It’s hard to tell how many lives Ken Kimbrough and his fellow airmen saved. They just pushed some rubber rafts out of an Air Force radar plane to rescue the crew of a scientific expedition. The scientists two-masted schooner was stuck on a reef off the coast of Vietnam, in grave danger of breaking apart.
It wasn’t just the lives of the biochemist Thomas C. Kurth who Kimbrough and his fellow airmen saved, but countless others by antibiotics and other drugs later developed by the scientist.
“It was in 1967 that they saved our lives,” says Kurth, 80, a former researcher for the University of Wisconsin. “And that’s helped us save others. We were collecting marine sponges, 360 species, of which 76 showed stronger antibiotic effect than penicillin. So it was very nice to get the help.”
Kimbrough, 71, was one of two crewmen who pushed three large life rafts and other equipment out of their Lockheed Constellation after receipt of a distress call from Kurth, captain and chief scientist of the Dante Deo.
“We got word that a seaplane was on the way to pick the survivors up, and we then had to leave for DaNang to refuel,” he says. “We knew those guys were in a bad way because they were aground on a coral reef and we could see holes in the ship’s hull.”
Just recently, Kimbrough and friends from his unit had begun to think about a 50th reunion. That got Kimbrough to wondering “what happened to the vessel and its crew.”
He found Kurt through a story in the military newspaper Stars & Stripes.
Kimbrough says he needed closure.
After finding Kurth’s name, Kimbrough gave him a call. “My conversation started out something like this: ‘Is this Tom Kurth who was the captain of the Dante Deo?’ There was silence and he said, ‘yes it is.’ I said, do you remember the plane that flew over and dropped those life rafts to you? He said, ‘I sure do, you guys saved our lives.’”
He told me he had specimens aboard that eventually turned into useful drugs.
Kurth says he “couldn’t believe it” when he saw Kimbrough’s plane. “After they dropped the rafts, we got picked up, so they saved our lives. We were sinking.”
Kurth was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at the time, on a three-year scientific journey collecting aquatic specimens. The expedition was sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, National Geographic, and a pharmaceutical company that since has been absorbed into another.
“It’s all about serendipity,” Kimbrough says. “Our job was to provide radar coverage and air traffic control for our planes flying over North Vietnam.’’
And then “we spot this ship, help save them,” he says. “It’s all pretty amazing.”
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