Saving Bravo

The pulse-pounding, untold story of the Navy SEAL mission to rescue an airman carrying top secret Cold War intelligence downed behind enemy lines

At the height of the Vietnam War, few American airmen were more valuable than Lieutenant Colonel Gene Hambleton. His memory filled with highly classified information, he knew secrets about cutting-edge missile technology that the Soviets and North Vietnamese badly wanted.

When Hambleton is shot down behind enemy lines in the midst of North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive, U.S. forces place the entire war on hold to save a single man, hiding among thirty thousand enemy troops and tanks. Airborne rescue missions fail, killing eleven Americans. Finally, Navy SEAL Thomas Norris and a Vietnamese commando, Nguyen Van Kiet, volunteer to go after him on foot. They glide past hundreds of enemy soldiers, but it takes them days to reach Hambleton, who, guided toward his rescuers via improvised radio code, is barely alive—starved and hallucinating after eleven days on the run.

In this deeply researched story, award-winning author Stephan Talty describes the extraordinary mission that led Hambleton to safety. Drawing on dozens of interviews and access to unpublished papers, Saving Bravo is the riveting story of one of the greatest rescue missions in the history of the Special Forces.