The Misty Pilots
Once Brian was on board, the chopper commander said, "Let's go look <[lb]>for your copilot." It was an agonizing search. At some point after Brian had been hauled up, the rescue aircraft started picking up a strong parachute beeper signal that they figured could only be coming from Howie's chute, since no other aircraft were down in the area. But they were unable to make voice contact, which was the only way to determine where he was and get him out. There was some sporadic groundfire, and the chopper Brian was on took a couple more hits. The rescuers scoured the area for another hour, looking fruitlessly. Finally, with nothing more than the tantalizing beeper to guide them, the rescuers turned south and left the crash site. The incident was over. The search for Howie would continue, however—and take a number of startling turns that nobody anticipated.
Dick Rutan had never flown with his buddy Howie. But he happened to be airborne en route to the airspace over the trail, with Misty commander Don Jones, when word came over the radio that Howie and Brian had been shot down near the Laotian border. Rutan, in the back seat, listened closely to the assembled rescue effort. When it became clear they couldn't find Howie, he and Jones—using the call sign Misty 41–streaked north toward the crash site, eager to do anything necessary to help.
They got to the area just as Brian was being picked up. But Misty 41 had trouble getting into the flow of the rescue. Essentially, they were bystanders. With so much chatter over the radio, it was hard getting information about where the aircraft had hit or what direction it had been traveling. Rutan reached Brian on the chopper via a radio relay but couldn't get clear information from him—after all, he had been on the jungle floor for most of the event. Rutan's frustration boiled over as the rescuers, having gotten no word from Howie, prepared to pull out. He and Jones spun circles over the forest awhile longer, but they had no better luck raising Howie than anybody else. Finally, darkness fell, and the whole search effort drew to a close.
Back at Phu Cat, the red-clay air base in the South Vietnamese countryside that was Misty's home, there was a bittersweet gathering in the Officer's Club. Brian's return was cause for celebration—and a chance to relish in the war stories that made them all feel so alive. But some of them took Howie's disappearance hard. Brian, needless to say, was one of them. He was exuberant over his own rescue, but manacled with guilt about leaving Howie behind. Even though he was in the back seat and wasn't flying the plane, he faulted himself for allowing Howie to get into trouble. As an experienced Misty he should have known better and insisted that they fly higher, or stood off farther from such a potentially hot area. They should have scouted for guns first, and not gotten so excited about finding a rare hole in the clouds. There were plenty of things they could have done differently, and it had been his job to make sure they did.
advertisement
