By Honor Bound Read online

  “Meanwhile, when Deng wasn’t shooting, he was interrogating our captive inside the bunker. He’d finally regained consciousness, and we had him tied up securely. I gave Deng our map and told him, ‘Have this guy point out where we are.’ The guy didn’t really want to talk, but Deng can be persuasive when he needs to be. Finally the guy points to where we were—on the coast just south of the mouth of the Ben Hai River. At first I didn’t believe him and told Deng to ask him again. Same thing: near the mouth of the Ben Hai. We didn’t have exact coordinates, but I now knew where we were. And then it all made sense—the permanent bunkers, my inability to talk to the ships at sea, and why we couldn’t see the spotting rounds. We were just too far north! I immediately raised Woody on the radio and told him where we thought we were. Then Deng got on the radio and told the junk skippers where we were. Now it was a race. Could those ships get support fire up to our location before the NVA got to us? Thank God we had Bill Woodruff on the junks relaying our new location out to the gunfire support ships.”

  Bill Woodruff recalls the events of around dawn on 31 October: “When those ships began putting in spotting rounds on predetermined locations south of the Cua Viet, where the team was supposed to be, and Tom didn’t see them, I knew we had a problem. Then when Tom called and said he thought they were just south of the Ben Hai, it all fell into place. That was the big ‘aha moment’ for me. I radioed the ships, specifically the Morton, that the team ashore were south of the Ben Hai River and not south of the Cua Viet. Not being sure just where they were, I asked the Morton to begin walking spotting rounds up the coast. I knew Tom and Mike were in serious trouble. Tom is a very cool customer, yet I could tell over the radio that he was both frustrated and anxious. But again, he was very cool about it. I told the junk skippers to close the coast a little to see if we could see anything. They didn’t like getting close to shore in the daylight, but we moved in a little closer.”

  “We continued to shoot, move, and give ground,” Mike said of the fight ashore, “and they kept coming. But we killed a lot of them. We’d been engaged for close to two hours, and now Quan and I were back to within about twenty-five yards of the bunker. I was well down through half my ammo and was starting to wonder how much longer we could keep this up. Then this grenade comes sailing over the dune I was using for cover—it was one of those Chicom [Chinese communist] grenades that are chemically timed and can take as long as ten seconds or so to go off. Well, I grab it and toss it back at them. I was thinking that I had the better of the exchange when the same grenade comes sailing back at me. It landed less than a dozen feet from me, and I knew there was no time to throw it back. I rolled into a ball with my back to it and it went off. The sand absorbed most of the blast, but I took some shrapnel. Later on, they dug six pieces out of me. I yelled like I was hurt, which I guess I was, and then waited. Less than a minute later, four of them came charging over the dune. But I was still in the fight and I had a fresh magazine in place. As they ran at me, I shot all four of them.”

  “I heard the grenade go off and I heard Mike yell,” Norris said of the exchange. “Then I heard the pop-pop-pop of Mike’s CAR. I yelled, ‘Mike, are you all right?’ and he yelled back, ‘I just got four more. That makes thirty-one. How many you got?’ That was Mike Thornton. Keeping score in the middle of a firefight. But he had killed a lot of them—all of us had. And these last ones that Mike shot seemed to have taken the fight out of the rest. Those still alive pulled back and we had a break in the fighting.

  “I now had intermittent radio contact with the ships. It seemed that I was talking with one ship, and after a lengthy exchange, telling them where I was—telling them our general location—that guy would go off the net. Then someone else would come up on the net and I’d have to go through the whole setup again. Finally I got one guy (which turned out to be the USS Morton) who stayed with me. But even he would fade in and out. As it turned out, the ships were coming up the coast and we were talking at the extreme range of the PRC-77. At that moment in time, I was starting to relax a little. We had a good defensive position, and the NVA who attacked us from the encampment across the stream seemed to have had enough of the fight. We had a captured enemy soldier and help was on the way. I’d been worried about that tank, but it didn’t move—maybe it couldn’t move. Mike was hurt, but I knew Mike. He’d fight right through it. As soon as I could get some naval gunfire in the area to cover us, we could try for a daylight extraction. But it was too good to last. Mike, who was keeping an eye on things with my binoculars while I was on the radio, said, ‘Hey, Nasty, I think we might have a problem.’”

  “Several trucks pulled up right across the shallow lagoon from us,” Mike said. “They were maybe a half mile away from us, but in the early-morning light we could see NVA soldiers spilling out of the truck beds. I stopped counting them when I got to seventy-five. They quickly fell into ranks and began to deploy. Some of them went north to work their way around the north end of the lagoon and others went south, moving past the tank and heading for the creek bed and the south end of the lagoon. It looked like they were going to be coming at us from two directions. Our dune and bunker had served us well in our earlier skirmish, but there were a lot of smaller dunes to the south that would afford cover for a force attacking from that direction—the same dunes that Quan and I had used as we fought our way back to the bunker. Unless we got some help or moved, we were sure to be overrun by this new larger force.

  “In the daylight we could see a single large dune about four or five hundred yards to the north. It was by itself with no smaller dunes around it to provide cover for an attacking force. It looked to be a better fighting position than where we were at the moment—one that might be easier to hold. The bad guys would have to come across close to a quarter mile of open sand to get to us. Tommy decided we’d try for it, and I agreed.”

  “Normally when we conduct fire and maneuver, we leapfrog with two elements, one moving and one covering,” Tom said of the plan to relocate to the more defensible dune. “And we normally move short distances depending on the available cover. But there was nothing between the two dunes but open ground. So I told Mike to take Quan and Lieutenant Thuan to make for the dune to our north. Deng and I would cover them while they moved. And I was still on the radio trying to get some spotting rounds into the area so I could adjust fire onto the bad guys. Mike, Quan, and Lieutenant Thuan took off, but it looked like the NVA would get to Deng and me before Mike and the other two got to the next big dune. There were just a lot of bad guys swarming up through the dunes trying to get to us. Deng was shooting and I was talking when a white phosphorous round dropped right in the middle of the enemy soldiers working their way toward us. After all the frustration of trying to get naval gunfire to us, this round dropped right where I needed it.”

  THE DESPERATE HOURS

  In helping Tom and Mike tell this story, I found that the events that took place just after the team made contact with the enemy and their dramatic escape out to sea proved to be the most difficult to reconstruct. Stephen Ambrose, one of our most prolific chroniclers of war, once said that two men fighting side by side in the same engagement will invariably provide two totally different versions of what took place. Their accounts might lead one to believe they had been on two different battlefields, in two different wars. So it was with a patchwork of interviews of those in the fight ashore and those supporting that fight offshore that this story unfolds.

  Prior to their killing of the second NVA soldier, Tom and Mike had been working together in close proximity. Once the shooting started, they still worked together, but, for much of the time, in two separate maneuvering elements. They had different responsibilities: Mike was focused on security and fighting off the NVA attacks. Tom was on the radio, which was their lifeline for support and escape. So their perspectives on what took place differ. For much of the time, they were fighting two different engagements. And close combat can both accelerate and distort time frames; it tends to alter the fo
cus of those involved. They no longer have the luxury or the time to step back and see the big picture. When the bullets are flying, there tends to be a tunnel-vision view of events and a constant shifting of priorities. And these events took place more than four decades ago.

  The supporting elements, while in little or no danger, felt the pressure of trying to sort through the unknowns and ambiguities so they could help the beleaguered team ashore. Bill Woodruff, on the junks, could only wait offshore from the insertion point, monitor and relay radio traffic, and be prepared to move inshore to retrieve the team if they could fight their way off the beach. And after Tom’s radio went silent, it fell to Woody to try to anticipate the movements of the team ashore and to guess what their fire-support requirements might be. And how he could position his two junks to pick them up if by some miracle they did manage to get into the water? The Navy ships offshore knew there was a team ashore, and after dawn on 31 October, they knew they were in trouble. Yet they could do little unless they had the exact location of the team and/or the NVA elements in close proximity. Initially, they had neither. Damage from friendly fire was on everyone’s mind—certainly for the plotting and fire-control teams aboard the ships offshore. It seemed that the fog of war that accompanied the insertion of the team in the wrong location had now descended on them as they tried to break contact with an aggressive and persistent enemy. No one, including Tom and Mike, knew their precise location. Yet as the day wore on, it became increasingly clear that if they did not get some help in the way of fire support, they were not going to make it. With this in mind, it might be helpful to take a closer look at the ships that were the key vessels supporting the team ashore and that participated in the recovery. Then let’s take a few minutes for a brief primer on naval gunfire support—NGFS.

  There were just the two ships: the USS Newport News and USS Morton. They were part of a flotilla of U.S. Navy ships patrolling the South China Sea and supporting mainly South Vietnamese Army operations ashore. The admiral in charge of this flotilla, called the gun-line commander, was embarked in Newport News. It is believed that the USS Newport News responded to a call-fire mission near Quang Tri City the previous evening and did not get back on station and up to the DMZ until the daylight hours of 31 October. The Newport News had recently suffered a serious gunnery incident. On 1 October they sustained an in-barrel explosion on the middle barrel of turret number two. The explosion of the 260-pound projectile set off seven hundred pounds of powder, causing a devastating flash fire. Twenty sailors were killed and sixty-two wounded. As a precaution, the captain flooded her magazines. The ship immediately made for the U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay in the Philippines for repairs. She was back on the gun line scarcely three weeks later, but with only the six 8-inch guns in turrets one and three still functioning. The Newport News also had a secondary battery of twelve 5-inch/.38-caliber guns in six twin mounts. Even in this crippled condition, she was still the most potent force on the gun line. Yet the Newport News fired no rounds in support of the SEALs ashore. The deck logs of the big cruiser confirm that she took no part in the gunfire support that day.

  The USS Morton was a modified Forrest Sherman–class destroyer with two 5-inch/.54-caliber gun mounts, and was the primary NGFS ship supporting the SEALs. Most nights, the NGFS ships were assigned targets and fire missions in support of the fighting ashore. On the night of 30 October, the Morton was relieved of all such duties. She was standing by for on-call fire missions for the team ashore.

  Both ships were manned by veteran crews, and a great many of the officers and enlisted sailors serving in these ships were on their second and third gun-line rotations. This experience was especially evident in all the stations that supported the NGFS mission. On the Newport News, their expertise extended to the fourteen-man medical department, which had been severely tested during the explosion in turret number two just a few weeks earlier.

  Naval gunfire from a seasoned ship like the Morton can be very accurate. Most naval gunfire missions fall into two categories. The first entails shooting to a set of targeted grid coordinates ashore, as with a harassment and interdiction mission. The second category involves getting a spotting round into an area near the target so a spotter, on the ground or airborne, can adjust the rounds onto the target. For both, precise and continuous navigation is required. Adjusting the fall of shot is a matter of trigonometrics. The spotter looks for the “splash” of the spotting round, usually white phosphorous or “Willy Pete” projectile. From his position, a spotter on the ground calls in the adjustments, left or right—add or drop (long or short)—so many hundreds of yards. If the call-fire mission is in mountainous terrain, the adjustments can be up or down. Aboard ship, the gunfire support team has to know only the location of the spotter and the gun orders of the last shot fired. Then with a simple device called a grid spot converter that looks like a circular slide rule, a conversion is made from the spotter’s reference to the target, and to the ship’s range and bearing to the splash of the last round. Then adjustments are made to the fire-control solution, and new gun orders are issued. This process also has to be adjusted for the course and speed of the ship. In this case, the Morton was steaming north at ten knots. It wasn’t that she couldn’t move faster, but a higher speed would hamper precise radar navigation and degrade accuracy.

  Today, support platforms are afforded the luxury of GPS accuracy in both navigation and on-demand, precision-guided weapons. Back in 1972, the delivery of ordnance in close proximity to friendly troops required teams of well-trained and highly skilled professionals.

  “Early on, I didn’t know just where the guys on the beach were,” said Bill Woodruff of the kinetic events that began just after dawn on the 31st, “and neither did they. But I knew they were in trouble. Tom was looking for naval gunfire, and I was relaying his request to the ships. They were coming up from the south, moving from the area off the Cua Viet toward the mouth of the Ben Hai. The ships were using alphanumeric call signs that changed often, so I really didn’t know what ship I was talking to. As they worked their way north, I kept calling for spotting rounds along the beach. The ships complied, but no one saw anything. As dawn became daylight, I could tell from Tom’s voice on the radio that their situation was going from bad to worse.”

  “Some of this new group of NVA soldiers moved off to the north, moving along the west side of the lagoon,” Tom recalled, “and a good many came south around the southern tip of the lagoon to where Deng and I were pinned down in the bunker. They were my immediate concern. There was just no way the two of us were going to be able to hold them. My plan was for us to keep them at bay while Mike and the others got to the second dune. Then Deng and I would make a run for it while Mike covered us. I don’t know how many of them there were, but there were a lot. As they moved on our position, they had to be tripping over the bodies of their buddies we’d killed in the previous firefight. I’m sure that made them mad, but I also hoped it would make them a little more cautious. And about then, I really needed some gunfire support.”

  Aboard the USS Morton, Lieutenant (junior grade) Ed Moore had just come on watch to relieve the gunnery liaison officer, or GLO. “I walked into CIC around 0700 and immediately noticed that the CIC [combat information center] NGFS team was much more relaxed than normal, sitting around and chatting among themselves. Since I was the CIC division officer, I was used to seeing them busy, shooting a current mission or preparing for the next NGFS mission. Something was up. I began the relieving process with a briefing by Lieutenant (JG) Jack Johnson. Jack was the Morton’s communications officer and a Naval Academy classmate. Jack said we were assigned a special mission to support a Navy SEAL operation in case they needed gunfire support for their assigned mission and for their extraction. We had been exempted from all other gunfire support duties during this operation. He showed me where the planned extraction point was plotted on our NGFS chart laid out in CIC. He also mentioned that it was believed the SEALs were inserted north of that point, and it was
uncertain at that time exactly where they were located. It seemed strange at the time that we would not know where a team of SEALs had been inserted, but I didn’t question it. That was the situation when I relieved the watch. We had been assigned an NGFS frequency to monitor in case they needed Morton to provide gunfire support.

  “The navigation and NGFS plotting teams had all done their job,” Moore recalled, “so the ship had a good fix on its location and we were ready to shoot once we had a target. The captain has the final say on when to fire; our batteries were released only on his authority. With all our navigation and fire control systems set, we could obtain his release of the guns very quickly. This was a very seasoned and proficient group of sailors aboard Morton, and they knew their jobs. We were just waiting to hear from the team of SEALs ashore.

  “Shortly after I relieved as the GLO, 0720 or so, we got a call on the assigned VHF radio frequency asking for gunfire support. We were used to receiving fire missions in a very specific format that followed a preset dialogue as followed by both spotters ashore and NGFS personnel aboard ship. It was obvious that this call was not going to follow that procedure, and that the SEALs ashore needed immediate gunfire support. I asked my sailor on the radio for their grid location, and he asked them. The response was that they did not have a grid location but were on the beach somewhere south of the Ben Hai River. Our only option was to fire spotting rounds in their vicinity, and hope they would spot one and then direct our fire from that point.” In anticipation of this fire mission, the Morton then began to reshuffle its ammunition—Willy Pete or spotting rounds in their after mount and high explosives in their forward mount.