Streaking out of low cloud cover just seaward of Haiphong, the U.S. Air Force Voodoo flew smack into a sky full of flak. As his reconnaissance fighter belched flame from its starboard engine, Captain Norman Huggins, 36, of Sumter, S.C., knew his search for North Vietnamese SAM sites was over for the day. He saw a finger-shaped island below him, surrounded by a wrinkled sea studded with enemy junks. The only hope for survival lay in his yellow and black ejection handles. Whoosh went the canopy, pow went the 37-mm. cartridge under his seat, pop went the parachute. And for the next 40 minutes, Norm Huggins fought for his life.
Blood streaming from a split lip, Huggins splashed down west of the island, inflated one of his two water wings, and stroked off toward shore, figuring to hide out. But as he neared the beach, he saw a group of men watching him. "One looked like a kid," he recalled. "I actually remember saying hello." Gunfire from the beach told him it was time to say goodbye. Huggins swam seaward, firing an occasional round from his waterlogged Smith & Wesson .38 to keep the snipers low. Then he saw two swimmers trying to outflank him from the north. "I squeezed off a couple at them, but I missed," he lamented later.
It was precisely time for a rescue, and onto the scene fluttered a re vamped "Silver Angel"—the stubby-winged HU-16 sea-rescue amphibian of Air Force Captain David P. Westen-barger, who had been on patrol 150 miles away when he first heard the radioed cry of "Mayday." Dropping through the cloud layer to 100 ft., West-enbarger saw an oncoming 30-ft. junk spitting machine-gun bullets just short of Huggins. "Dunk that junk," he ordered four fighters circling overhead. As they complied, Westenbarger splashed down near Huggins, taxied between him and the pistol-packing swimmers, pulled the downed aviator aboard while the HU-16's flight mechanic blazed away at the bobbing heads with an M-16 automatic rifle. Huggins needed only a minute to regain his breath, then grabbed a rifle himself. "Come on," he said with understandable vengeance, "let me do some of that shooting. I've used up a lot of luck in one whack."