Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  Those captured were taken to an interrogation center. Often the PRU knew the men they had captured because they had lived in the same village. But the Viet Cong tried to involve everyone in their activities. With that volume of captives going-through the interrogation center, there was a constant problem of identifying those who were really important leaders and those who had cooperated with the VC for self-preservation. Often the SEAL adviser had to step in and act as a quality-control officer.

  The advisers worked six-month tours of duty, and LeMoyne wondered if that was too short a time to learn the territory and run effective operations. But he found that after six months in an active province, the advisers were visibly tired. Fatigue showed itself in various ways.

  I had an adviser in Ca Mau, a fine petty officer. He was a very quiet, almost laconic, individual, a man of few words. I went down to see him right after the Tet offensive. We sat up almost all night. He never stopped talking. That was uncharacteristic behavior. It didn’t affect his operations. But that wasn’t him. When he got home and relaxed, it was back to Silent Sam again.

  I had another adviser who was a corpsman by rating. He ran an awfully good operation, doing a marvelous job. He had one of the best intelligence organizations in the whole corps. But his hands shook badly. When they were loose, they shook noticeably. He never left them loose, laid them on things. He would put his pencil on the paper and write. But if he lifted the pencil, you would see his hands shake.

  I relieved a couple of advisers, one because he didn’t like being in the field by himself at night with the PRU. He tried, but he just wasn’t comfortable at it and asked to be relieved. Another I fired. He was just a disruptive person, abrasive. He was in a good province with a good PRU and wasn’t getting results.

  As the PRU program proved its worth, it was absorbed into a much broader effort known as the Phoenix program, whose goal was to destroy the VC’s ability and willingness to fight by identifying individuals through a census program, removing the VC leadership, and replacing them with a revolutionary development cadre loyal to the Saigon government.

  Phoenix amounted to a deliberate plan of repression and control of the population. And it quickly gained a reputation for brutal assassination of VC leaders and their families. Studies after the war indicated it had been quite effective in sapping enemy strength.

  Wilbur later felt he had been very fortunate to be in at the beginning, before “the great surrender to the Phoenix program.”

  “The PRU was an impressive and satisfactory success, but recognition of its success would spell its undoing. It would attract attention, become a pawn of bureaucratic jealousies and meddling. The uniqueness of my experience is, I was there at the beginning, before it got administratively restricted and before too many cooks and too many hands started struggling for the helm,” he says.

  Soon after Richard Nixon took office as president in January 1969, the United States set in motion the process known as Vietnamization, which would prepare the South Vietnamese to take over the war and permit the withdrawal of American troops. One after another, SEAL detachments and platoons were pulled out. The dwindling number of SEALs remaining in the country increasingly found themselves in the lonely, demanding role of advisers to the Vietnamese frogmen, the LDNN.

  Two of the most remarkable feats of bravery performed by SEALs occurred late in the war, after most of the Americans were gone and the few remaining SEALs were operating with LDNN.

  In April 1972, the North Vietnamese took advantage of the American withdrawal to launch a broad offensive with the goal of overrunning South Vietnam and toppling its government. The Easter offensive was met by fierce resistance from the South Vietnamese, and the attack was turned back. Even though most American ground troops were gone, the United States weighed in with heavy use of air power to pound North Vietnam and provide air support for the South Vietnamese troops.

  In the midst of the battle, an American EB-66 electronic-warfare plane was shot down on 2 April 1972 while escorting B-52 heavy bombers on a mission. Although the plane suffered a direct hit from a surface-to-air missile, the plane’s electronic-warfare officer, fifty-three-year-old Lt. Col. Iceal Hambleton, got out. While still in his parachute, he radioed his position. But he was in deep trouble, far behind enemy lines. A desperate standoff then began. Other air force planes dropped a circle of mines around Hambleton to keep the North Vietnamese soldiers away. But he was still surrounded by enemy troops who knew his approximate location.

  Even though they couldn’t reach him themselves, the North Vietnamese decided to use the downed officer as bait in a trap for would-be rescuers. One Huey helicopter was shot down with the loss of all on board. Another was so badly damaged it had to crash-land on a nearby beach. A big HH-53 rescue helicopter succumbed to enemy fire, as did two small OV-10 reconnaissance planes.

  The air force will go to great extremes to rescue a downed airman. But there was added urgency in this case when it was learned that Hambleton had worked in the Strategic Air Command and had a wealth of information in his head about U.S. missile forces and their targets. Officials were determined that he not be captured by the North Vietnamese and passed on to their Soviet allies.

  Only after it became obvious that the traditional method of retrieving a downed flier simply would not work did the authorities call on Lt. Thomas Norris, one of the few SEALs remaining behind in Vietnam. On the night of 10 April, Norris and four other frogmen crept a mile and a half through the enemy-controlled area and rescued one of the spotter-plane pilots. The next day, he tried twice with a three-man team to get to Hambleton. They couldn’t penetrate the ring around the officer. By this time, Hambleton had been on the ground nearly ten days.

  Norris decided on a new tack, one that fit in with the way he had always liked to operate. Earlier in the war, when Norris was a member of Team Two in the south, he had preferred to go on missions with only one or two companions.

  Capt. Michael Jukoski, who was Norris’s platoon commander, recalls Norris at the time as quiet and unassuming but very aggressive. “I didn’t like him to go out with just two people,” Jukoski says. “It is a lot easier to move with less people, but he couldn’t fight his way out.”

  As he prepared for the rescue attempt, Norris donned the clothes of a Vietnamese fisherman. He was joined by Nguyen Van Kiet, a Vietnamese frogman. They climbed into a small sampan and paddled up the Song Mieu Giang River on the night of 12 April. Hambleton had carefully nursed the batteries of his emergency radio. He was instructed to move down to a pickup point on the river.

  The two frogmen found Hambleton and quickly helped him into the sampan, covering him with banana leaves. Then they set off down the river, moving close to the bank and stopping whenever they heard signs of an enemy patrol. Several times they called in an air strike to clear the way. Finally, after three hours, they had almost reached the forward operating base that was their goal when they came under fire by heavy automatic weapons. Air force planes, circling above to cover the rescue operation, quickly moved in to silence the enemy guns.

  For his feat, Norris was awarded the Medal of Honor. The citation, signed by President Gerald R. Ford, says, “By his outstanding display of decisive leadership, undaunted courage, and selfless dedication in the face of extreme danger, Lieutenant Norris enhanced the finest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

  Nguyen Van Kiet, who accompanied Norris on the rescue mission, became the only Vietnamese to receive the Navy Cross. The citation, signed by Navy Secretary J. William Middendorf II, says, “Due to Petty Officer Kiet’s coolness under extremely dangerous conditions and his outstanding courage and professionalism, an American aviator was recovered after an eleven-day ordeal behind enemy lines. His self-discipline, personal courage, and dynamic fighting spirit were an inspiration to all, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and the Naval Service.”

  Norris displayed a distinct kind of bravery, repeatedly returning into enemy territory with the same
kind of cool calculation that Bruhmuller displayed in his repeated trips to escort Mister out for interrogation. There is quite another kind of bravery encountered more often on the battlefield, the kind that is seen when men, in the heat of battle, do things that seem almost superhuman. By a strange twist of fate, Norris was the object of a feat of this kind of bravery.

  The Easter offensive had been beaten back, but in the fall of 1972, the North Vietnamese were still a major threat in the area of the demilitarized zone. To keep track of the NVA forces and identify targets for bombing attacks, small units of LDNN, with their American advisers, patrolled the six-kilometer-deep strip of South Vietnamese territory between the Cua Viet River and the DMZ.

  By that time, the SEAL presence in Vietnam had dwindled to three officers and nine enlisted men. Douglas P. Huth, who later, as a captain, commanded the Naval Special Warfare Center at Coronado, was one of the officers. Typically, he says, two Americans would accompany four Vietnamese. They would sail north, out of sight of land, in a cement-hulled junk and make contact with a destroyer standing by to provide gunfire support.

  “The ship vectored the junk in to a couple of thousand meters off the beach. Then we’d go over the side into a rubber boat and paddle ashore,” Huth recalls. The boat returned to the junk while the SEALs patrolled four or five kilometers inland.

  “We could see and hear the NVA,” Huth says. “We got close enough to tell what kind of weapon a guy was carrying. But it wasn’t our job to capture them. If you make an attempt to do something other than recon and surveillance, they know you’re in the area. The object is not to let them know you are there. Offensive action is not doing the mission because it defeats the opportunity to go back in that area again.”

  The SEALs were warned that if they got in trouble, they could not expect air cover or helicopter support because of the formidable air defenses the NVA had installed in that area. The only help available was from the five-inch guns on the destroyer. And for that to be useful, the SEALs had to know exactly where they were.

  On 31 October, Norris and Engineman Second Class Michael Thornton accompanied an inexperienced LDNN officer and two veteran LDNN enlisted men on such a patrol. Their plan was to land south of the Cua Viet River and patrol north to check out the Cua Viet River Base, which the NVA had captured earlier in the year. They landed about four o’clock in the morning and carefully patrolled northward, working their way around the numerous NVA encampments. To their surprise, they did not find the river where it should have been.

  They were lost. Instead of inserting them south of the river, as planned, the skipper of the junk had left them north of the river. Instead of moving north toward the river, they had been moving north away from it, almost across the DMZ into North Vietnam.

  By the time they were convinced of the error, it was nearly dawn. Norris ordered the patrol to pull back to the shore where he would try to find a landmark and determine where they were. Without an accurate fix on their position, he could not call for fire support from the USS Newport News, lying offshore.

  Just as the men had crept to within sight of the shore, they were spotted by an NVA patrol. Within minutes, they found themselves surrounded by more than forty enemy soldiers, who moved to within twenty-five yards of their position. Norris managed to figure out where they were and radioed for naval gunfire. But the NVA were so close that the American gunners could not hit them without also hitting the frogmen.

  The battle raged for forty-five minutes. Thornton had shrapnel wounds in both legs and his back, and one of the Vietnamese had been hit in the hip.

  Norris decided on a desperate gamble. He radioed the ship to give him five minutes and then target his own position. While he and one of the LDNN provided covering fire, Thornton and the two other Vietnamese sprinted 125 yards to the last dune line and prepared to pin down the NVA long enough for Norris and the remaining LDNN to move back before the ship’s shells rained down.

  As Norris raised up to fire an antiarmor shell, a bullet struck the left side of his head and knocked him to the ground. The Vietnamese frogman looked at the gaping wound and dashed back to the last dune line. He told Thornton that Norris had been killed. Still, a SEAL does not abandon a buddy, even if all he can do is recover the body. Thornton ran back to their last position and found Norris, still alive, but only barely so.

  Thornton is a hulking man and Norris is slight. If their roles had been reversed, both probably would have died right there. But Thornton was able to carry the wounded officer back through the enemy fire. The Vietnamese looked to him for guidance. He told them they were going to swim. Somehow, they covered the 275 yards of open beach without being hit and plunged into the four-foot surf.

  Once past the breakers, Thornton inflated Norris’s life jacket and pushed him ahead of himself, while also helping one of the LDNN. The NVA soldiers pursued them a few feet into the water, firing their weapons. But they soon lost sight of the fleeing SEALs and cheered their victory.

  Out at sea, the crews of the American ship and the junk from which the patrol had departed many hours before watched the final barrage rain down on the SEALs’ last known position and waited for radio contact. Instead, there was silence. Long after everyone had given up hope, an enlisted SEAL on the junk insisted that they continue the search. Finally, shortly before noon, the five men were found and lifted from the sea.

  They were transferred to the Newport News for emergency treatment, and then Norris was taken to a hospital in Da Nang. Huth, who saw him the following morning, some fourteen hours after he had been hit, says, “He didn’t look very good.” He is convinced that the salt water, by cleaning out the wound and stopping the bleeding, saved Norris’s life. But perhaps because of the long delay in reaching medical treatment, doctors could not save his eye.

  Later, Norris became an FBI agent, spending months working undercover to make cases against drug dealers and white supremacists.

  Thornton, later a SEAL officer, became the third SEAL and the first enlisted man to receive the Medal of Honor. “By his extraordinary courage and perseverance, Petty Officer Thornton was directly responsible for saving the life of his superior officer and enabling the safe extraction of all patrol members, thereby upholding the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service,” the citation, signed by President Nixon, says.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The Super SEALs

  IN THE EARLY MORNING DARKNESS OF 6 JUNE 1972, LT. MEL-vin S. (“Spence”) Dry stepped from a helicopter and plummeted into the Gulf of Tonkin near the North Vietnamese city of Thanh Hoa.

  The twenty-six-year-old officer fell at least thirty-five feet and hit the water so hard that his neck was broken. He became the last SEAL fatality of the Vietnamese war, almost six years after Billy Machen became the first SEAL to lose his life in that long conflict.

  Dry was a key participant in Operation Thunderhead, a bold but badly bungled effort to assist the escape of as many as five Americans from a North Vietnamese prison camp near Hanoi. The operation, long cloaked in secrecy, marked the first use in combat by U.S. forces of tiny swimmer (later, SEAL) delivery vehicles (SDVs).

  The operation was set in motion when the prisoners managed to send out word that they planned to break out of the prison, steal a small boat, and make their way down the Red River into the Gulf of Tonkin. This meant that, if everything went smoothly, they would emerge from the sprawling Red River Delta somewhere along a fifty-mile stretch of coastline, running from just above Thanh Hoa north to a point slightly below the big port of Haiphong, sometime between 29 May and 19 June.

  Aboard the USS Long Beach, command center for the operation, plans were made for helicopter patrols that would cover the entire area two to four times a day, looking for a boat with a red or yellow cloth flying from its mast, the signal the prisoners had selected to enable the rescuers to pick them out of all the boat traffic in the delta and along the coast.

  Just north of Thanh Hoa, however, the coastline
swings in, almost due west, and then curves south, with several islands a short distance off the shore. This meant that the helicopter searching for the escapees could come under cross fire from the island and the mainland each time it ran this five-square-mile gauntlet.

  This is where the SEALs came in.

  They agreed to send two men in to hide on one of the little islands and, through their binoculars, watch the boats moving along the coast for the red or yellow signal. This would provide complete coverage of the area where the men were expected to emerge into the gulf without adding to the danger to the helicopter and its crew.

  But sneaking the SEALs onto the island posed a problem. If they tried to come in so close to the Vietnamese mainland by helicopter, surface boat, or even parachute, they were likely to be detected. The decision was made to try something the U.S. Navy had never done before in a combat situation: bring them in close to shore in a submarine and then send them the rest of the way in an SDV.