By Honor Bound Read online

  “I had two objectives for my meeting with Tom. I needed to know what he was doing, both training-wise and operationally, and what I could do to support him. I had read his after-action reports, so I had some idea of what he was doing in Da Nang as well as down farther south. But I wanted to hear it from him. My direction was to downsize our presence in Vietnam and to expedite our turnover of assets and responsibilities to the Vietnamese. And in addition to getting Tom what he needed, I wanted his ideas on what we might do to help the South Vietnamese resist the recent NVA push into South Vietnam. Neither of us knew much about what was going on up north, but we knew a major battle in Quang Tri Province just south of the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] was in progress.”

  It was called the Easter Offensive. In late March 1972, the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA, had just conducted a surprise push across the Demilitarized Zone into South Vietnam and had taken control of the northern portion of Quang Tri Province—the province just to the south of the DMZ. The South Vietnamese Army had fallen back to a defensive line along the southern banks of the Cam Lo and Cua Viet Rivers, temporarily halting the NVA advance. For this offensive, the North Vietnamese had committed literally their entire Army with a spearhead of some thirty thousand troops backed by large quantities of armor. The Americans did not have the troop strength to counter the offensive, but they did have the air power to make it very costly for the massed NVA troops. General Creighton Abrams ordered the B-52 strikes that effectively blunted the NVA advance, but the battle for Quang Tri and other northern provinces raged throughout the summer and into the fall. Eventually the NVA would capture the provincial capital of Quang Tri City. The city of Hue was threatened, as was Da Nang itself.

  “There was not a whole lot I could tell Craig at the time,” Tom recalled. “The NVA offensive caught us all by surprise, and it was a conventional push with tanks and massed infantry. We were primarily a reconnaissance force and were used to operating in very diverse, squad-sized units. The NVA came across the DMZ with armor and in division-sized strength. We Americans knew this war was winding down for us—we were going home. Those of us who were left were just advisors. We went out into the field with our Vietnamese, but it was now their show. At the time, I was anxious to get back up to Da Nang and Camp Fay, where most of my South Vietnamese Sea Commandos were at the time.”

  “Tom and I were the only two SEALs still attached to MACVSOG,” Craig Dorman said. “And Tom was by far the most experienced SEAL officer still operating in Vietnam. He was what we call a pass-down item. I had just relieved a marine major in the SOG maritime billet, and Tom was one of his subordinates. My direction at the time was to get ready to close things down, here in Saigon and at Camp Fay up in Da Nang. Then just as the SOG organization was downsizing, here comes this push from the north. So I was very interested in our operations up there. In addition to Tom’s work with the Sea Commandos, we had a small fleet of fast patrol boats that were engaged in the interdiction of North Vietnamese coastal smuggling operations and taking our own agents up into North Vietnam. And on top of that, I was a very green SEAL officer. This was my first trip to Vietnam. Tom was the go-to SEAL at MACVSOG, so I was glad to finally meet him.”

  ESCAPE AND EVADE

  Unknown to both Tom Norris and Craig Dorman, a tragic series of events was unfolding in the air and on the ground south of the DMZ, events that would involve them both. In order to counter the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive, General Abrams authorized B-52 strikes to slow the enemy advance. By this late stage of the war, the North’s surface-to-air missile (SAM) capability had improved to a point that our B-52s were vulnerable. To counter this threat, electronic-countermeasures aircraft with radar-jamming capabilities flew sorties against these SAM batteries to protect the big bombers. On the afternoon of 2 April 1972, Easter Sunday, two Air Force EB-66C Destroyer aircraft from the 42nd Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron sortied from the Korat Royal Thai Airbase. Their call signs were Bat 21 and Bat 22, respectively. The two EB-66s, indistinguishable by a layman from the Navy A-3 Skywarrior, were on a mission to protect three B-52s that were attacking NVA troop concentrations just north of the South Vietnamese city of Cam Lo. Between them, the three big bombers carried a payload of close to a hundred tons of high explosives—a good measure of discouragement for the NVA infantrymen marching south. Unknown to the bombers and the EB-66 crews, the advancing North Vietnamese had brought south with them the very dangerous and capable SA-2 SAM. It was the same surface-to-air missile that protected Hanoi and Haiphong and a forerunner of the SA-11 that brought down Malaysian Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. It was a SAM ambush of the American aircraft working along the DMZ.

  The three B-52s and Bat 22 completed their mission and made it off target unscathed. Bat 21 took a direct hit. The 440-pound warhead destroyed the aircraft and five members of the six-man crew perished; only one man escaped. Lieutenant Colonel Iceal “Gene” Hambleton managed to clear the wreckage and parachute to safety. He was the Bat 21 navigator, and his prearranged call sign was Bat 21 Bravo. Hambleton was fortunate enough to escape the SAM hit and to land unhurt, but there his luck ended. He parachuted into the middle of a major enemy offensive. He was literally surrounded by tens of thousands of North Vietnamese infantrymen. The fifty-three-year-old Hambleton was just weeks away from the end of his tour and months away from his military retirement. From the perspective of the enemy, he was indeed a prize. From his previous Air Force tours of duty, Hambleton had detailed knowledge of American strategic ballistic missile forces. He was also well versed in current electronic-countermeasures equipment and tactics. The North Vietnamese’s Soviet patrons would like nothing better than to get their hands on Hambleton.

  A great deal has been written about the shoot-down of Bat 21 and the subsequent attempts to recover Hambleton. Nearly all air operations over South Vietnam were suspended as multiple sorties were flown in support of Hambleton’s rescue. Over the next week and a half, five aircraft were lost and dozens more sustained battle damage—many never to fly again. Eleven aviators were killed and two captured. Six days into what was to become one of the costliest downed-pilot rescues in Air Force history, General Creighton Abrams, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, grounded all helicopters engaged in the effort to recover Bat 21 Bravo. This directive from Abrams came at the recommendations from his senior Air Force commanders. It seems that the North Vietnamese had crossed the DMZ well prepared to deal with American air power. Along with various calibers of ground fire, there were multiple batteries of crew-served antiaircraft weapons. And in addition to the SA-2 SAM missiles that downed the EB-66C from which Hambleton escaped, there was evidence that the North Vietnamese were equipped with the more modern SA-7 Grail man-portable, shoulder-fired antiair missiles. Abrams’s directive was issued on 8 April, barely twenty-four hours before Tom Norris began his briefing with Craig Dorman. While Norris and Dorman were unaware of the drama that was unfolding up near the DMZ, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel was monitoring these events very closely. His name was Andrew E. Anderson.

  Andy Anderson was also attached to MACVSOG, and he headed up a small organization called the Recovery Studies Division, and like all SOG entities, it had a cover title—the Joint Personnel Recovery Center or JPRC. On the SOG org chart, Anderson’s group was listed as MACVSOG 80. Anderson’s mission and that of the JPRC was to gather intelligence on downed flyers and develop plans to rescue them. Like much of MACVSOG and the American military in general, he was under orders to close down his operation and transfer his responsibilities to his Vietnamese counterpart. Yet Anderson saw Bat 21 Bravo and other downed pilots trapped in the middle of the North Vietnamese offensive as one last opportunity to save Americans on the ground. And he had a plan. In a bold move, Lieutenant Colonel Anderson stepped out of his chain of command and called Major General Winton Marshall, vice commander of the 7th Air Force. General Marshall was coordinating efforts to recover the downed airmen. As of the morning of 8 April there were three airmen on
the ground, still evading but surrounded by thousands of enemy soldiers.

  Anderson met with the general in Saigon that same day and sold him on his plan for a ground rescue of the pilots. That afternoon he was on General Marshall’s personal aircraft headed for Da Nang to coordinate the operation. He had a team of Vietnamese Sea Commandos at Camp Fay ready to go, but he would need an American to lead them. The following day, on 9 April, after a day of feverish planning and coordination, he called down to Saigon to speak with Craig Dorman.

  “It was really strange,” Tom recalled. “I was sitting there in the middle of telling Craig, my new boss, about what we were doing up at Camp Fay, and this call comes in over the STU-3—that’s the secure phone line. Craig says, ‘I better get this,’ and he takes the call. I’m only getting one side of the conversation, but I’m hearing Craig talking about ‘downed pilot rescue’ and ‘behind enemy lines’ and things like that. He talks a while longer, then I hear him say, ‘Well, it just so happens, he’s sitting here in my office—right now and right in front of me.’ So about this time I say, ‘You need some help with this. If there’s an American on the ground in trouble, then I’ll do what I can to help get him out.’ So my briefing of Craig now turned into the beginning of a rescue mission.”

  “Anderson had a problem,” Dorman recalls of the conversation. “His rescue plan involved moving the pilots to a river that roughly ran between the North and South Vietnamese lines. Two of the three downed airmen were located close to the river, but the enemy controlled both sides of the river. The rescue team needed to move from a secure location, upstream and into enemy-controlled territory, link up with the airmen, and get them back downstream and to a friendly position. Anderson needed a seasoned volunteer who was experienced in working with Vietnamese, and someone who was good in the water—like a Navy SEAL. And I had a problem. I needed Tom’s help with all the other stuff that SOG was involved with, but I could see that this was a mission that was going to take priority. And I had only to look across the desk to see that Tom was chomping at the bit.”

  Tom Norris graduated with Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) Class 45 (East Coast), one of the last East Coast winter classes before SEAL training was consolidated on the West Coast on Coronado. Winter classes were tough, with attrition higher than at other times of the year. There were close to seventy-five SEAL hopefuls at the start of training with Class 45—only thirteen Americans and two Turkish officers made it to the end. Tom graduated seventh in the class. He was a good runner and very good on the obstacle course, but he was dead last in swimming. He made the minimum swim times, but the fact that he was usually the last man out of the water on a timed swim was not lost on the instructor staff.

  As one of Tom’s classmates in Class 45, this narrator saw firsthand how much he suffered. He came down with a stomach flu during Hell Week and for several days could not keep anything down. BUD/S trainees during Hell Week are denied sleep, but afforded all they want to eat—for good reason. A man during Hell Week burns seven to eight thousand calories per day. If he can’t keep it down, he’s in serious trouble. At the end of our Hell Week, I doubt that Tom weighed more than a hundred pounds. He was barely coherent at the end of that terrible week, but he never quit. Probably more than any of the rest of us, he wanted to be a Navy SEAL.

  DA NANG

  “After a few minutes on the phone with Anderson,” Craig Dorman recalled, “it became clear that Tom was the man for this job on a number of levels. He spoke some Vietnamese and he was one of the few people who had run small units into enemy-held territory. The Sea Commandos knew him and they liked him, and he’d helped to train a great many of them. There were others with those qualifications, but they had either left the country or were days from finishing their tour. Not only was he the right man for the job, he was the only man available for the job.”

  “The next thing I knew I was on a plane to Da Nang,” Norris said of the end of the meeting with Dorman. “It was a nice plane, and I was the only passenger. I think it was a general’s plane, T-39 Saberliner, and it was a big step up from the canvas bench seat in the back of a Huey. I felt like a corporate exec. I later learned that it was the same plane that had taken Andy Anderson up to Da Nang the day before. As soon as I got into Da Nang, I was met by the Camp Fay base commander, Commander Graff, and he drove me over to a briefing facility, where a group of us waited for Lieutenant Colonel Anderson to show up.”

  Camp Fay was a part of the Naval Advisory Detachment, or NAD, that served as a cover organization for the MACVSOG maritime components in the Da Nang/China Beach complex. Activities at NAD Da Nang comprised a small Navy that included swift boats and the Nasty-class motor torpedo boats of the Coastal Security Service, a small-craft repair complex, a training camp for the Chinese Nung tribesmen, and a full range of administrative, logistical, and operational-support services. Camp Fay itself supported the training of the Sea Commandos and served as their main base of operations. One of Craig Dorman’s primary duties was the transfer of these boats and these facilities to the South Vietnamese.

  “I’d met Anderson once or twice, but I really knew nothing about him,” Tom recalled of the SOG Marine. “He was based in Saigon, and I had spent most of my time at Camp Fay or up and down the coast with our Sea Commando teams. He was a short, cocky guy with an easy smile, but he was also very passionate and very professional. And he was all Marine. He walked in about 2000 [8:00 P.M.] that evening, and he gave us an overview of the mission. He had done most of the groundwork and coordination to pave the way for a rescue attempt, and had lined up all the American Air Force and naval support. But there was still a lot we didn’t know. The maps we had were crude, and we had very little intelligence on enemy strength in the area where the airmen were on the ground, and what we did know seemed to change hour by hour. We were scheduled to meet with the South Vietnamese military commanders the next day before we headed out to the outpost that Anderson had selected as a jumping-off point. We’d launch the operation or operations from there.

  “There was a shooting war going on just south of the DMZ and around the city of Dong Ha. Friendly fire was always a concern, so there were a great many people, on both the American and South Vietnamese sides, to check in with before we could move a team up to the battle line and go out on the mission. We knew by now that this was not just a probe, but a major North Vietnamese offensive. We were coming to understand that they were shooting down a lot of American and South Vietnamese aircraft, so they had brought with them a good air defense capability. This was not good, as American air power was our key strength. Yet we also had to understand that we Americans were in a support role; the battle would be fought and won, or lost, by the South Vietnamese.

  “This was Anderson’s mission, and he had done a great job of laying out the concept of the operation and how it would be conducted, even to the detailed movement of the recovery squad—my squad—and coordination with the Air Force forward air controllers. It was these FACs who were in contact with the airmen on the ground and would control their movements as a part of the rescue plan. And we were on a very tight time schedule. Anderson had us going after our first airman the following night. Following Anderson’s briefing, I now had a clear idea of just what we were going to have to do to get these flyers back. It was doable, but it was not going to be easy. What gave me a lot of confidence was the Sea Commandos I was going to be working with.

  “I knew the two senior commandos, Lieutenant Vu Ngoc Tho and Petty Officer Third Class Nguyen Chau, and they were both good men. I’d worked with them before and knew them from our Sea Commando training, so I would be going out with guys I could count on. I knew the other three more junior commandos only by sight, but since Tho and Chau had selected them, I knew they would be good men as well. Two of them were PFCs [privates first class] and fairly new to the Sea Commandos. The third of the three junior men was Petty Officer Third Class Nguyen Van Kiet. Lieutenant Tho had questions about the mechanics of how Anderson wanted
us to conduct the operations in the field—how and where we were to move and just how far we were to penetrate into ground held by the enemy. He came to me after Anderson’s briefing with his concerns. I told them not to worry, that as soon as we were on our own, we’d do things our way—the way we’d been trained. When he understood that I felt the same way as he did, he was much more relaxed.

  “Anderson had a good plan, yet I don’t mind saying that I was beginning to wonder just what I’d gotten myself into. All I really knew was that there were Americans on the ground and in harm’s way, and we had to do all we could to rescue them. When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was be a jet pilot. That was my dream. It didn’t work out and now I was a Navy SEAL on a pilot-rescue mission. Now we were going to see if we could save those airmen on the ground.”

  Tom Norris was born on 14 January 1944, in Jacksonville, Florida. The family moved to Wisconsin for a short while before relocating to Silver Springs, Maryland, his home of record while he was in the naval service.

  “I get asked a lot about my childhood, and what I wanted to be when I grew up. Since I was born a hundred years too late to be a cowboy, I thought about becoming a doctor or a policeman. When it became clear that I would have to go into the military, I wanted to be a jet pilot—a Navy jet pilot—and land on aircraft carriers. Beyond my dream of flying jets, my home life was really very normal and very average. My dad was a teacher, a naval officer in World War II, and worked for the Veterans Administration when he retired. Mom was a teacher, but when Dad went to work for the VA, she stayed home with us boys. And we could be a handful. I remember my parents as loving, encouraging, and supportive. They were strict, but fair. They taught us discipline, respect, and to be responsible, and that you had to work toward goals in life. I have two brothers, and they were, and still are, a big part of my life. Jim is three and a half years older than me, and Kenny is a year and a half younger. Since Kenny and I were closer in age, we were together a lot. And Kenny would do just about anything I would do. I remember one time there was a big storm—the tail end of a hurricane moving up the coast. It hit Maryland with winds of close to fifty miles an hour. I wondered what winds that strong were like, so I climbed a big oak tree near our house, high enough so I was above the roof line and could really feel the wind. And Kenny climbed up right behind me. I was only about ten at the time, so that made Kenny about eight and a half. We caught heck for that—actually I caught heck. Kenny was just following me.