By Honor Bound Read online

  “It was not a particularly difficult mission,” Norris continued, “and it was certainly something we’d done before, so we knew the drill. In general, it was about a fifty-mile transit from Thuan-An up to the Cua Viet River in our boats; with a max speed of about eight knots, that was a little more than six hours. The plan was to get well out to sea, so no one on the beach would know if we were going north or south. Once we turned, in this case north, we’d make our way up the coast and then turn west to come back into shore. Then we hoped to be on station off the southern bank of the Cua Viet as soon as possible after dark. We’d then leave the junks and paddle in close to shore in rubber boats, and swim ashore from the rubber boats. We’d insert, do our job, and get out before first light. We didn’t have to be back at Thuan-An before first light, but we sure as heck wanted to be back across that beach and away from the coast before sunup. I was told I’d have offshore Navy support in the way of two destroyers, so if we were a little late in getting out of there, I’d have some friendly, on-call fire support. I was getting into the planning when Mike came to me. ‘Hey, sir,’ he said, ‘we got a problem.’”

  “The LDNNs came in all varieties of experience and capability and courage,” Mike recalled of the Vietnamese assigned for the mission. “On this operation, we had three very good ones. Lieutenant Quan was a first-rate LDNN officer, and Deng and Quan [an enlisted LDNN, no relation] were two guys I’d worked with on my first tour and was with them again in Thuan-An. Deng and Quan were good to go, but the problem was with Quan, the officer. The night before, he was in a tuk-tuk accident and banged himself up pretty good—enough that he’d not be able to go on an operation for another few weeks. This left us without our best LDNN officer.”

  “Losing Lieutenant Quan was a blow,” Tom confirmed, “because he really was good. But this operation had to have a Vietnamese officer—someone who could be seen to be in charge, and who could report what we found to his LDNN boss down in Vung Tau, or anyone else in the South Vietnamese military who needed the information. This was a ‘now’ operation, and we had to find someone else to go. So we turned to Lieutenant Thuan. He was the next in line, both in seniority and in experience. Thuan was one of the LDNN officers who had been sent to the United States for SEAL training and returned to be an LDNN team leader, so his English was very good. I’d been out with him a few times on other reconnaissance operations, and he hadn’t done too badly. But none of us had ever been with him in combat. As it turned out, he’d had very little actual combat experience. But he was eager to go on the operation. His family had connections in the South Vietnamese government, which was not surprising. Many South Vietnamese officers owed their position to family influence. From the South Vietnamese perspective, this was an essential operation, and I think he saw this as a chance to be involved in something important.”

  “My job was to make sure the three Vietnamese were ready to go,” Mike said, “while Tommy planned the operation from the top down. We didn’t generally tell our LDNNs where we were going, just when to be ready to go, although Lieutenant Thuan probably had some idea. They didn’t really understand operational security like we do. You could never be sure that they wouldn’t tell a friend or relative where we were going and have that information get passed along to the Viet Cong and on to the NVA. The bad guys had a very well-developed intelligence network. And they had a lot of locals in their employ. So we often told our LDNNs that this was a secret mission tasking and that they would get the full briefing on the operation just before we went out.”

  “This was to be a straightforward reconnaissance mission,” Tom said of the planning process, “and similar to those we’d done many times before. Since it was a reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering operation, we’d be on the lookout for the opportunity to capture an enemy soldier and bring him back with us for interrogation, but a clean body snatch is hard to do. Yet if the opportunity presented itself, we’d make the grab. And it was critical for us to remain undetected. If we made contact, then the operation was blown.

  “I looked to the Navy for two things. The first was navigation. The Navy ships offshore, usually destroyers, had good radars and very accomplished radar operators. I counted on them to direct us from an offshore location to our insertion point, in this case a point on the beach on the South China Sea just south of the mouth of the Cua Viet River. They couldn’t always see the rubber boats—in this case the IBSs—in the water, but the Vietnamese junks assigned to the LDNNs painted pretty well on radar. We relied on the destroyers to get our junks a few thousand yards off the beach from where we wanted to go ashore. Once on station, the Navy radar operators would give us a magnetic heading to follow to get to our planned insertion point. We’d then paddle in close to shore, usually outside the surf line, and from there, swim in to the beach. The junks would wait for us offshore. If for some reason the junks got out of position, the destroyers could vector them back to our beach entry point for a pickup. The second thing the Navy did for us was on-call fire support. I would give them the map coordinates of several locations in and around the target area. Then if I needed fire support, I could have them shoot a predesignated set of coordinates and then adjust the fire from there to where I needed it. For the most part we worked well with the destroyers, and they had five-inch guns. It was like having a mobile, floating battery of 105mm howitzers. A five-inch/.38-caliber naval gun could send a fifty-five-pound projectile about nine miles or so and, depending on the ship, they could be very accurate. If it was a newer ship with five-inch/.54-caliber guns, it was a seventy-pound projectile, and they could accurately shoot up to eleven miles.

  “So ahead of this mission, I set up a navigation plan that had the destroyers picking us up at the mouth of the Thuan-An barrier inlet and tracking us north to the mouth of the Cua Viet. That would get us to a position due east of our insertion point and provide magnetic compass heading for us once we headed toward the shore in the IBSs. Once we were ashore, they were to stand by to seaward while we conducted the recon mission. At least that was how it was supposed to work.

  “Early on the afternoon of 30 October, I briefed Mike and a SEAL named Bill Woodruff with what we call a patrol order. A patrol order goes over the operation start to finish, from leaving the base—in this case the LDNN small boat harbor at Thuan-An—to the return to base. The patrol order is a formatted mission briefing that details the timeline, radio frequencies, support assets, the insertion and extraction plans, actions in the target area, emergency procedures, and all the like. Once aboard the junks, we would brief Lieutenant Thuan, and he would brief the other two LDNNs. Then Thuan and I would brief the junk captains. When we operated from junks, we always had a SEAL advisor aboard one of them. On this operation Bill Woodruff, or Woody as we called him, would be with the junks start to finish. Like all the LDNN enlisted advisors, Woody was a solid SEAL operator.

  “I recall asking him at the patrol order, ‘Are the boats ready to go?’

  “‘Yes, sir. They’re fueled and standing by pier side. The crews know we’ll be out for the night and that they’ll probably not get back until late morning—maybe tomorrow afternoon.’”

  The primary boat-support element for the LDNNs at Thuan-An was the Yabuta junk detachment. In addition to the more modern small-craft combatants in the South Vietnamese Navy there was the junk force. The junks, all told some 450 of them, came in various sizes and configurations, but the most numerous were the thirty-six-foot Yabuta-class junk. Some seventy of the Yabutas, including those at Thuan-An, were constructed of ferro-concrete—cement reinforced with steel mesh. These seven-ton concrete craft mounted a .30-caliber medium machine gun, a .50-caliber heavy machine gun, and a 60mm mortar. They were powered by a three-cylinder Grey Marine diesel engine, and while the concrete Yabutas were slow, about eight knots all out, they were remarkably seaworthy. The Yabutas and the junk force formed the backbone of the “Market Time” operations that sought to stop the movement of military supplies by boat from north to south du
ring the Vietnam War. Those detailed for maritime special operations supported both American and LDNN operations. My SEAL platoon in the lower Mekong Delta used the Yabutas on occasion for insertion and extraction. Junk force detachments usually had an American advisor aboard for most of the war, and operated in two- or three-craft detachments. At Thuan-An in 1972, there was no assigned American advisor for the Yabuta detachment.

  OVER THE BEACH

  “Most of our operations used the junks for insertion and extraction,” explained Bill Woodruff. “Sometimes they could get in close enough to the beach or into a river inlet so that the team to be inserted could jump over the side and wade ashore. They had a draft of only two feet. But they didn’t handle well in the surf. If there was a surf up, the guys would have to swim in to the beach, or if there was a need to be silent and have a lower profile going in, we’d use an IBS to paddle in and the team would beach the IBS or go over the side of the IBS and swim ashore. In the latter case there would be others in the rubber boat to paddle the IBS back out to the supporting junks.

  “The junks operated in twos or threes for mutual fire support, and if one broke down there was another to tow it back home. That happened more than once. Whenever we used the junks on an operation, one of us would remain with the junks to make sure they stayed on station and to act as a radio relay for the team ashore. Most of us would rather be ashore on the op, but we each took our turn staying back with the junks. The night of 30 October, when Tom and Mike went up north, I was with our two junks.”

  “We got under way sometime midafternoon and probably cleared the breakwater at Thuan-An a half hour later,” Mike recalled of the start of the operation. “We went well out to sea before turning north, probably four miles or so. The junk captains knew these waters pretty well. Even when we had Navy ships vectoring us to a point offshore where we would launch the IBSs, we still relied on the local knowledge of the junk skippers. Now that they knew where we wanted to go, they headed north, paralleling the shore toward the Cua Viet. The junks were always moving up and down the coast, so we passed pretty much unnoticed. It was close to a seven-hour transit this time, but it seemed longer. Again, the plan was for the junks to remain well offshore and we would close the beach in the IBSs. The IBSs would take us in just outside the surf line and we’d swim in the rest of the way.

  “Things began to go wrong just before we got ready to insert. One of the Navy ships that was supposed to be guiding the junks to a point off the Cua Viet got called away for a gunfire support mission farther south near Quang Tri City. So that left only one ship to guide us in, which is not as good as having two ships that could provide cross-vectors. But they got us to what they thought was the drop-off area, off the coast just south of the mouth of the Cua Viet River. At first, the junk skippers weren’t sure about this positioning. They knew the coast, but it was dark and we were several miles offshore. The shoreline was pretty much featureless. After some consultation, they agreed that we were off the Cua Viet. Unfortunately, that was not the case. We were off the coast and just south of a river mouth all right, but it was the Ben Hai River—a river just below the boundary between North and South Vietnam and the midpoint of the DMZ.”

  Tom, Mike, and Bill Woodruff all have similar recollections of thinking they were south of the mouth of the Cua Viet when they were actually at a seemingly identical location near the Ben Hai, some ten miles to the north. To this day it is unclear to them whether it was the U.S. Navy or the junk captains that caused the team to insert below the wrong river mouth. Given the navigation tools available in 1972, this was understandable. For the Navy, the radar paint for both locations was similar; for the junk captains, it was a very dark night. This narrator was able to inspect the deck logs of the ships tasked with supporting various phases of the operation, including those of the USS Morton (DD-948), the primary supporting vessel. These records indicate that they had indeed spotted the junks offshore and just south of the mouth of the Cua Viet River. But the reality was that this was not where they were.

  In retrospect, it seems inconceivable that they could have been that far off. In today’s special-operations and maritime-navigation world, with GPS trackers and satellite-phone technology, precision navigation is taken for granted. Yet the team was spotted offshore on the wrong beach. More than once I led SEAL operations where we inserted on the wrong place on a river or even the wrong river. It happened often back then, and it happened to Tom Norris and Mike Thornton on the evening of 30 October 1972. This error set in motion the events that would change the lives of these two Navy SEALs.

  In the reconstruction of this operation, the team had gone ashore just north of the southern boundary of the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam, and three miles south of the mouth of the Ben Hai River. This DMZ was established by the Geneva Conference of 1954 that officially ended the first Indo-China War and French influence in the region. This conference established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south—North and South Vietnam. The agreed boundary between the two was the 17th parallel, but in practice, this boundary followed the course of the Ben Hai River. The zone itself was five kilometers (about three miles) to either side of the Ben Hai River that ran from the South China Sea near the 17th parallel, west to the Laotian border. Throughout much of American involvement in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese militarily occupied the northern portion of the DMZ and often portions south of the 17th parallel.

  RECONNAISSANCE

  “Tactically, our insertion went pretty well,” says Mike of their approach to the shoreline. “The junks took us in to about four thousand yards off the beach, where we boarded the IBSs. There were five of us on the insertion team and four LDNNs who would paddle the IBSs back out to the junks. It took us close to an hour to work our way inshore. There was a three- to four-foot surf running. Just outside the surf line, we slipped into the water and swam ashore. Once on the beach, Tommy sent me up the beach gradient to the top of the berm to check things out. I waited a few minutes to make sure the coast was clear, then signaled the others to cross the beach. We all then moved about fifty yards into the beach scrub for better concealment. As I recall, it was about 2230—10:30 P.M. on the 30th. The tide was low, so there was about fifty yards of flat beach to cross.

  “I was carrying the starlight scope, a bulky first-generation night-vision device [designation AN/PVC-1] that allowed you to see relatively well at night. It was the size of a loaf of bread and weighed eight pounds. Tommy told me to scout the beach area to see if I could find any of the features we were looking for or expecting to find—like the mouth of a river. I went north about two hundred yards from our position, and the same distance to the south. And with the starlight scope, I could see a good ways up and down the beach. No river mouth and nothing looked familiar. Tommy moved inland just a short distance to look the area over with his binoculars. Neither of us saw anything that told us where we might be.”

  “We didn’t know where we were,” Tom said of their position on the beach, “but it just didn’t look like we were anywhere near the Cua Viet River or the Cua Viet Naval Base. At night on unfamiliar ground, it’s easy to be fooled. The river and the base facility could be just a few hundred yards farther into the bush. So now I had a decision to make. Do we call the junks and have them send the IBSs back in to extract us, and go looking for the right place to insert? Or do we patrol farther inland and look for some landmark to tell us where we were and perhaps the location of the Cua Viet Naval Base? I decided that we’d stay on the beach and conduct a reconnaissance patrol. We’d do what we could to avoid the enemy, and if we were lucky, we’d find the Cua Viet and that would lead us to the occupied naval base. And there was always the chance that we might come upon an enemy soldier we could capture and take back for interrogation. In retrospect, probably not my best decision in the field, but it was the one I made that night. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.

  “I know Mike didn’t agre
e with me,” Tom recalled of that fateful decision, “but it was my call and I made it. And Mike stood by me. When I said we’d continue on, he said, ‘Okay, let’s get ’er done.’ We were out to gather intelligence, and since it was late, I knew we would never be able to extract, determine our location, and reinsert at the right location in time to do the recon. We’d have to spend the day on the junks and try again the next night, or go home empty-handed. So I reasoned that we could check out this area and get back to the beach for pickup before first light.”

  “We set up in our standard patrol formation and moved inland,” Mike said. “We moved due west for about a mile. Tommy was on point, followed by Deng. Deng had the radio, so he would always be close to Tommy. Then came Lieutenant Thuan, Quan, and myself. When we were out with the LDNNs, we always tried to keep them between us—an advisor up front or with the guide if we had one, and one of us serving as rear security. The LDNNs were in their standard tiger-striped camouflage utilities and flop hats. They all carried M-16 rifles and maybe two hundred rounds of ammo and a few grenades. Up front, Tommy was in a cammie top, blue jeans, and a floppy hat that Kiet had given him. It had a bullet hole in it, and I think he wore it for luck. Tommy favored an AK-47 and carried his spare banana magazines on his chest in an NVA-type vest. He also had two LAAWs [light antiarmor weapons—rockets carried within disposable launching tubes] and his standard load of grenades and signaling devices. I was the mule. On a recon patrol, I carried a CAR-15 carbine and just over eight hundred rounds of 5.56 ammo, along with an assortment of a dozen fragmentation, CS [a type of tear gas], and smoke grenades. I also had three LAAWs and the starlight scope. All of us carried a medical kit and an inflatable UDT over-the-head life vest.

  “I also had our silenced weapon, a .22-caliber automatic pistol with a suppresser attached to the barrel. We called it a hush puppy. The hush puppy used downloaded, subsonic ammunition so there was no sonic crack when you fired it. It also had a slide lock to freeze the action of the weapon so no sound would escape from the ejection port. It was a very-close-range weapon. Even if you were close enough to hear it, it was hard to tell which direction the sound was coming from. But you had to get close to use it.”