Two Souls Indivisible (4 page)

Inside his cockpit, he flipped on the starting switch and gave his wingman and the two other fliers the signal, rotating his forefinger in circles, to ignite their engines as well. He used hand signals to communicate to the ground crew but also had a microphone in his oxygen mask.

"Hot and muggy," the air traffic control officer told him.

Five minutes passed before the plane moved. When the control officer said, "Clear to taxi," Cherry checked with all the flight members and gave them a thumbs-up. The crew chief pulled the chocks from the wheels of all four planes, which began to taxi toward the runway. Cherry pulled down and locked his plexiglass canopy. The crew chief saluted each pilot, who responded in kind. Then, right before takeoff, a problem arose. A wingman's plane, the jet that would fly in close tandem with Cherry's, experienced a sudden loss of oil pressure and had to abort. A new aircraft would be used, but it didn't have the same weapons as Cherry's. To coordinate the attack—to ensure that the weapons fell on the target simultaneously—the wingman would have to fly ahead of instead of adjacent to Cherry. It made no practical difference for the flight, but any deviation from routine was disconcerting.

Finally, they were ready for takeoff. Cherry's jet shook slightly as it powered up, then sped down the runway and lifted quickly into the gray sky, the force pushing him hard against the back of his seat. On some takeoffs, the pilot was blinded by the sun caroming off flooded rice paddies. But today Cherry saw only verdant jungles rush by below. He broke through the clouds and saw the sun. He checked his course settings and, cruising at 680 mph, relaxed. It was ten-thirty
A.M.

The radio crackled in Cherry's ear, and bits of conversation from distant ships drifted in and faded quickly. They had left Thailand's airspace and were now over Laos at the 19th parallel, where they would refuel. Flying above the clouds, everything seemed smooth. Cherry heard his code name on the radio. The KC-135 tankers, which had been orbiting, were now approaching. He scanned the sky briefly and found them. Matching speeds, he flew behind one tanker, whose boom, or long tube, nudged its way into the Thunderchief's external gas tank, and in three minutes the tanker furiously pumped in one thousand gallons of jet fuel. It was a routine job, but when Cherry was hooked to the fueler twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, he always felt more like a target. When the task was finished, the boom retracted; Cherry rolled away, and his wingman followed in line. In less than fifteen minutes, all four aircraft had been refueled.

He flew above the clouds until they reached the mountains near Dien Bien Phu; heading east, he rocked his wings to signal his wingman, then descended sharply, slicing through the clouds and leveling off above the trees at a hundred feet. He was now "on deck," flying at 575 mph, low enough to avoid enemy radars and to feel the full rush of flying. At high altitudes, a pilot barely feels as though he's moving; at treetop level, he has a complete "awareness of speed," as Cherry called it, which conferred an ever greater feeling of power, even omnipotence. He was thirty-four minutes away from the site.

He raced ahead until he reached Kep airfield, then turned southwest, which would put him parallel to the Northeast Railroad. The airfield, however, was fortified with antiaircraft weapons, and as Cherry passed by, gunmen fired tracers that looked like flaming orange tennis balls. They narrowly missed him, and Cherry accelerated to 700 mph, still flying straight and low.

The dangers had just begun. Three minutes from his target, Cherry saw hundreds of rifles pointed at him, their muzzles flashing. Combat pilots liked to "fly and fight," vacating battle sites quickly and avoiding protracted gunfire, but now Cherry faced just that. As he later discovered, armed peasants had been rebuilding a road that had been destroyed by a U.S. bomber, and he assumed they had been alerted to his raid by the gunmen at the airfield.

There was no point in deviating from course. He was right on top of the riflemen, and to pull away would give them an easier shot, so he gripped the control stick and searched for the target.

Thump!
Metal slammed against metal. His plane shook and swerved. "I've been hit," he yelled into his microphone.

He didn't know where the damage was, but the computer system on his flight control panel shut down, destabilizing the aircraft and leaving him in sporadic radio contact with his wingman. He locked the control stick between his legs and used both hands to steady the jet, but it jerked and yawed. Still, he maintained altitude and control. His mouth and throat were dry from the near-pure oxygen he had been breathing through his mask, and perspiration soaked his combat suit. He turned off the electrical and hydraulic switches to minimize the chance of fire. Cherry saw a lake at a bend in the railroad, which was supposed to be near the missiles. He finally saw the installation—several battery launchers that formed a circular pattern. His pellet-spraying cluster bombs were "antipersonnel weapons," designed to remove any militiamen so that his wingman and the two other fliers could bomb the site without fear of counterattack. When he reached the target, he held the red button on the control stick for three seconds, which emptied the bombs from their canister. Through his rearview mirror, Cherry watched them hit the installation, exploding in little balls of fire.

He then flew away from the site and felt the plane straining skyward. His plan was to fly about forty miles to the Gulf of Tonkin, where he would ditch the Thunderchief and be rescued by a Navy carrier. "Let's get the fuck out of here!" he yelled to his wingman.

But then smoke began to pour from his instrument panel and warning lights dotted the cockpit like a Christmas tree. The plane shook violently, and Cherry, losing control, gripped the stick tightly and tried to straighten it out. The clock read 11:44
A.M.
The cockpit continued to fill with thick smoke. He had one last chance to save the aircraft. He leaned over to turn off the switches for the battery, generator, and alternator, believing he might minimize the fire while keeping the engine alive. But Cherry's hand never reached the panel. A loud explosion sent the Thunderchief spinning through the air. The blast likely came from the 20-millimeter ammunition in the aircraft's nose—allowing Cherry to remark later that the North Vietnamese didn't shoot him out of the sky. He shot himself.

The plane was going to either explode completely or crash in seconds. Cherry pulled on the control stick, tilting the jet's nose for ejection. At about 400 feet—high enough to bail out but low enough to minimize the exposure to gunfire—Cherry pulled the ejection handle with his left hand. The instrument panel shattered as the canopy flew off, creating a wind tunnel effect. Cherry's left arm, unsecured, was sucked straight up and wrenched from its socket. Then he was literally shot out of the aircraft by a 37-millimeter cannon shell from beneath the seat. It is supposed to create a "smooth ballistic trajectory," in which the lap belt disengages, the parachute automatically opens, and the seat falls away. But none of that happened. His lap belt didn't unlock and his chute didn't budge. He remained strapped to his seat, sailing harmlessly over the Vietnamese brush. The malfunction probably saved his life. The maximum speed at which one can release a parachute safely is about 575 mph, and Cherry was flying at close to 700 mph; the chute would have ripped apart.

When Cherry's eyes were able to focus, he saw the sky and realized he was still in his seat. Tilting back, he pulled the ripcord. The white canopy blossomed above, and he finally disengaged the seat. As the ground rushed toward him, he looked at the chute's fluffy panels, saw the dark form of his wingman fly by, and heard bullets whiz past his ear. Just before impact, he saw black and gray clouds drift over the ridge where his plane had crashed. He slammed hard against the high grass on a small hill. He was two minutes from the coast.

"Our lead got out," his wingman radioed to the base in Thailand. "We saw him hit the ground, but I don't think he was conscious."

He was conscious but badly injured. In addition to ripping out his shoulder, the fall had broken his left wrist and left ankle. Even healthy, he wouldn't have escaped: he was immediately surrounded by a dozen armed militia, as well as a bunch of kids with hoes and pitchforks.

"Damn," Cherry said under his breath, "I'll be here a long time." He assumed it would be one or two months before the United States won the war. He was the forty-third American captured in North Vietnam, and the first black.

A young pilot in Cherry's squadron used to say that he would rather die in combat than be captured: death was immediate; captivity was long, excruciating, and sometimes fatal. Cherry told the pilot that his choice was foolish. "You can always die," he said. "But you at least have to go in and test the waters."

Cherry was now living out his own advice, yet there was something incomprehensible about his position: moments earlier, he had been piloting the largest single-seat, single-engine fighter ever built, a twentieth-century warrior catered to by enlisted men, support personnel, and military gofers. Now he was being mocked by giggling children with farm tools. Cherry wasn't afraid; he was just dumbfounded.

A militiaman with a semiautomatic weapon stepped forward and showed two fingers, indicating he wanted Cherry to raise both hands. The American wasn't in pain yet, but he couldn't move his left arm. His .38 pistol was in its harness, the butt showing. Cherry feared that if a militiaman saw it, he would be shot. He used his good hand to motion to his gun, and two soldiers finally moved in slowly and took it, as well as his hunting knife. They also took his parachute and antigravity suit; they wanted to remove his flight suit as well but were baffled by the zippers. A Vietnamese civilian took Cherry's knife, walked over to him, and plunged it toward his groin. The American scooted backward, and the knife sank into the ground inches from his genitals. Cherry calmly demonstrated the zipper. Amused, the man began toying with it—up, down, up, down. He got the flight suit, but when he indicated that he wanted to cut off Cherry's boots, the American resisted by kicking. He didn't want to walk barefoot, and there was something special, even sacred, about a serviceman's shoes. After a brief scuffle, whoever was in charge told the man with the knife to let the pilot keep his boots.

A militiaman motioned for Cherry to stand, so he rocked forward and picked himself up, dusty, hot, and sweating, his face nicked and bleeding from the instrument panel's shattered glass. His left ankle hurt, but he didn't know it was broken. Someone pushed him with a stick and, escorted by his captors, he limped to a path and headed for a nearby village. He had heard the Vietnamese language before and even understood a few words, but he didn't understand his captors as they talked and laughed among themselves.

It was a two-mile walk, and he soon grew tired, shambling along the path as best he could. As they approached the village, a gong sounded, the loud rumble beckoning farmers from the rice paddies. Children ran his way and touched him. He tried to smile. They laughed. A young man in uniform seemed to be in charge, which heartened Cherry. He assumed that a soldier, even a Communist, was more likely to respect a prisoner of war. According to the Geneva Conventions of 1949—which North Vietnam had signed—POWs were to be treated humanely.

Cherry, at this point, was not in danger. Ho Chi Minh had already announced that any village capturing an American would be rewarded if it returned the prisoner alive to the authorities. To his captors, therefore, Cherry was more a prize than he was the enemy. The militiamen took him into a hut, where a medic put ointment on his face to soothe the cuts while passersby looked in. When it was time to move again, precautions were taken. The soldiers put a black cloth over Cherry's white shirt so he'd be more difficult to spot from the air. His ankle was also swelling, and he finally lost his composure when they were walking out of the village and a civilian's bike rode over his feet. The American grabbed the handlebars and shoved the bike over a hedgerow into a rice paddy, the rider in tow. The man, furious, charged the pilot, but the soldiers blocked his path and turned him away. Cherry's elbows were soon tied behind his back, stretching his dislocated shoulder.

The American realized that he was valuable to his captors, but moments later he thought his life was about to end. Two U.S. jets appeared from behind a mountain and flew low, searching for the downed pilot by homing in on the electronic signal in his parachute. The soldiers threw Cherry face down into a dry rice paddy, and one man straddled his back, pointing his automatic weapon flush against the bone behind his ear. Cherry, his nose in the dirt, his shoulder aching, assumed that if a jet pilot saw him and took action, he'd be dead. But the planes passed by without finding him. The gunman relaxed his weapon, picked up his captive, and pushed him forward.

As Cherry limped to a Jeep, a man with a camera wanted to photograph him. Such pictures, he rightly assumed, would be published or displayed to boost the pride of the Communists, so he turned his body, fell to one knee, frowned, and refused to give the cameraman a good look. The photo session soon ended without a single picture; Cherry counted it as one small victory. They piled into the vehicle and took off.

The ride relieved his ankle, but with his elbows tied, he couldn't lean back. Angry, he nudged a guard, saying, "Too tight, too tight!
Hurt, hurt, hurt!" He asked him to loosen the nylon cord, but the guard refused. Cherry, confident the men wouldn't shoot him, knocked the guard with his shoulder and almost pushed him out. The soldiers in front laughed, discussed what to do, and finally allowed the guard to loosen the rope.

They drove to yet another village and stopped at a brick building surrounded by a courtyard jammed with teenagers. It appeared they were now at a school, and when Cherry entered the structure, he feared his journey had taken an ominous turn. He sat down at a table covered by a blue cloth, an interrogator across from him, a guard with an automatic weapon behind him. The questions—Who are you? What aircraft were you flying? What were your targets?—were in English.