By Honor Bound Read online

  “Some of my earliest memories were of getting into trouble with my brother, and my dad punishing us. I remember him taking me and my brother out to the well house with a leather belt, but before he whopped us, he would talk to us about what we’d done and why we were being punished. He made sure we knew why he had to whip us. It was his disapproval that hurt more than the whipping. Neither my brother nor I wanted to disappoint him. I forget the swats on the butt, but I can still remember the look of disappointment on Daddy’s face. But we did some crazy stuff. One time my brother and I decided to take a ride in Daddy’s pickup truck. I was five and he was four. We started the pickup, and I knelt in the seat to steer while he worked the pedals. We got damn near down our long drive to the county road before we rolled off into the ditch. Another time we were playing cowboys and Indians in our barn. We decided to build a campfire in one of the horse stalls and almost burned down the barn. Again, Daddy would first talk to us and then out came the belt. Yet, there was a lot of love in my family. All us kids grew up knowing that our parents really cared for us.

  “We did a lot of things as a family—picnics, boating, fishing, things like that. And we went into town to the YMCA, where we all learned to swim. Daddy made sure we knew how to swim at an early age, even though he himself couldn’t swim a stroke. Swimming was something that I always seemed to be good at. I was good at other sports, but swimming was my thing. I could swim faster and farther than just about any other kid my age. So I hung out at the pool a lot in the summers and even became a lifeguard. I was always very comfortable in the water.

  “My brother and I also watched a lot of TV with the family after dinner. I think it was then that I first got interested in the Navy and becoming a frogman. I remember seeing The Fighting Sullivans, about five brothers who were all on the same Navy destroyer in World War II. The ship was hit and four of the brothers refused to leave, searching for the oldest Sullivan. All five were killed when the ship exploded. Now that’s family. I guess it was not too long after that when I saw Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews in The Frogmen and then I was hooked. I always figured that I’d go into the military, so when it came my time to go, I joined the Navy. I still wanted to be a frogman, but that would come later. We liked watching John Wayne and just about any cowboy movie, but I still remember the Sullivans and those Navy frogmen. You ask a lot of guys from my generation in the teams and they’ll say the same thing. It all began by watching our heroes on black-and-white, small-screen television.

  “I didn’t do all that well in school. I couldn’t read and I still have problems with it. I’m dyslexic. Back then, they didn’t call it that—you were just dumb. For me it meant that I simply couldn’t keep up in school. I did okay in math but that was probably the only thing. And I loved history. Otherwise, I did poorly. I had to repeat my sophomore year in high school, and that really hurt my pride. Failing a grade is a blow to a fifteen-year-old boy’s ego. I wanted to play high school sports and the coaches wanted me to play. I was tall and lanky then, and they wanted me as a linebacker in football. But my grades just wouldn’t allow it. I got As in P.E. and Bs in math, but Ds and Fs in everything else. I was in summer school every summer. So it’s no wonder I got in with the wrong crowd and started getting into trouble. Nothing serious, but we were mischievous—southern country boys drinking beer and making bad decisions. The sheriff was out to the house a few times, and there was a time or two in juvenile court. And I cut a lot of classes. I had seventy-two absences in my senior year in high school. It was hard on my parents, especially Daddy, as he was the one who had to deal with me. He always stood up for me, because that’s what families do, but even he could see I was headed for trouble.

  “You hear a lot of those stories back then about the judge saying, ‘It’s go into the service or go to jail.’ Well, it wasn’t exactly like that for me, but it was damn close. I was running with a bunch of guys who were like me, service classification 1A and waiting for the draft to catch up with them. We all knew we were headed for the military, and we were just having a good time while we waited. Well, Daddy and the judge talked it over. I was headed for reform school, and they both knew it. So my dad took me in to see the judge and he said, ‘Son, I’m going to let you make your first major decision in life. You can join one of these fine armed forces or the county has a special school that will provide you with the kind of close supervision that I think you need.’ I joined the Navy in Spartanburg and then drove to Columbia, South Carolina, to be sworn in. A few months later, they mailed me my high school diploma—probably because they didn’t want me coming back for it.”

  In talking with Tom and Mike about how they grew up, it’s hard to find two young men who were more dissimilar—physically, educationally, temperamentally, and socially. Yet at least for this narrator, three things stand out in these two young lives that were common to both. Both grew up in families that were close and put a premium on what might loosely be termed today as strong family values. They were both loved, and early on they were raised to understand right from wrong—if not always doing the right thing. Second, they both had a brother who was younger but close to them in age. As the older sibling, they were always the leader and they took some measure of responsibility for their younger brother. If there was a scrape or there was trouble, or someone had to answer for the actions of the two, that burden fell to them. Looking out for a younger brother brings a maturity and a personal accountability that both Tom and Mike took seriously. And finally, early on both Tom and Mike stood up for what was right. Like all boys moving into manhood, they got into fights. For both, these fights were often the result of someone picking on their younger brother or stepping in to confront a bully. As young boys, both had an intolerance for anyone who abused or took advantage of someone else. Neither would stand for it. The fact that Mike was a big kid and Tom was not made no difference. Both would step in and take the part of the underdog.

  CLASS 49

  “I can honestly say I enjoyed Navy boot camp,” Mike recalls of his first days in the Navy. “It was four months at the Naval Training Base in San Diego and for me, it was easy. Unlike high school, I could keep up and even excel. There were other guys like me at Navy boot camp who had trouble reading, and the Navy was very good about taking the time to make sure we learned what we had to know. I was a better athlete than most of the other guys, and in the pool I could help others. When I graduated, I went directly to my ship. I was an engineman striker, which meant I was still a seaman, but designated to work with auxiliary gasoline and diesel engines aboard ship. Usually a seaman out of boot camp goes to what they call A-School to learn about his rating—in my case, engines. I didn’t test so well, so they sent me straight to my ship, the USS Brister. Actually, this was a stroke of luck, as the Brister [DER-327] was an old ship and scheduled for decommissioning. I was aboard long enough to put my package in for UDT/SEAL training and within a few months of reporting to the ship, I had orders to Coronado.

  “I got there just in time to begin training with Underwater Demolition Recruit Training Class 49. Back then they didn’t call it BUD/S, and there were no pretraining programs or indoctrination. You just showed up and jumped right in. I knew I wanted to be a frogman, but I had no idea what I was getting into—how hard it would be. Hell, it was considered shore duty, so I figured that I’d have the weekends off and that during the week after the workday a guy could go into San Diego for a few beers. Boy, was I in for a surprise.”

  “Mike was a character, start to finish,” says his friend, classmate, and teammate Hal Kuykendall. “I remember we arrived for SEAL training with Class 49 in Coronado at the same time. It was around the first of November 1968. We were still over in the old Quonset huts on the Naval Amphibious Base on San Diego Bay. Training began the next day and everyone was turned in early, trying for some sleep, as we all knew the first day of training was a real ballbuster. We got there about midnight, and Mike turns on every light in the barracks. That brought all kinds of complaints from
the guys in their racks. Mike just said, ‘That’s why God gave you eyelids. Why don’t you try using them.’ He proceeded to take a shower and stow his gear, and then he turned off the lights. I didn’t like Mike at first. It took me a while to get to know him and to warm up to him. But start to finish, he was a strong SEAL trainee.”

  Basic underwater demolition team/SEAL (BUD/S) training at that time was conducted on both coasts. The Underwater Demolition and SEAL teams then came directly under the Navy, and with the exception of Vietnam or other area-specific deployments, the East Coast teams served units of the Atlantic Fleet and the West Coast teams those of the Pacific Fleet. Training on both coasts was conducted at the main Navy amphibious bases that served that fleet—Little Creek, Virginia, and Coronado, California. Without getting into the odd class nomenclature, Mike was in training in Coronado with Class 49 (West Coast) at the same time as Tom Norris and your narrator were training with Class 45 on the East Coast. The training differed organizationally and professionally and in how the phases of training—basic physical training, diving, land warfare, weapons training, and so on—were conducted. But both coasts had a brutal Hell Week. Only about one in five who entered this ordeal made it through to the end. That was the case back in 1968–69 when we went through training, and it’s the same today. Class 49 on Coronado began with 129 trainees and graduated eighteen of the original 129 and four who rolled into the class from a previous class. In my Class 45 at Little Creek, we began with seventy-two and graduated thirteen Americans and two Turkish officers. In Class 45, all of us went to the East Coast Underwater Demolition Teams, but for Tom Norris. He had orders to SEAL Team Two. In Class 49, fourteen of the graduates went to the West Coast UDTs, while eight were selectively assigned to SEAL Team One. Mike Thornton was one of the eight.

  Perhaps one difference in the East and West Coast training venues was the instructor cadre. Instructors at the two training facilities came from the teams on that coast. Both teams had commitments in Vietnam, but the West Coast combat rotations were far more rigorous than for the East Coast, especially in the UDTs. So there were a great many more combat veterans on Coronado than in Little Creek.

  “We had some instructors who were not only good teachers, but they were real characters,” Mike recalls. “There was Vince Olivera, who was part American Indian and a plank holder [assigned to the unit when it was first commissioned] at SEAL Team One. He called us palefaces and we all stood in awe and fear of Instructor Olivera. Then there was Dick Allen, a black SEAL who was the Navy boxing champion. He once sparred with Muhammad Ali. When Ali was once asked who hit him the hardest, he said that it was a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy named Dick Allen. And then there was Instructor Terry Moy, who we called Mother Moy. It seemed as if he was always there watching us, making sure we did everything right and that we put out 110 percent.”

  “I remember Mike Thornton,” said the now-retired Master Chief Petty Officer Terry Moy. “He was one of those strong trainees who was very good in the water. And he was also one of those in-your-face trainees who was just a natural for extra attention by the instructors. Guys like Mike we would single out for more pushups and more harassment. Basically, we picked on him because we knew he could take it, and it was good for class morale. Like one of us would say, ‘Okay, because Thornton here screwed up the evolution, the whole class is going to have to do it over again.’ By singling out two or three of the strong trainees for extra attention, it brought the class together as they sought to protect and look out for one of their own. We wanted our trainees to bond as a class, just like they would later be expected to bond as a team or an operational team. Because Mike was outgoing and gregarious, not all of his classmates liked him—especially the more serious ones. But when we picked on him, the rest of the class would rally behind him. Every class has a Mike Thornton or two, and we SEAL instructors used them to good advantage.”

  “Training was hard, but it was also a lot of fun,” Mike says of his Coronado training class. “I didn’t have a lot of problems, and I was always very good in the water. But I was not all that good a runner. We had to run four miles for time in boots on the beach, and I was always at the back of the pack, which meant I was out there running with the goon squad after everyone else was secured from the day’s training. But during those goon-squad runs, Olivera or Dick Allen or Mother Moy would be out there running with us. So my times came down. By the end of training I was doing 5:40 miles in boots and in the sand.

  “Hell Week was hard—maybe an hour of sleep a night if we were lucky, and we were always cold and wet. The instructors worked us in shifts, so they were always fresh. It was a miserable week, but what stands out in my mind as the hardest day in training was the night we tried to get one over on the instructors. We were coming back from the mud flats in south San Diego Bay, back to the amphibious base by way of running on the beach. We were on our own, each boat crew carrying our rubber boats on our heads. The Hell Week class was divided into boat crews, and each crew’s constant companion was their IBS [inflatable boat, small]. An IBS is twelve feet long, five and a half feet wide, and weighs 108 pounds. We carried them everywhere. This time it was a race back to the base carrying our boats, and it always paid to be a winner. Well, my crew and another crew figured we’d get a leg up on the instructors and the other Hell Week crews. One of my classmate’s girlfriends came over the beach berm with a four-wheel-drive flatbed truck. We loaded two of the boats on the flatbed, piled aboard, and away we went. The plan was to hide out along the beach, then jump back in ahead of the other crews—all rested and coming in first. As we came up the strand highway to the base, this Navy ambulance pulls up alongside us and guess who’s in the cab? Vince Olivera and Dick Allen. Well, when we got dropped off, they were waiting for us. They made us pay, and pay dearly. While the other trainees got a meal by the fire and got to doze off for fifteen minutes, we got to do push-ups in the surf, a roll in the soft sand, then more surf push-ups. It’s what they call surf torture. The instructors like it when you try to be sneaky, but when you get caught, you pay the price. That night, we paid in full, and I’ll never forget it. After that beating, we came together as a crew and started winning boat-carry evolutions without cheating.”

  For the record, there were three crews who took a shortcut that night. The third crew, however, managed to elude the instructors and gain a reprieve from that Hell Week evolution. And as an aside, one of the young women who tried to help Mike and his boat crew in their ill-fated attempt to sneak their boats past the instructors was later to become his wife.

  “It was just after we began our last phase of training, the land warfare phase out on San Clemente Island, that we got our team assignments. There were twenty-two guys who graduated in my class—eighteen from the original 129. I remember how lucky and proud I felt when I was given orders to SEAL Team One. Even back then, it was no small thing to be a Navy SEAL. But it’s one thing to be a SEAL and yet another to do the work of a SEAL.”

  THE SUMMER OF ’72

  “After Tommy arrived at Thuan-An, it seemed like we pressed a little harder for operations. He was a guy who wanted to go out and get things done. And things began to pick up a bit once it was clear that the NVA were not going to be able to take Hue City. Then when the ARVNs finally recaptured Quang Tri City in mid-September, it got even better. Most of our missions were reconnaissance-type missions, and we were always looking to grab a Viet Cong fighter or, better yet, a senior-level Viet Cong cadre. But the LDNN SEALs were still a little reluctant to go into the field. And we all understood that. Many of them had been fighting for a decade or more, and while we SEAL advisors were still there, they knew we’d be gone soon—and by early 1973, we were. Still, while we were there, most of us wanted to go on operations whenever we could, and we were looking for intelligence leads that might get us to a good target.

  “A typical LDNN SEAL operation would have us launch from Thuan-An late afternoon in one of the boat-support-detachment junks. These were co
ncrete junks—imagine! They were ferro-cement hulls built in Vietnamese shipyards for the coastal junk force. We had a few of these junks assigned to support LDNN operations. We’d make our way out to the South China Sea and either turn left and go north toward the DMZ or south toward Da Nang. After dark, we’d insert over the beach, patrol to the objective, and then try to get back across the beach and out to the junk before first light. If we went south, we were usually targeting the Viet Cong or looking to capture a VC fighter for intelligence. If we went north, we were probably still looking for a VC target, but maybe grab an NVA soldier. There were still main-force elements of NVA north of Thuan-An and we had to be very careful. Sometimes we’d launch from the junks in an IBS [the same Zodiac-type rubber boats we used in basic SEAL training on Coronado] and paddle in close to the beach. From there it was over the side and a swim through the surf. If the junk could get in close enough, we’d swim ashore from the junk. Most of our operations fell into this pattern.

  “In the evenings, we’d sit around with a beer and recall the old days when we deployed as SEAL platoons to conduct direct-action missions. Yet we knew those days were over. Back then, we usually operated in SEAL squads of six to seven SEALs with a Kit Carson Scout or two [Vietnamese Army scouts who used to be Viet Cong but came over to the Vietnamese Army under an amnesty program], a couple of LDNNs, or a local guide. My first platoon was Charlie Platoon and we were in-country from December 1969 through July 1970. We worked out of a place called Dong Island, and it was a great deployment. We had solid platoon officers and our platoon leading petty officer was Barry Enoch, one of the finest SEAL operators at Team One. When I made my first deployment, he was my sea daddy. It was the same for all of us on our first combat tour, and it was an active tour. Seems like we’d be out every other night, and most of the time we made contact. I remember we took down a few province-level Viet Cong cadre types, and one time we had good intelligence and were able to take down an entire VC grenade factory. Jumped right in the middle of it; it was great.”