Saving Bravo: The Greatest Rescue Mission in Navy SEAL History

From the author of A Captain's Duty, the New York Times best-selling account of Captain Phillips, comes the untold story of the most important rescue mission not just of the Vietnam War, but the entire Cold War.

One American aviator, who knew our most important secrets, crashed behind enemy lines and risked capture by both the North Vietnamese and the Soviets. One Navy SEAL and his Vietnamese partner had to sneak past them all to save him.

At the height of the Vietnam War, few American airmen are more valuable than Lieutenant Colonel Gene Hambleton. His memory is filled with highly classified information that the Soviets and North Vietnamese badly want. When Hambleton is shot down in the midst of North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive, US forces place the entire war on hold to save a single man hiding among 30,000 enemy troops and tanks. Airborne rescue missions fail, killing eleven Americans. Finally, Navy SEAL Thomas Norris and his Vietnamese guide, Nguyen Van Kiet, volunteer to go after him on foot. Gliding past hundreds of enemy soldiers, it takes them days to reach Hambleton, who, guided toward his rescuers via improvised radio code, is barely alive, deeply malnourished, and hallucinating after eleven days on the run.

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 Drawing from dozens of interviews and access to unpublished papers, Saving Bravo is a riveting work of military history, telling the story of one of the greatest rescue missions in the history of the Special Forces.

How did two men succeed where entire airborne missions had failed?

• A High-Stakes Cold War Mission: The desperate, top-secret race to save one man, Lieutenant Colonel Gene Hambleton, whose capture could have changed the course of the war.
• Elite Special Forces Operation: How Navy SEAL Thomas Norris and his Vietnamese partner Nguyen Van Kiet planned a daring infiltration deep into enemy territory after conventional rescue attempts failed, killing eleven Americans.
• Survival Against All Odds: The eleven-day ordeal of a downed pilot hiding among 30,000 enemy soldiers, battling starvation and hallucinations while guiding his rescuers by a secret code.
• An Authentic Vietnam War Story: Drawn from dozens of interviews and unpublished documents to tell the complete, untold story of one of the most remarkable rescue missions of the era.