By Honor Bound Read online

  “We were able to pass our operational certification in the spring of 1981,” said Dick Marcinko of his new unit. “Yet there were still a lot of issues that needed to be addressed, including our command relationships. Operationally, we reported to one chain of command, but we were still part of the Navy and assigned to Atlantic Surface Force Commander for administrative support. We had a lot of nonstandard equipment and we conducted nonstandard training, like traveling to third-world countries with irregular documentation. And we were not bound by the grooming standards that applied to the rest of the Navy. Yet, we were all still sailors, still in the United States Navy. We lived on or near Navy bases, used the Navy exchange, and our pay, benefits, and family services all came through the Navy. But my guys had beards and long hair. We got the reputation of looking like a bunch of hippies, and I guess we did. It’s what we wanted to look like, but it flew in the face of the regular Navy. We were controversial and probably more than a little cocky.”

  “Complaints about our appearance and conduct finally worked their way up to our Navy boss at SURFLANT [Commander, Surface Force, Atlantic Fleet],” recalled Norm Carley. “He called our operational boss, an Army two-star general, and told him that a personnel inspection of his Navy guys might be in order. So a unit inspection was scheduled. When the general arrived, the team was paraded in choker whites (formal white dress uniform). It was actually a comical site; all these tall, fit SEALs in formal attire with beards and long hair. When the general emerged from his car, Commander Marcinko, thinking ahead, had arranged for him to be met by Mike. Mike was to be his escort for the inspection. Well, the first thing the general noticed about Mike was the Medal of Honor that hung from his neck. He, of course, saluted Mike and Mike returned the gesture with a parade-ground salute of his own. This sort of set the tone for the general’s visit and the inspection proceeded from there.”

  “There are a great many stories that have been told about this special team,” Mike says with a chuckle, “and some of them are even true. Yet a good many of them are classified, and those are the ones you’ll not read about in this book. But when some of the old hands get together, we do talk about the way it was back then and you know, it seems like it was only yesterday.

  “Throughout my Navy career,” Mike continues, “I’ve always been blessed with great role models and mentors who helped me along and who looked out for me. When I was getting close to the end of my rotation at the new team, one of them suggested I consider becoming an officer and take my service career in another direction. I had just been advanced to senior chief petty officer, and my next move would have been back to one of the UDT or SEAL teams or off to recruiting duty. I was also looking for a change. For a guy like me who had no college degree there was but one choice if I was to join the officer ranks—limited-duty officer or LDO. The term ‘limited-duty’ can be misleading. It just means that as a commissioned officer, your duties are assigned within a designated specialty, like administration or logistics or engineering. So I put my papers in for the LDO program. There were no LDO billets in the SEAL Teams, but there were in the diving and salvage Navy. And as a salvage officer, it was a chance to do something different and a chance to get back into the water on more of a full-time basis. I was accepted into the program and in September of 1983, I got orders to ‘knife and fork school.’

  “Knife and fork school, or Limited-Duty Officer Training, was a five-week course at Pensacola, Florida, designed to help senior enlisted personnel make the transition from the enlisted ranks to the officer corps. It was mostly an administrative exercise with some classes on naval history, writing reports, procedures associated with officer duties, and writing enlisted evaluations. It was a good school, and I met a lot of other ‘mustangs,’ guys like me coming from the ranks and wanting to finish their Navy career as officers. At the end of the course, I was a brand-new ensign—an officer and a gentleman, so to speak—but I was still Mike Thornton. From there I went another sixty miles or so east along the Florida Panhandle to the Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City.

  “I was back in training—again. Diving and Salvage Officers School was a hard six-month school that was challenging and a lot of fun. I knew a lot of the master divers who were instructors there. Most of those in my class were new college graduates, fresh out of Officer Candidate School. All were naval officers, with one coast guard officer and one Army officer. The Navy trains salvage officers for all services. The only old goats in the class were myself and another mustang, an explosive ordnance disposal warrant officer. Since I was a SEAL and I’d had diving training during my basic SEAL training, the initial pool work and the physical training were not a problem for me. I helped the young officers in the pool and with PT, and they helped me when we got into the more advanced work with diving and treatment tables and the written work. There was one young female Navy ensign in the class, and she was my swim buddy. We worked well together and I helped her learn how to be a Navy diver.

  “I began the diving and salvage portion of my career back in Little Creek, Virginia, with orders to the Commander, Service Squadron Eight in the fall of 1984. This was the beginning of eight rewarding years as a Navy diving and salvage officer. Sure, I missed the SEAL teams and the rough camaraderie of the other SEAL operators, but this was a whole new challenge. The diving and salvage Navy is blue-collar work. Each job is a challenge, often an engineering challenge. Every day there was something new. Sometimes they’d call for divers for routine hull maintenance, but usually it’s because something is wrong—something got broken underwater and we’d get called in to assess the damage and figure out a way to fix it. It was great. And as an LDO, I was usually put in charge of the operation; I was not told how to do the job—just to get the job done. Those were orders I could follow: get the job done. There’s not a lot of posturing or bravado in the diving and salvage Navy, although there’s an esprit de corps in the Navy diving community. But for the most part, it’s a get-wet, get-dirty, and get-the-job-done business.

  “My first posting was as the officer-in-charge of the Second Class Dive School. Second class divers are basically open-circuit scuba divers trained to help with basic underwater ship husbandry and hull inspections. It’s the entry point for Navy divers and a starting place for more advanced Navy diving work. It was a lieutenant-commanders billet, and I filled it as a brand-new junior grade lieutenant. It was a good tour and I had some great instructors working for me. I did get into a little scrape when two of my students came in late one morning and were too hungover for morning physical training. When I told them to get changed and get ready for PT, one of them spit on me. So I grabbed one in each hand, cracked their heads together, and knocked them out. I thought my lead instructor was going to have a heart attack. This put an end to my students not showing up in the morning ready for PT, but it did earn me an office call with the Commander, Surface Force, Atlantic. He was understanding, but he also said I better never do that again.

  “In January 1986, I received orders to the USS Edenton (ATS-1). The Edenton was a British-built, 282-foot rescue and salvage tug. I had just made full lieutenant and was assigned as the ship’s first lieutenant and salvage officer. It was the first time I’d really been to sea since I was a young sailor aboard the USS Brister. Now I was an officer, had my own stateroom, and took my meals in the wardroom. I also had a lot of responsibility, as I had the deck force under me as well as the diving and salvage crew. The ship was home-ported in Norfolk. Shortly after I came aboard, we made a short cruise to the Caribbean for refresher training. Then a few weeks later, we left for a deployment cruise to the Mediterranean—all this within a month after I reported aboard. We were tasked with a lot of routine diving and underwater hull maintenance duties, but the one I remember best was an emergency diving job on the USS Mahan.”

  In the spring of 1986, tensions between the United States and Libya seemed to be coming to a head. June 1985 saw the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Libyan-sponsored terrorists. Then there was mi
litary confrontation between units of the Sixth Fleet in the Gulf of Sidra in March 1986. That incident resulted in the sinking of a Libyan corvette and a Libyan patrol boat, and the downing of two Libyan fighter jets. Several other Libyan surface craft were damaged along with shore-based missile batteries. Then a nightclub attack in West Berlin on 5 April that killed three and wounded 229 was found to have been carried out by Libyan agents. President Reagan ordered air strikes on Tripoli that targeted Libyan military infrastructure and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi himself. These air strikes, from aircraft flown from land bases in England and from U.S. aircraft carriers, were scheduled for 15 April. With this in mind, units of the Sixth Fleet steamed south toward the North African coast.

  One of the screening destroyers was the USS Mahan (DDG-42). The Mahan had just been equipped with the Terrier New Threat Upgrade Combat System and the extended-range RIM-67 Standard Missile. This made Mahan the most capable fleet air defense guided-missile destroyer in the U.S. Navy. Given the Libyan Air Force’s strike capability with their Soviet-equipped MiG-23s, the fleet commander wanted Mahan to be a part of his screening force. But the destroyer had just been damaged and was questionable for the planned attack on Libya.

  “It seems that the Mahan was making her way into a Mediterranean port,” Mike recalled, “and had scraped bottom, damaging both of her sonar domes. It was just a grounding in silt, but when we dove on her, we found both Mk 33 sonar domes were cracked. There was nothing wrong with her ability to shoot missiles, but she could not hunt submarines nor make more than a few knots without risking further damage to her sonars and her hull. So we went to work. I had only two days to get the destroyer ready for sea. We fabricated two bras of wire mesh and used come-alongs to hold them and the sonar domes in place while we moved the Mahan to another anchorage where we had crane services. Then I worked two crews of divers twenty-four hours a day to unbolt and remove the two domes. We then rigged them to the crane and swung them out and away from the hull. The sonar transducers were now exposed, but the ship was capable of making flank speed. She may not have been able to hunt subs, but she was able to rejoin the fleet in the Gulf of Sidra and provide fleet air defense for the attack on Lybia.

  “Without the Edenton and my salvage crews, the USS Mahan would not have made it in time to help protect the fleet. And that was just one job. We did a lot of others, but perhaps none as important as that one. Working aboard a Navy ship and managing my salvage crew was a distinct privilege for me. I learned a great deal, and it was challenging work. Every job was different and involved assessing the damage or the job and figuring out how to solve the problem with the resources at hand. It was highly rewarding. And the Edenton’s skipper and crew afforded me a singular honor, perhaps one unique in the U.S. Navy. When a senior officer boards a Navy ship, he is accorded the honor of being ‘bonged’ aboard when he arrives and again when he departs. The commanding officer of a ship, in this case the Edenton, a commander, was treated likewise. When he came aboard, his arrival was announced over the 1-MC [the ship’s loudspeaker system], ‘BONG-BONG—BONG-BONG, Edenton arriving,’ or ‘BONG-BONG—BONG-BONG, Edenton departing.’ When I came and went it was ‘BONG-BONG (just two bongs, as I was only a lieutenant), Medal of Honor arriving,’ or ‘BONG-BONG, Medal of Honor departing.’”

  * * *

  “In early 1989 I left Edenton for a Navy Construction Battalion in Norfolk—the renowned Navy Seabees. With the Seabees, I was assigned as the Bravo Company Commander, which meant I was responsible for all the barges, causeways, divers, and boats. I was also responsible for about four hundred sailors. To help with this, I had some very dedicated and talented Seabee chief petty officers. Their abilities called to mind the old Seabee saying from World War II in the Pacific: ‘We’ve done so much with so little for so long, we can now do anything with nothing.’ That applied to my senior enlisted leaders. It was good work and it was hard work—especially with the causeways. There were a lot of moving parts—literally—to maneuver causeways into place to move vehicles and supplies from ships offshore onto and across a landing beach. Again, this was not combat, but the troops ashore can do little without the supplies coming across the beach. So I got to the battalion and learned my job in time for the Gulf War, which began in August 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Oddly enough, my most challenging assignment with the Seabees was not getting supplies or material across the beach but another salvage operation.”

  On 2 August 1990, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, and on 8 August, Saddam Hussein pronounced the annexation of Kuwait. The stage was set for the Gulf War. A U.S.-led coalition began combat operations with an air-warfare campaign on 17 January 1991, with the ground forces crossing the Saudi Arabia–Kuwait border on 24 February. The liberation of Kuwait soon followed. During the preceding six months, a massive buildup of forces took place. It was unknown early on in the crisis whether men and materials were to be administratively disembarked in friendly Persian Gulf ports in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or Qatar, or if there was to be an opposed landing in Kuwait proper. It was a logistics exercise unprecedented since the Korean War. And it was the presence of American troops on Saudi soil, in the same region as the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, that prompted a Saudi expatriate named Osama bin-Laden to begin planning attacks on U.S. soil.

  Mike and a portion of his Seabee company were embarked in the USS Saginaw (LST-1188). It was part of a forty-plus-ship amphibious ready group making its way through the Suez Canal, to the Gulf of Aden and the northern Arabian Sea, up into the Persian Gulf. The Saginaw was one of a newer class of landing ships designed to handle causeways for the efficient unloading of troops and vehicles across the beach. One of the ships assisting in this flow of materials up through the Strait of Hormuz was the NSTS vessel the USNS Andrew J. Higgins (T-AO-190). The Higgins was a naval sea transport ship with a mixed crew of U.S. Navy sailors and merchant seamen. Named in honor of Andrew Higgins, whose landing crafts were key to the amphibious campaigns of World War II, the Higgins was a 677-foot fast fleet oiler carrying fuel oil, JP-5 aviation fuel, and refrigerated stores—material needed for the coming invasion and repatriation of Kuwait. En route, the big ship struck a reef off Oman, and was hard aground and leaking oil. The ready group commander, Rear Admiral John LaPlante, canvassed his scattered ships looking for a salvage officer and he found only one. It was Mike Thornton aboard the USS Saginaw.

  “Admiral LaPlante called on me personally to see if I could do something to get the Higgins off the reef and refloated without further damage. Myself and a master diver from one of the other ships dove on the Higgins and found two long gashes in the hull several hundred feet long. It was a double-hulled vessel. That, and the compartmentization in the ship’s design, prevented the ship from going down. We made some calculations and offloaded some of its fuel oil and JP-5 to lighten her up. Then I sent a message back to SUPSAL [the Navy’s superintendent of diving and salvage] regarding how much air pressure we could put in the void between the inner and outer hulls without causing further damage. Then we rigged air compressors on the deck of the Higgins and ran air lines down into the flooded spaces along the hull. Just before the next high tide, we began putting compressed air into the hull. At high tide, she began to float free and we managed to pull her off the reef.”

  One of the vessels assisting in getting the Higgins off the reef was the USS Portland (LSD-37). “We were on our way with everyone else to the Persian Gulf,” said Commander Mark Falkey, the captain of the Portland, “when we stopped to assist with the salvage of the Higgins. She was hard aground on an uncharted reef. There was a lieutenant diving and salvage officer, going from ship to ship borrowing boats and boatswain mates to get the Higgins off the reef. I saw him briefly and noticed that he wore a baby blue ribbon with five tiny stars on it, and thought, could it be? I later confirmed that the lieutenant was Mike Thornton. Small world? You bet. Close to twenty years ago in Vietnam, on 31 October 1972 to be exact, I was the junior officer of the deck on the USS Morton when we s
hot a naval gunfire support mission for some SEALs in hot water just south of the mouth of the Ben Hai River.”

  “Getting the Higgins off that reef was probably the highlight of my diving and salvage career,” Mike recalled. “And I wasn’t even in a salvage billet at the time. When we got her into Bahrain for repairs, Admiral LaPlante sought me out and personally thanked me for the job. The fuel and the stores aboard the Higgins got off-loaded and made it to the troops staging along the Saudi Arabia–Kuwait border a little late, but they got there. On board the USS Saginaw, we were standing offshore when the air war started and later on while the Army and Marines liberated Kuwait. I knew there were SEALs involved in the combat operations ashore, but I had no idea what they might be doing. So I waited out this war in the safety and comfort of an air-conditioned Navy LST. But if I’d had a choice, I’d have been ashore—a little overweight and a little out of shape, but I’d have still liked to have been a part of it. Later that summer, we began the long transit back home to Norfolk.”

  * * *

  “In 1992, I had a decision to make. For more than ten years, I’d been an operational Navy SEAL. And while I’d enjoyed great tours of duty as a diving and salvage officer, I’d been away from the teams now for close to ten years. The Navy doctor who gave me my annual diving physical just before I left the Saginaw said that I was cleared for shipboard duty but that he would not certify me for diving or parachuting. This made a return to the SEALs problematic, and a diving and salvage officer who couldn’t dive was a nonstarter, at least for me. And I had a terrific offer from a civilian company in Pittsburgh. So after some consideration, I decided that it was time to go. After more than twenty-three years in uniform, I put in my papers to retire from the United States Navy.”

  On 31 May 1992, Mike Thornton was retired from active duty at the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, Virginia, in a ceremony that was unprecedented for a Navy lieutenant. Many of Mike’s former commanding officers were there, including Dick Marcinko. Also attending were thirteen Medal of Honor recipients. Tom Norris was not among them. Tom, then a special agent with the FBI, was on a case and couldn’t break away. But Mike understood; the operational always takes precedence over the ceremonial. Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale, also a recipient, was the featured speaker. In such proceedings, the individual retiring is piped aboard the dais by his rank, “Lieutenant, United States Navy, arriving.” At the completion of the ceremony and speeches, he is piped off, “Civilian, departing.” During these comings and goings, the honoree is attended by side boys, a naval tradition from the days of sail. There were eight of them who lined up in two files to help get Mike “over the side.” Among the side boys of senior naval officers, master chief petty officers, and master divers were Captain Dick Flanagan and Captain Ryan McCombie.