termed Sandy-1, was not to risk other lives and thereby worsen the situation. Flying a slow-moving prop plane, the A-1 Skyraider, “not an easy plane to fly”, he was to create an environment allowing the helicopter pilots to get in and extract the downed man without turning the men in the helicopter into casualties or additional potential POWs. It was a little less clear how much risk Sandy-1 could take on himself. On May 12, 1972, Lt. Lamar Smith was leading the SAR and was about to put himself well into harm’s way.
The mission was already at a disadvantage in that Lt. Smith’s wing man, Captain Gene Bardal, was flying with virtually no instruments. This SAR was starting late in the day, and there were no capabilities for night rescue. Therefore, when Captain Bardal, who technically outranked his mission leader, noted that his torquemeter was showing a reading that was clearly wrong, the two men opted to proceed rather than try to correct the problem. To do so would have essentially aborted the rescue, but by pressing on, it obligated Capt. Bardal to stay right on Lt. Smith’s wing the entire time. He would be flying blind whenever they entered the cloud cover, and that was only about 1000 ft. above the downed pilot. There would be a substantial increase in exposure to what these men euphemistically called “cumulus granitus” – a lethal mix of cloud and mountainside.
They established radio contact with the man on the ground and began “area denial” maneuvers against the NVA troops closing in on him. These involved repeated strafing runs across the area near the pilot, moving low enough and slow enough to take ground fire. The pilot on the ground first reported to them that they were taking effective fire, and then reported to Lt. Smith that “something is streaming out of your airplane” – obviously fuel. Sandy-1 was either going to have to pull out with his crippled plane and take the blind-flying plane of his wing man along, or try something extraordinary in order to stay on site for any useful length of time.
Since the plane would have some internal fuel, Lt. Smith opted to keep flying off his rapidly-depleting external fuel until the engine quit – there was no fuel gauge – then drop his fuel tank with its useless weight and attempt to restart the engine with the internal fuel before crashing. Trying to restart an engine at altitude was risky enough, but he was at “green-out” level – blinding himself with leaves chopped up by the propeller. With already two perfectly good ways to die – from crashing into the mountains while coming about in the clouds, or from the 50 cal. machine guns that had already generously ventilated his plane, Lt. Smith had just added a highly likely third way.
