By Honor Bound Page 22

  “I was astounded at the turnout,” said Mike of his final day in uniform. “There were 150 invited guests, but at least three times that many showed up—from the base, from the East Coast teams, from my last SEAL team. There was a contingent of sailors from the Seabees and from the USS Edenton. I was honored, I was blessed, and I was very humbled. In my mind’s eye, I can remember every detail of that day. It was truly overwhelming.”

  At the time, Mike Thornton was the only Medal of Honor recipient on active duty.

  TOM NORRIS—AFTER VIETNAM

  “From the time I got back in late 1972 through 1977, I was either in the hospital, just out of the hospital, or getting ready to go back into the hospital for another operation. It was not a lot of fun, and it was very frustrating. I’m a doer, and I wanted to get on with my life. But about every six months, I’d be back to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for another operation. Toward the end of that period, in 1975 and 1976, they were minor, reconstructive-type operations, but still time in the hospital. And there were the headaches. They would come and go, but sometimes when they came, they could bring me down to my knees. I’ve known some pain in my life, but nothing prepared me for those headaches. It took several years for them to recede to the point that I could deal with them. I still get them now and then, but they’re manageable. But those first couple of years, it was a struggle.

  “My memory was not all that great at first. The doctors said it may or may not get better with time. Fortunately, it did. It took about a year and a half for it to fully return, or as near as I could perceive that it was fully returned. And there was the issue of the eye. I had to get used to the depth perception issues of having only one eye, and then there was the getting used to the prosthetic eye. It was a period of adjustment and it took time. To get physically stronger, I could go to the gym and work out—I could be proactive in my recovery. But with the injury and the eye, it just took time. And through much of all this, I still hoped to be allowed to stay in the Navy—and to remain with the SEAL teams.

  “The concern was just how much I could recover physically and get past the headaches. For duty in the teams, I needed to be able to dive and to perform other tasks, like shooting and parachuting. It seemed that after each operation, I’d get a little better, but recovering from the brain and reconstructive surgeries was a challenge unto itself. In the end, it just wasn’t in the cards. I’d lost a portion of the left side of my brain, and the Navy found that unacceptable for continued military service. I really did want to stay in uniform, but this was during the drawdown after Vietnam, and the separation boards were looking for ways to reduce the size of the military. So I was medically retired in April 1975. I was no longer on active duty, but the reconstruction on my head and around my eye continued. I really didn’t want to leave the Navy, but I had no choice. I had to move on. The Navy put my disability at 80 percent and the Veterans Administration at 90 percent. I was retired with 75 percent pay.”

  A good many of us who spent time with Tommy during this in-and-out-of-the-hospital period knew little of his ordeal. Maybe a little of his frustration, but none of his pain. He kept that to himself. During much of this time, he seemed to be on a pilgrimage to help others. When not at home with his parents in Silver Spring, Maryland, he made extended visits with friends.

  “Tommy spent several two- or three-month stays with us,” Ryan McCombie said. “My wife and I were living in Virginia Beach, and we had a new baby. Tommy was the perfect house guest. But he was like a gun dog or a herding dog in that you had to keep him busy. He was always looking for projects around the house. And he was very precise about things. One weekend, he was helping me to install some chair railing in our dining room. The rule is that you measure twice and cut once. With Tommy, you measure twice, talk about it, measure again, recheck the level, talk some more, measure a final time, then cut and install. I remember when he built a deck at his folks’ home in Silver Spring. He laid and nailed the whole deck, but was then dissatisfied with the nail heads showing. So he took up the deck, took out the nails, and relaid boards with countersunk screws. He didn’t care about the time involved; he just wanted it right.”

  Many of us have our Tom Norris carpentry stories. He was helping me with a remodel project and we were framing in a wall. I noticed that he was bending more than his share of nails and occasionally banging his fingers. Half his fingernails had blood under them. When I kidded him about it, he said, “You try pounding a nail with one eye.” So I did and the kidding stopped.

  “When I was finally medically retired from the Navy I had to think about what I wanted to do and what I would be allowed to do. If I couldn’t be a naval officer or a SEAL, then I’d try to be a federal agent. So I began the application process with those agencies—FBI, CIA, the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA], Secret Service, and so on. But they all seemed to have physical restrictions that left me out. Of course, there were waiver processes, but none of that seemed to get me very far. My first choice was the DEA, as I had this thing about illegal drugs and wanted to join the fight against them. But the DEA, more than the other agencies, was pretty cool to any kind of a waiver for what they thought of as my disabilities. Heck, with the exception of the headaches, which I knew I could manage, I thought I was good to go. By this time I had been presented with the Medal, but that didn’t seem to matter. Then I got an idea and called an old SEAL buddy—Sandy Prouty.”

  “I’d first met Tommy back in 1970,” said Charles “Sandy” Prouty. In the teams and at the Naval Academy, he was known as Sandy (he and your narrator were classmates at Annapolis). At the FBI, he became Charles or Charlie. “We were both platoon officers and we both happened to be at Subic Bay in the Philippines, taking a break from combat operations in Vietnam. We were at a bar out in town when this fight broke out between some of my SEALs and some sailors from of one of the ships in port. Well, one of my guys, who hadn’t a clue who Tommy was, grabbed him and was getting ready to punch him out. I stopped my guy and told him who it was he was about to hit. He said, ‘Sorry about that, sir,’ and returned to the fight. After that, the next time I saw Tommy was when he relieved me at MACVSOG in Saigon.

  “I saw Tommy again briefly while he was undergoing treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I was then with Underwater Demolition Team 21 in Little Creek, just before I left active service. I joined the FBI in 1973 and was assigned to the Alexandria field office when Tommy called and said he was thinking about becoming a federal agent.”

  “Sandy was really great to me,” said Tom. “He had me come down to his office and introduced me around to all the other agents. This was in 1977. He took the time to show me what he did and how a bureau agent goes about his job. He even let me ride with him when he went out on interviews and to follow leads. It really whet my appetite to become an agent, but there was still the issue of me with the one eye and the brain damage. There just seemed to be no way for me to pass the bureau’s physical examination—or anyone else’s, for that matter. And the FBI’s physical requirements were the most stringent of all of the federal agencies.”

  “I took Tommy down to Quantico with me to shoot on the FBI range there,” Prouty recalls, “and he could shoot pretty well. And he immediately bonded with the other agents there. Tom’s a likeable fellow and the guys really took to him. He’d already been turned down by the bureau for failing to pass the physical, but several other agents and I encouraged him to put in for a waiver. I remember saying, ‘You got nothing to lose. What are they going to do, send you back to Vietnam?’”

  “So I wrote a personal letter to FBI Director William Webster and told him of my background, my disabilities, and my desire to become a bureau agent,” continued Tom. “To my surprise, he gave me a waiver on the physical requirements for my agent application. I later learned that he was advised against granting this waiver, as his bureau advisors did not want to set a precedent. But he told them, ‘I’m going give this guy a chance. He’s earned the opportunity to try. If he can meet the same st
andards as anybody else applying for this position, then I’m going to let him give it a try.’ Then a few days later, I got a call from the Baltimore field office, as that was the office closest to my home of record in Silver Spring. I went in for testing and, later, an interview. As it turned out, it wasn’t like they wanted me to come in next month; they wanted me there right now. This was a good thing, as I was approaching thirty-five and there was an age limit for new agents; I didn’t want to have to get another waiver. All this took place in January 1979. I passed all the other tests and early that spring I was accepted for training as an agent. It was not until many years later that I met Judge Webster and was able to thank him for affording me the opportunity to be an FBI special agent.

  “My training class first met at the Hoover Building in Washington, where we were introduced to our instructors and proctors. Then it was off to Quantico for the agent training course. There were a few veterans like me, and most of those in the class had law degrees. The training was pretty intense, but if you paid attention in class, it wasn’t a problem. And the physical conditioning, the running and push-ups and all, was a piece of cake. The only problem I had with shooting was shooting behind a barricade. You had to shoot with either hand and with either eye. Since I had only my right eye to work with, I had to lean out a little farther when shooting around the left side of a barricade, but it was really no problem. It was just a knack and I had to adjust with it. Fortunately, I have very good vision in my right eye. I had some great future agents in my class. One of them was Ed Mireles, who was involved in the epic FBI gun battle in Miami in April 1986 against two bank robbers. The FBI lost two agents in that shooting before Mireles, himself wounded, shot both of the robbers. After training, I was posted to the Washington field office. So finally, in late 1979, I was a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At last, I was a bona fide federal agent.

  “Like all new agents on their first posting, I was assigned routine duties that involved doing background investigations and interviews that related to people applying for jobs with the federal government. But I was blessed with some great mentors at the Washington field office, including my break-in agent, a guy named Henry Ragle. He was an agent who came up within the bureau ranks, having worked in a support capacity before qualifying as a special agent. Henry was on the bank robbery squad, and he saw to it that I could have as much work as I wanted, so I got to see it all. I would do most of my background interviews in the evening hours, so I had the days to work on bank robberies. On the weekends I got to work on bank robberies, kidnapping, extortion cases, gambling, and the like. I had no other distractions in my life, so I could work eighteen hours a day and put in time on the weekends. After so much hospital time and recovery time and down time, it was great to have work—and I really enjoyed the work. I even got to do some foreign counterintelligence surveillance and to work on some organized crime cases. Right from the beginning, I got to experience a broad range of FBI casework.

  “You’re supposed to be in the bureau for two years before you can do undercover work,” Tom said, “and it was work that was usually reserved for senior agents. Back then, there was very little to prepare you for undercover assignments other than a short, three-day course conducted at Quantico. We had an undercover squad at the Washington field office, a group of agents who just worked undercover cases. But there were no vacancies on the squad. They knew I was interested in this kind of work, but the only way to get on this squad was to already be an undercover agent or develop an undercover case. My first assignment came on a stolen property/fencing operation involving pawn shops in the District. My job was to bring in alleged stolen property to the shops. Then we would get statements from the shop owners that they knew they were receiving stolen property. It was a minor role, but it got me started. After that, I was officially cleared for undercover work.

  “There was a process for undercover work, or more specifically, how the field offices requested agents for undercover support. You were put into a pool of agents cleared for undercover assignment, along with a file that detailed your background, experience, and capabilities. If some field office across the country needed an outside undercover agent, they went to this pool of agents to match the undercover agent with the requirements of their case. Usually, this led to a meeting with the case agent, his supervisor, and possibly the special agent in charge to see if the undercover agent was right for the job. If they thought you could do the job, you were then detailed to help with that case. This could last for a few days to a few years, depending on the case. It wasn’t too long after I got put into the undercover pool that I got a call from the resident agent at the Coeur d’Alene office in Idaho.”

  “By 1984, we had pretty much rolled up Richard Butler and his neo-Nazi Aryan Nations organization,” recalled Wayne Manis, a veteran agent and former Marine Corps officer, “but there were several splinter groups we were very much concerned with. One of them was the Order, a radical right-wing group bent on killing Jews and blacks. They were pretty far out there. They wanted to use acts of terror to force the United States to cede the five northwest states to the Order. To do this, they were into robberies, assassinations, and counterfeiting, and they were very well armed. Their founder and leader, Robert Matthews, was killed in a shoot-out and house fire on Whidbey Island, Washington, in late 1984. But his organization was still active in northern Idaho. We had a former member of the Order who was willing to testify against a number of individuals in the Order, and we were building a case against them. We also had an informant inside the Order who told us that group’s security chief, Elden ‘Bud’ Cutler, was hatching a plan to kill our witness. In fact, he was looking for a professional hit man to do the job. Enter Tommy Norris.

  “I told the bureau what I was looking for in the way of an undercover operative, and they sent me Tommy. He was perfect. The Order was a hardened bunch, and they were wary of undercover federal agents, so this was a dangerous assignment. In scruffy street clothes and that injury to the left side of his head, Tommy looked nothing like a fed. Our inside informant surfaced Tommy as a killer for hire, and he met with Cutler. Cutler not only wanted him to kill our witness, but he wanted his head, literally, so he could use the severed head as a tool to intimidate others who might want to testify against the Order. Tommy took the job, but obviously he couldn’t deliver the head of our witness. So with some applied makeup and air-brushed doctoring of a photo, we created an image of the ‘dead’ witness—decapitated. Tommy met with Cutler in a motel room, showed him the photo, and demanded payment. Cutler paid him for the hit, and we video-recorded the payoff. Case closed. Again, it was a dangerous piece of work, but Tommy brought it off perfectly. Cutler didn’t have a clue who he was dealing with.”

  Tom was only in northern Idaho and Coeur d’Alene a few times on short, in-and-out trips, but he fell in love with the country. While completing work in support of the trial of Cutler and members of the Order, he returned to Idaho and purchased a small ranch on Hayden Lake—not far from a ranch owned by Wayne Manis, the case agent for the Cutler operation. And with the takedown of the Order, stories began to circulate within the bureau of this one-eyed former Navy SEAL who worked undercover.

  In addition to his investigative work and his undercover work while assigned to the Washington field office, Tom took on additional duties as a member of the office’s SWAT element and later on as one of the founding members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team—the HRT. At the time of its formation in 1982, the FBI had a well-developed Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) capability in most of its larger field offices. And most major cities had a SWAT component within their law enforcement organizations. The HRT was founded under the guidance of the legendary special agent and deputy assistant director Danny Coulson. As its name would suggest, the HRT was brought in when there was a confrontation that involved hostages. The HRT was a national response element with expertise in hostage negotiation and armed assault when hostages were at risk. The
organization was formally certified in the fall of 1983 and was placed on standby for the 1984 summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

  “There were two hundred applicants for the fifty operational billets,” recalled Sandy Prouty, who also arrived at the HRT in 1982. “That first year there were four of us who were former Navy SEALs, a few Army veterans, and a whole bunch of Marines. It was a competitive undertaking for those first fifty billets with a challenging obstacle course, running, and shooting. And you had to have a good bureau record. Tom made the cut on his own merit with no problems during the selection process. He was made one of the first assault-team leaders. There was a six-month initial training period that was part training and part setting up the organization, as well as establishing hostage-rescue protocols and procedures. Then we went to work.”

  “From the beginning, the HRT duty was a part-time venture for us,” Tom said of the start-up operation. “Since most of us were from the Washington field office, we were allowed to spend only half of our time with the HRT. The rest of the time we were in the office with our case loads. So it was not an altogether ideal setup. And we started from scratch with nothing. Under Danny’s direction we built the training facilities and shoot houses, and set up training and certification procedures. Other than that, a lot of us were combat veterans with combat experience in Vietnam. The terrorism/counterterrorism business was pretty new to everyone, so we went to the military for guidance and expertise, and they were very helpful. By then both the Army and the Navy had dedicated special missions units that focused on the terrorist target. And both of them were very willing to share their knowledge with us. Neither had the evidentiary or the investigative constraints that we worked under, nor did they do much negotiating with bad guys with guns. But they did know how to conduct combat assault. The HRT supervisor knew the commander of the Army unit, and I knew the commanding officer and many of operators in the Navy unit.