by Couch, Dick
IN AN ASTONISHING TWIST of fate, six months after his Bat-21 rescue mission, Norris’s own life was saved by yet another SEAL team member, a petty officer by the name of Michael E. Thornton, in an operation that earned Thornton the Medal of Honor.
Thornton and Lieutenant Norris were among the comparatively few American sailors left in South Vietnam in October 1972. The so-called Brown Water Navy had been “Vietnamized,” and most of the remaining U.S. Navy personnel were advisors to the Vietnamese Navy (VNN). But being an advisor did not necessarily mean being out of harm’s way, especially when the North Vietnamese invaded South Vietnam in force in the spring of that year.
On October 31, 1972, Norris and Thornton led a three-man South Vietnamese Navy team on a prisoner-snatch and intelligence-gathering mission behind enemy lines. They landed farther north than planned on the coast of Vietnam, and when dawn broke they realized they were on the edge of a large concentration of enemy troops near a naval base on the Cua Viet River, near the coast of Quang Tri Province, just north of the southern boundary of the Demilitarized Zone.
The North Vietnamese Easter Offensive into South Vietnam had been blunted by a generous dose of American airpower, but their forces remained massed just north of the DMZ. Senior military planners needed intelligence on North Vietnamese troop movements and concentrations. Norris sensed this would be a risky mission and felt he needed the presence of another U.S. Navy SEAL. His choices were limited, but he did know of a SEAL petty officer assigned to the LDNN training base at Thuan-an just north of Da Nang. He was from Team One and his name was Mike Thornton. Though the two had never worked together, Norris knew of Thornton’s reputation as a solid operator. He sent for Thornton, who immediately volunteered to help with the mission.
Thornton, Norris, and three Vietnamese SEALs approached the coast in the South China Sea near the North/South border by fishing sampan in the early morning hours of October 31. In the shallows several hundred meters off the coast, they swam ashore. Due to imprecise navigation, they found themselves farther north than planned. Moving cautiously inland, they encountered the enemy, in force.
A North Vietnamese patrol came down toward the beach. It was the point element of a North Vietnamese Army battalion. A firefight broke out between the SEALs force of five men and several hundred enemy troops. The SEALs, as SEALs are trained to do, headed for the water. Getting back to the coast turned into a three-hour running gun battle as Norris, Thornton, and their Vietnamese teammates were just able to stay ahead of the advancing enemy.
Thornton and Norris maneuvered around the sand dunes as they fired, creating the impression of a bigger force. The superior North Vietnamese forces immediately began to conduct their own fire-and-maneuver and flanking movements. Attempting to hold back their pursuers, Norris aimed a LAW (Light Anti-armor Weapon) rocket at the biggest group of enemy soldiers he could find and got ready to pull the trigger. “I never got a shot,” he explained. “A round came in and hit me in the head, right above my temple area. It just blew out a portion of my head. It just picked me off of the sand dune and dumped me on my back. I knew I’d been hit, but I didn’t know how bad.”
“Where’s Tom?” asked Thornton of a South Vietnamese teammate who had witnessed what happened to Norris. “Mike,” he replied to Thornton, “he’s dead.”
“Stay here,” ordered Thornton, “I’ll go get Tommy.” Thornton recalled, “I thought he was dead, but I wasn’t going to leave him behind. We never leave anybody behind. So I sure wasn’t going to be the first one.”
With Thornton carrying Norris, they made their way through the surf and into the open water. Along the way, Thornton took a round through his upper arm, but they kept going. In addition to Norris’s devastating injury, one of the South Vietnamese had been shot through the leg and another in the butt. Over the next two hours in the water, Thornton supported Norris and the wounded Vietnamese until they were recovered by American vessels. When the five men were taken aboard, Thornton refused medical attention until Norris was attended to.
“The doctor gave him no chance at all to live,” recalled Thornton. But Tom Norris refused to die. After a long ordeal of surgeries and rehabilitation, Norris recovered to the extent that he would pursue a successful new postwar career as an FBI agent.
The Medal of Honor was presented to Petty Officer Second Class Mike Thornton on October 15, 1974, by President Richard Nixon. Thornton helped smuggle his buddy Tom Norris out of a nearby naval hospital in the middle of the night to a hotel so they could attend the White House ceremony together. The hospital staff told Norris he couldn’t attend, but, as Norris pointed out to us, “Of course, that’s not the thing to tell a SEAL. You just don’t tell a SEAL he can’t. It’s not a word in our vocabulary. Mike kind of kidnapped me out of the hospital.”
THE LAST SEAL FATALITY of the Vietnam War claimed the life of Lieutenant Spence Dry. The twenty-six-year-old Dry was the SEAL element leader for a highly complex and hazardous SEAL Team One/UDT-11 mission to rendezvous with and rescue two American POWs who planned an escape from the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison in North Vietnam.
In May 1972 the American prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton had managed, miraculously, to open a direct channel of two-way communications to the American military. The system was neither instantaneous nor perfect, and it still is not known if it was based on electronic transmissions or human intelligence, as to this day the details of the system are classified. However they did it, the signal came out that two Americans were planning an escape, and a rescue plan, dubbed Operation Thunderhead, was hatched by the U.S. Pacific Fleet and launched from the USS Grayback (LPSS-574), an amphibious transport submarine that was adapted to carry four swimmer delivery vehicles, or SDVs. The SDVs were small minisubmarines with primitive navigation systems that had never been used in combat before. Tragically, two of the SDVs malfunctioned badly during Operation Thunderhead, and for one SEAL the consequences were fatal.
Lieutenant Dry and his three SEAL and UDT teammates were supposed to launch their SDV at night and make their way through poor visibility and powerful currents to a little island in the Red River to watch for a signal from the escaping POWs in a fishing boat. “The time Spence and I were to spend on the island was a minimum of 24 hours and up to 48 hours,” recalled Dry’s fellow SEAL Philip “Moki” Martin. “We were to look for a red light on a boat during the night and a red flag during the day.” Their first reconnaissance attempt was aborted when they went off course, could not find the island, and their SDV’s battery ran out.
The would-be rescuers were forced to swim out several miles offshore and tread water until they were rescued by a search-and-rescue HH-3A helicopter. They were flown to the guided-missile cruiser USS Long Beach (CGN-9), which was serving as the command ship for Operation Thunderhead, where plans were made to night-drop them back into the water next to the submarine Grayback at 11 P.M. on June 5 to resume the mission. Dry and Martin stressed to the chopper pilot that the drop would only be safe at an altitude of twenty feet or less and an airspeed of 20 knots or less. But when the helicopter pilot spotted what seemed to be the Grayback’s red signaling beacon atop the sub’s snorkel mast, visibility was very poor, the tailwind was some 20 knots, and the craft may have been as much as fifty or sixty feet high. Many years later, Martin said, “I still think about Spence’s face. I could see him in the red light of the helicopter by the door. I can still see his face reflecting in it.” Dry’s last words before jumping, Martin remembered, were “We gotta get back to the Grayback.”
Martin recalled, “The problem was an extremely strong wind creating at least a 5-foot sea state, and so when we got into the water we couldn’t have seen the Grayback anyway because it was so rough. I questioned the height of the helicopter when we went out, and I thought the helicopter was too high. Four guys went out, and the first guy was killed. The second guy suffered an injured back. I was the third guy and I went out and just about everything that was on my body was ripped off. I barely hit t
he water at the right angle and I still injured my knee. The fourth guy was knocked unconscious and almost drowned until I found him. Our saving grace was we all wore wetsuits under our camouflage uniform and that kept us afloat.”
When Spence Dry and his colleagues jumped out of the helicopter, the impact snapped Dry’s neck, killing him. The survivors, now a total of seven men, were rescued the next morning. It turned out that the POW escape attempt had already been canceled by the POW leadership inside the Hanoi Hilton, but there wasn’t enough time to alert the would-be rescuers.
The details of the mission were classified for many years, thwarting the campaign of Spencer Dry’s father, himself a former Navy captain, to earn his son a posthumous Purple Heart and the proper recognition for his sacrifice. The Navy officially designated it as a training accident. Ten days after the accident, the surviving men of Dry’s SEAL platoon wrote a group letter to Dry’s father, pledging, “His memory will remain with us so long as man values positive leadership and courage in the face of danger.”
Proper recognition for Spence Dry did not come until 2005, seven years after the elder Dry’s death, when two of Dry’s classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy, retired Navy Captains (SEAL) Michael Slattery and Gordon Peterson (a naval aviator and Seawolf pilot in Vietnam), published a detailed account of the mission in the prestigious journal The Naval Institute: Proceedings. The article helped spur the 2008 award of a Bronze Star with valor to U.S. Navy SEAL Spence Dry.
DURING THIS FIRST DECADE of their history, the life of a Navy SEAL was one of continuous combat rotations to Vietnam. Officers might get in one or two combat tours, but the enlisted SEALs went back time and again. In spite of the broad direct-action warfare portfolio handed the SEALs, their training and deployments were all about operations in Vietnam. In short, SEALs became very good jungle fighters and little else. They maintained minimum qualifications in diving and parachuting but seldom practiced these in an operational scenario. Yet, within certain constraints and the guidance of area commanders, the SEALs had a free hand in choosing which missions they would undertake. With this latitude comes a great deal of responsibility. Today in Afghanistan, platoon officers, platoon chiefs, and task unit commanders have that same latitude and responsibility. While it leads to operational success, it also means these combat leaders must make these life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. It means that they have to balance the importance of the mission against the risk to their men, not easy then and not easy now.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the UDTs and SEAL teams shrank to pre-Vietnam levels and operating budgets were tight. A fifth UDT was commissioned in the summer of 1968 for duty in Vietnam and decommissioned in the summer of 1971. There was even talk of disbanding the SEALs and the UDTs altogether. Today there are close to 2,700 active duty SEALs; at the height of the Vietnam War there were just under 450. “What happened to the Teams after Vietnam was pretty much a mirror image of Korea except there were more Teams—UDT-22 on the east coast was immediately disestablished,” according to Tom Hawkins. “The SEAL Teams were reduced to basically pre-war strength. Some SEALs either had to get out or they had to go find a place to go. Some of them went back to UDT because there were some billets available. Many went to the EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] community. Many went to the diving community and those that couldn’t find a diving billet of some kind had to get out of the Navy. And we lost a lot of really, really good operators as a result. But, you also have to understand that when the SEALs came back from Vietnam, they didn’t have a Navy mission. What was the Navy going to do with the SEALs? We had to figure all of that out.”
How did the SEALs perform during the course of the Vietnam War? On the basis of numbers, their record was impressive. For their relatively small size, the SEALs were among the highest-decorated units in the conflict. In six major POW rescues involving SEALs, some 152 Vietnamese captives were freed, accounting for 48 percent of POWs freed during the war. One SEAL historian, Dale Andrade, put it this way: “By the end of 1970 SEALs and their South Vietnamese allies had killed more than two thousand Viet Cong and captured about twenty-seven hundred, many of them important members of the political infrastructure. All this had been accomplished relatively cheaply in terms of SEAL casualties. Only three dozen or so were killed during nine years of involvement in Vietnam. In the overall conduct of the war, SEALs did not change the tide of battle. But they did illustrate that a few well-trained men using counterinsurgency tactics and specially trained allies could devastate a guerilla enemy, particularly the political infrastructure.” As General William Westmoreland said, “I would like to have a thousand more like them.”
There are some vets who even think that if SEALs were deployed in greater numbers, they could have turned the tide of the war. “Some people have said that if there were more SEALs or more SEAL-like activities, we could have actually won the war,” said Hawkins. “I think there’s probably not a SEAL alive that wouldn’t tell you that. To actually fight in an unconventional warfare campaign, you have to get down where the people are, and I think the Army was still fighting a conventional war. I think the Marine Corps adapted pretty well. It took the Navy quite a while to adapt to what became a brown water Navy. It took the Navy quite a while to figure out that it needed SEALs, riverine force, and armed helicopters. Everybody eventually learned the lesson, but the difference is in the village, with the people, with their hearts and minds. Our role wasn’t to win too many hearts and minds—our aim was to think like the Viet Cong and to take what he gave back to him, through unconventional warfare. But there should have probably been a lot more emphasis put on structure building, and community building.”
Nevertheless, the SEAL culture and many of the skills and techniques of the modern SEAL force were pioneered in Vietnam and have had a lasting impact on modern special warfare ever since. But at the time, as former Marine and then RAND company analyst Bing West said after a 1968 visit to a SEAL platoon, the SEALs were a “tactic in search of a strategy.” Another SEAL historian, T. L. Bosiljevac, put it this way: “Although they were highly successful in their own districts and provinces throughout the Delta, their full potential was never fully understood or tapped. Most of their operations, especially early in the war, were nothing more than small-unit infantry tactics in a swamp environment.” He continued, “Most of all, their full potential in special operations was never fully integrated in the overall military strategy and goals of the war. They were never really viewed as anything more than a local tactical asset.”
Vietnam-era SEAL veteran Bob Gormly agreed, arguing, “For the most part, we were relegated to the Navy river patrol forces. SEALs killed considerable numbers of the enemy, and obtained locally important intelligence. A lot of our men were wounded, but surprisingly few were killed. The latter statistic I attribute to training and the fact that we called our own shots; we simply didn’t operate where or when we didn’t want to. In my view, we should have been conducting high-risk, high-gain operations. Instead of chasing VC who harassed the river patrol forces, we could have been applied to such vexing problems as freeing American prisoners of war.” At least one SEAL officer proposed to the higher-ups in the chain of command that the SEALs be unleashed in a fully coordinated program of POW hunts and attempted raids across South Vietnam. His pleas were ignored.
The last SEAL platoon left Vietnam on December 7, 1971, exactly thirty years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the last remaining SEAL advisors left Vietnam in March 1973. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace in Saigon, bringing the war to an end.
Between 1965 and 1972, there were forty-six SEALs who died in battle in Vietnam. Their names are etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and are also memorialized on the Navy SEAL Memorial at the Navy SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida.
In the Vietnam War, the Navy SEALs first forged their skills in battle, and launched a legendary reputation as d
irect-action warriors. It was a conflict that saw naval special warriors transform, in the words of Vietnam veteran SEAL Carl Swepston, from being “a guy in the water with fins on and a facemask and lifejacket and a Ka-Bar to a guy with AR-15 and M-16 machine guns going in and going directly against the enemy.” They caused such damage to communist forces in the zones they operated in that the enemy respectfully dubbed them “The Men with Green Faces” and announced cash bounties for killing of SEALs.
The stage was set for the SEALs to face a new era, of limited wars, hostage rescues, and the dawn of global terrorism.
CHAPTER 6
TRAGEDY AND RESURRECTION:
THE POST-VIETNAM YEARS
GRENADA,
OCTOBER 25, 1983, 10:00 A.M.
THE ASSAULT FORCE:
U.S. Navy SEALs
THE ENEMY:
Grenadian army and militia troops backed by Cuban advisors
THE MISSION:
Support the U.S. invasion of Grenada
In fifteen seconds, I will be dead.
For U.S. Navy Lieutenant Jason Kendall, it was a reasonable assumption. He and eleven other members of a Navy SEAL assault team were soaked in the blood of wounded enemy prisoners, and trapped inside a building that was surrounded on three out of four sides and being shot to pieces. Around them were the dead bodies of nine enemy soldiers, four more on the brink of death, and fourteen other enemy POWs, eight of them wounded.
Their only escape route, out the building’s back door, was a fenced-in open field that was flanked on both sides by enemy troops pouring fire into it, creating what looked to Kendall to be an amphitheater-sized shooting gallery. If they were forced to cross it, his SEALs had little chance of survival. Beyond the field outside the fence were jungle, cliffs, and the potential safety of the open waters of the Caribbean, but there seemed no chance of getting there. “I could see trucks coming up both flanks,” recalled Kendall, “they unloaded guys down the fence line, and my best guess is we were outnumbered a good three to one, maybe four to one, and surrounded.”
