By Honor Bound Page 17

  “After we got out of small-arms range of the beach, all we could do was swim. After a while, Tommy quit pestering me about whether we had everyone. Deng and Quan kept asking, ‘Mike, what do we do, what do we do?’ and each time I said, ‘We swim—we just keep swimming. We’ll swim south, all the way to Thuan-An if we have to.’ They were starting to give up and said, ‘But, Mike, what happens when we get tired?’ and I told them that when it got dark, we’d swim ashore and rest. But for now we keep swimming—that we were going to be all right. I was now towing both Quan and Tommy behind me, swimming a breaststroke so I could use my arms. I kept checking on Tommy, and it looked to me like he was going into shock. But all I could do was keep swimming. We were now well into the swells. The ships were well out to sea, and I could occasionally catch a glimpse of them when we rode over the crest of a swell. I wondered if anyone knew we were still alive. I wasn’t sure about the Navy, as they might give up or get called away for another fire mission, but I knew Woody would not stop looking for us. I just had to keep everyone together and keep us moving.”

  RECOVERY

  It is unclear just how long Mike, Tom, Deng, and Quan were actually in the water. A reconstruction of events has them entering the water sometime around 0830, and by 0900 they were out of small-arms gunfire range. The four were picked up by the junks around 1130. So they had been fighting on the beach for approximately three hours and in the water for about three hours. Yet nothing had been heard from them since a North Vietnamese bullet had silenced their radio at about 0750 that morning.

  “Before Tom’s radio went dark,” recalls Bill Woodruff, “he’d radioed his approximate location. My junk skipper had spoken with Deng on the radio, so he had a rough idea of where they were as well, and he was not happy about it. He knew it was a bad area with lots of NVA. So we moved up the coast and came in closer to shore. I had no option but to move inshore and look for them. My junk skippers certainly did not like being in that close. As we searched along the coast, I was getting a lot of calls from the Morton, as they were still putting in rounds ashore. I was between them and the beach and moving back and forth between them and where they were shooting. Naval gunfire protocols require that there be no friendlies on their gun target line in case there is a short round. But that’s where I had to be if these guys managed to get off the beach and into the water. The ship kept telling me to move away, and I kept telling them to shoot over me. We got into a little shouting match over the radio, but I had to stay where I was—just in case we could rescue them.

  “Then about 1030 or so we’re maybe a thousand yards or so off the beach, a lot closer than any of us liked to be in the daylight. We get a few RPGs shot at us, but we’re just out of range. Then we see this guy in the water. We maneuver over to pick him up and it’s the Vietnamese officer, Lieutenant Thuan. We get him aboard and he tells me that Lieutenant Norris was killed fighting the NVA, and that Mike Thornton went back to get him and never came back. He said he thought that the others, Quan and Deng, had followed him into the water, but he didn’t know where they were. Of course I’m wondering what the hell he’s doing here without his men, and how was it that he was the only one who escaped. He was clearly scared and babbling on, but I had no choice but to pass this information along to the Morton. I asked them to keep shooting; if there were any chance for them at all, those 5-inch rounds might provide the diversion they’d need to break contact. But it didn’t look good. I was in radio contact with my other junk and ordered them to keep moving ahead of us and to keep searching along the coast. No matter what the Vietnamese lieutenant said, we were not going to give up.”

  Word passed from the Morton to the Newport News that there was one American killed in action (KIA) and one American and two Vietnamese missing in action (MIA). Aboard the big cruiser, the admiral who was in charge of all NGFS activity off the coast of North and South Vietnam, the gun-line commander, ordered the Newport News south. With the uncertainty of the team ashore and the need for the heavy cruiser’s big 8-inch guns in support of the heavy fighting around Quang Tri City, it was a logical decision. The Newport News began to steam south, leaving the Morton to sort out the missing SEALs thought to still be ashore. Word of the death of Tom Norris and the MIA status of Mike Thornton was passed to Commodore Dave Schaible in Vung Tau and back to SEAL Teams One and Two stateside. It seemed as if one and likely two more SEALs had been killed in the decade-long Vietnam War.

  “I was between a rock and a hard place,” said Bill Woodruff of learning the fates of Tom and Mike. “We don’t leave our people behind or unaccounted for. My junk skippers wanted no part of getting any closer to shore and risking damage to their crafts. My duty was to try to get to the guys ashore, but how? And the four LDNNs that were aboard the other junk in my two-junk force were none too keen about going ashore. Had I ordered them to do so, they probably would have refused. Yet we never leave a teammate behind. So we continued to skirt the coast just out of small-arms range and look for swimmers. And God knows what I would do if we failed to locate them. It didn’t look good, and I was scared—really scared.”

  “It seemed like we were in the water forever, and I was exhausted,” Mike recalled of the ordeal. “When we were on the crest of a swell, I could see ships farther offshore, but I could only catch a glimpse of them now and then. Deng again asked me, ‘Mike, what are we going to do?’ and I said we’d just keep swimming—that the junks were sure to spot us. He says, ‘What if they don’t find us? What if they went back to Thuan-an?’ Both he and Quan were about at the end of their tether. The Navy ships were well out to sea, so our only friend on that big ocean was Bill Woodruff. I knew Woody would be looking for us. I knew he’d never leave us—not Woody.”

  “It was about 1130 and I saw the Newport News begin to move off to the south,” Bill Woodruff remembered. “Then my junk skipper got a call from the other junk that was off to the north and slightly inshore from us. We were about a half mile apart so as to better search the area. They said they had swimmers in the water and were going to get them. You can’t know what that meant. Now it remained how many and in what condition.”

  “I saw the one junk and Deng and I began yelling and waving,” said Mike, “but they had spotted us and were already headed our way. But we still kept yelling and waving. Tommy was out cold and Quan just held on, fighting the pain. It seemed like it took them forever, then they were alongside and I was looking up into the faces of the junk crew and the other LDNNs. They hauled up Deng and Quan, and then I helped them to pass Tommy up and over the side. You could see by their faces that they thought he was dead. At that point, I wasn’t sure myself. But he was still breathing. As I got on the radio to call Woody, I saw that the cruiser was headed south. I didn’t know much about ships, but I knew that cruisers carried a doctor aboard and the destroyers didn’t. And Tommy needed a doctor. I told Woody to call that cruiser and get them turned around, that Tommy was alive but he wouldn’t be much longer without medical help. Woody got the Newport News turned around and headed back our way. We headed out to sea to meet them. Tommy was in a bad way, but he was still hanging in there. By now the other junk was chugging alongside us, and I could see Woody, radio handset in hand, smiling and waving. What a sight he was! Quan was bleeding and in a lot of pain and Deng was hurt, but he was a tough kid. I just hoped we could get Tommy aboard the cruiser in time.”

  “That cruiser was a big ship,” Bill Woodruff recalled. “You know it’s big when you see just how much bigger it is than the destroyers. But when you come alongside her in a thirty-six-foot Yabuta junk, I mean it’s really big. We came alongside the port quarter, back by the number-three turret. She was still headed north, making bare steerageway, perhaps a knot and a half. Once alongside you don’t see the ship anymore, just a big gray metal wall that’s about fifteen feet high. Both junks were alongside together and they put a Jacobs ladder over to each one. Deng and Lieutenant Thuan scrambled up first, Deng from the other junk and Thuan from the junk I was on. But
it took some doing to get Quan and Tommy up to the deck. A line with a loop was lowered for Quan and he was pulled aboard. For Tommy it was a Stokes litter that was hoisted up to the main deck, sailors lifting from above while Mike and the other junk crew tended the trailing lines to steady the litter. I just got a glimpse of Tommy, and I could see even from a distance that he was in a bad way. Once the team and myself were aboard the Newport News, the junks cast off. The junk skippers were anxious to get back to Thuan-An, and their mission here was done.

  “There was great relief up the chain of command that all of the team had been recovered, even if the life of Tom Norris still hung in the balance. And no one was more relieved than I was. If they’d not made it out, I’d like to think that I would have had the courage to go back for them. Maybe I could go up the coast a ways, then insert after darkness and try to recover them. It would have been more than dangerous, maybe even a suicidal mission. But that’s what we SEALs do, we go back. And I was right there, right offshore, but thanks to Mike Thornton, I never had to make that call. I give thanks to Mike every day that he did what he did, and I never had to face that decision. When you look at it, with the information Mike had, he made an illogical decision. It was a brave decision, but given the facts at hand, maybe a foolish one. But he did what heroes do, and I didn’t have to face the what-might-have-been. Thanks, Mike.”

  Bill Woodruff completed his tour of duty as an LDNN advisor and rotated back to SEAL Team One, one of the last SEALs to leave Vietnam. After his enlistment was up, he completed his college degree and returned to the SEAL teams as an officer; he served there for another twenty years. After leaving active service, he completed his law degree and is now an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia.

  TRIAGE

  “I was a first class corpsman on the USS Newport News when we got the call in sick bay that there were wounded coming aboard,” recalled Chuck Zendner. “We had a crack medical department on the ship, with a great deal of experience. Don’t forget, it was exactly a month earlier we suffered that turret explosion. We put twenty shipmates in body bags and treated sixty-two wounded sailors. Prior to that we’d been on the gun line on and off for seven months. There were fourteen of us including our physician, Lieutenant Greg Fulchiero. He always ensured that we knew exactly what to do in any emergency and under any conditions. And he was a great doctor. If we needed a head doctor, he was a head doctor—or a bone doctor or a surgeon or whatever. So the five SEALs who came aboard needing medical attention was a walk in the park for us.”

  Dr. Gregory Fulchiero graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 and from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital in 1970. After completing an internship at Allentown General Hospital, he came on active duty in the Navy in 1971. Like so many general medical officers, or GMOs, he was plucked out of residency and served as a general practitioner aboard ship or at a shore facility. Following his service on Newport News, he completed his orthopedic residency in 1977. After a thirty-year career in orthopedics in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Dr. Fulchiero passed away in July 2012.

  “When they came aboard, they were a pretty scruffy lot,” Zendner continued. “My job in handling casualties was triage. I saw them first, evaluated them, and sent them on to a senior medical person, corpsman or doctor, for treatment. I remember seeing this one American, and I couldn’t believe his head wound. His forehead was simply blown away. I had two thoughts: one, it was a good thing he was in saltwater or he’d have bled to death. My second thought was, this man will not be alive in the morning. He went straight to Dr. Fulchiero, who was waiting for him in surgery. There was this big guy who was with him, and he carried him from the fantail to sick bay. We had to force him to let go so we could treat him. He wanted to go in to surgery to be with him.”

  “When we finally got up on the deck of the Newport News,” Mike recalled, “I was pretty amped up and wanted them to take care of Tommy right away. I think they figured that he was a goner and that with that head wound, he would never make it. They wanted to check me over and check the others over and I told them flat out: Tommy comes first; the rest of us can wait. I carried him straight into sick bay and the doctor went to work on him.”

  “Then we started checking the other four,” said Corpsman Zendner. “One of the Vietnamese was sitting in a pool of blood and we got right on him. He had a nasty bullet wound in his buttocks. Another was uninjured, and the third Vietnamese had only some shrapnel lodged in his back, which was an easy fix. We treated them, cleaned them up, and got them into bed. While we were treating the Vietnamese SEALs, I kept my eye on the big American. I finally got him to sit down so we could look him over. I saw blood on his pant leg and when I cut into his trouser leg, I saw a bullet hole in his leg. My eyes got big and I called another corpsman over to look at it. I said that we’d better treat that and the SEAL said something like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ He just didn’t seem to care. But he did care about the others and kept asking about them, especially his lieutenant. We knew he was a lieutenant because the other big American SEAL said he was. He had no rank insignia on him.”

  “After they initially treated my leg,” said Mike, “I got word that Captain Zartman, the skipper of the Newport News, wanted to see me in the captain’s quarters to brief him and the admiral, the guy who was the gun-line commander. I went up, and I don’t know what they expected, but I was a mess—wet, dirty, still running on adrenaline, and dripping all over the captain’s nice rug. They looked at me like I was from another planet, which in a way I was. I told them what had happened as best I could, and they called a corpsman to take me back to sick bay. Tommy was in surgery for close to two hours. They got him stabilized and some IV fluids in him, and heloed him off to the medical facility at Da Nang. I stayed behind with the LDNNs to see that they were taken care of. Lieutenant Thuan had almost gotten us all killed, and I don’t think he ever fired a round the whole time. Deng and Quan fought well start to finish. None of us would have made it without their courage and loyalty. They were just great fighters.”

  “With the junks on their way back to Thuan-An, I was left on the cruiser,” recalled Bill Woodruff. “I waited for Tommy to get through what little they could do for him aboard the big ship and boarded the helo with him for the trip to Da Nang. He had a bandage around his forehead and eye, but nothing across the rent in his skull. You could see his brain. He was fading in and out on the hour flight to Da Nang, and we had to shout over the sound of the turbines. When he was conscious, he was coherent. I think he was more tired than in pain, at least that’s what he said. After all, he’d been up for about thirty-six hours. And I tell you, it was really strange talking to someone who’d just been through what he’d been through, and the fact that you could clearly see his brain.”

  “We spent the night on the cruiser in their sick bay ward,” Mike said of his stay on the ship. “I sat up with Quan for a while. He said, ‘Mike, whenever I go out with you, we get into trouble.’ I told him, ‘I guess that’s true, but I always get you back home, don’t I?’ The next day we were standing off Thuan-An on the Newport News. They sent a junk out for us and by late afternoon of November 1, we were all back at the LDNN base—all but Tommy.”

  “We left the gun line late that November and headed home,” said Chuck Zendner. “The turret explosion and the loss of our shipmates was still foremost in our minds. But I still never forgot those SEALs—the lieutenant with that terrible head wound and the big SEAL who was hovering over him.”

  AFTERMATH

  Word that Tom, Mike, and the LDNNs had been overrun and were KIA or MIA reached the SEALs at Vung Tau, Thuan-An, and the stateside SEAL teams. This narrator recalls those incoming overseas messages when I was at SEAL Team One, priority messages saying that a platoon or a team in the field had been hit. They were dreaded communiqués. I even sent a few of those messages while on deployment. Sad business. At Thuan-An, Ryan McCombie was mustering the other SEAL advisors and LDNNs for a recovery effort. It’s with a great sadness
and sense of purpose that a team has to kit up and get ready to go out to try and recover a team that’s been hit. I’ve done that as well. It’s dangerous, gut-wrenching duty. Imagine the relief that McCombie and the other SEALs at Thuan-An felt when they learned that all five were safe and on board the Newport News.

  As for Tom Norris, his medial odyssey was just beginning. There was little that could be done for him on the Newport News—or even in Da Nang, for that matter. He needed the attention of a neurosurgeon and there were none at Da Nang or anywhere else in Vietnam. The closest physician with this specialty was at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Tom was ferried by helo from the Newport News to the medical facility at Da Nang late in the afternoon of the 31st. A casualty-evacuation aircraft, a C-141, was laid on to fly him to Clark Air Force Base the next day, if he made it through the night.

  “I managed to get down to Da Nang just a few hours after Tommy got there,” said Ryan McCombie. “There was not a lot they could do for him other than keep him quiet and keep him pumped with fluids and pain meds. They periodically chased me out of the ward where they were treating him so they could irrigate his head wound and what was left of his left eye. But he was not allowed to go to sleep. The doctors said that with a head wound like that, if he went to sleep, he would likely slip into a coma and not wake up. So I sat up with him all night, talking to him. It was kind of distracting, talking with someone whose brain you could see. He would fade in and out, and he said he was not in any pain. Yet with Tommy, you never knew. He could be very stoic and not admit that he was hurting. But he was tired—and no wonder. By the next morning, the morning of 1 November, he’d been awake or mostly awake for forty-eight hours. And he was for the most part coherent. I tried to kid him, saying that when they operated on him, this was his chance to improve his looks. I even offered to go along so they could use me as a model—then maybe half of him would be good-looking.