The Daily Nightly : Medal of Honor Recipients

Medal of Honor: Jack H. Lucas

Petra Cahill — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:20:00 GMT

Last year, for 110 straight days, we featured a different living recipient of the Medal of Honor. These are the men who have received their nation's highest military honor.

We are re-posting this entry of Jack Lucas, who died today in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was 80 years old.

Brian is a board member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. The words and photos are courtesy of Artisan Books, publishers of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty by Peter Collier with photographs by Nick Del Calzo.

JACK H. LUCAS
Private First Class, U.S. Marine Corps 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division

Jack Lucas was a cadet captain in the military school where his mother had enrolled him after his father’s death when he heard radio reports of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The next day he promised his mother that if she let him enlist, he would come home after the war and finish his education—but he wound up forging her signature on the consent form because she would have to lie for him. Lucas, big for his age, told the Marine recruiters he was seventeen. Shortly before being sent to the training center at Parris Island, South Carolina, he turned fourteen.

Troops were moving out to Hawaii, but because of his experience in military school, Lucas was ordered to stay behind and drill new recruits. He knew his buddies were ultimately headed for combat, so he hopped onto the train with them—in effect going AWOL to get into the war. Once in Hawaii, he managed to convince officers that he was there because of a clerical error.

He was almost drummed out of the Corps when a censor read a letter to his girlfriend that mentioned his real age, fifteen by then. He managed to talk his way out of trouble again and was assigned a job driving a truck on the base.

A year later, when a large number of troops were being ferried out to ships in Pearl Harbor heading into action, Lucas stowed away on the USS Deuel, in effect going AWOL a second time. He slept on deck and scrounged meals from other men. When the ship was
well out to sea, he turned himself in for fear of being classified as a deserter, and a sympathetic colonel decided that instead of punishing him, he would finally grant Lucas his wish of being assigned to a combat unit.

Not long after, the Deuel approached Iwo Jima. On February 19, 1945, five days after he turned seventeen, Lucas hit the beach with forty thousand other Marines, five thousand of whom would become casualties that first day of combat. The next morning, his unit destroyed a Japanese pillbox, then took cover in a Japanese escape trench, where eleven Japanese soldiers surprised them. The Marines and Japanese started firing at each other at point-blank range. Lucas shot one soldier in the forehead before his rifle jammed.

As he was trying to get it to work, he saw two Japanese grenades land near the Marine next to him. He dove down into the soft volcanic ash, covering the grenades with his body. One failed to go off, but the explosion of the second one flipped him over on his back and inflicted large wounds on his arm, chest, and thigh.

His chin was sliced open and one eye was forced out of its socket. He had internal injuries and was bleeding heavily from his nose and mouth. A Marine from a following unit, reaching down to take off Lucas’s dog tags, saw Lucas’s hand wiggle.

He was given a shot of morphine, carried back to the beach on a stretcher, and transferred to a hospital ship. At one point he was almost given up for dead, but the doctors kept working on him.

After hospitalizations in Guam and San Francisco, and several of the twenty-two surgeries he would undergo, he was discharged in September 1945. On October 5, at the age of seventeen, he received the Medal of Honor from President Harry Truman, making him the youngest recipient since the Civil War. Then, as he had promised his mother years before, he went back to school—a ninth grader wearing the Medal of Honor around his neck. He later graduated from high school and earned a college degree. His book, Indestructible, was published in 2006.

Medal of Honor: Hershel W. Williams

Daily Nightly Editor — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

The first time the five foot six, nineteen- year-old Hershel “Woody” Williams tried to join the Marines, in the fall of 1942, he was too short. The second time he tried, a few months later, he wasn’t: The Corps relaxed its height requirements. He immediately enlisted. He was sent to the Pacific with the 3rd Marine Division and placed in a flamethrower/demolition unit.

Williams took part in the invasion of Guam, which seemed horrific—until he was sent to Iwo Jima the following year. The beach area in Guam was clear and relatively undefended, and the Marines could advance into the jungle. At Iwo, all the jungle cover had been blown away, and the beach became a slaughterhouse.

His company was supposed to hit the beach on February 20, 1945, but there were so many Marines stuck on the beachhead that there was no place for them. They finally landed the next day, even though the Marines were still backed up, unable to advance. The island’s volcanic ash was so porous that it was impossible to dig foxholes or create cover, and the Americans, exposed to enemy fire, were taking huge casualties. Williams’s unit had landed with six flamethrower men and had lost them all in two days without advancing more than fifty yards. Morale was plummeting.

On February 23, Williams suddenly heard Marines shouting and firing their weapons in the air. Looking up, he saw that the American flag had been raised on Mount Suribachi. Spurred on by the sight, his company surged forward and finally advanced, crossing the first airfield and assaulting the enemy.

The Japanese defenses were organized around pillboxes of reinforced concrete arranged in pods of three, connected by a system of tunnels. Acting Sergeant Williams saw the American tanks wallowing impotently in the soft volcanic sand. With covering fire from four riflemen, he strapped on a flamethrower and went after the pillboxes. Over the next four hours, he moved through intense enemy fire to assault one Japanese position after another. He climbed on top of one pillbox and stuck the nozzle of his flamethrower through the air vent, killing the soldiers inside and silencing the machine gun. When enemy soldiers from another pillbox fixed their bayonets and charged him, he killed them all with a burst of flame from his weapon. He repeatedly returned to his own lines to get new flamethrowers or pick up satchel charges, which he tossed into the pillboxes he had disabled. Finally, an opening in the Japanese lines was created, enabling the Marines to advance.

When Williams’s company was taken off the line a week and a half later, only seventeen of the 279 men who had hit the beach with the company had not been killed or wounded.

After the battle of Iwo Jima, Williams went back to Guam as part of the Marine force training for the invasion of Japan, which was unnecessary after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On October 5, 1945, he was ordered to Washington to receive the Medal of Honor. The moment President Harry Truman placed it around his neck, he resolved to consider himself the medal’s caretaker for the Marines who didn’t come home from Iwo Jima.

Hershel Williams later became active in his church as a lay minister. He served his fellow recipients and their loved ones as chaplain for many years. He is now chaplain emeritus of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

Medal of Honor: Paul J. Wiedorfer

Daily Nightly Editor — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Working in the war industries gave Paul Wiedorfer an automatic deferment until 1943, when he was drafted. The following year, he was in Europe with the 80th Infantry. After fighting through France and into Belgium, his battalion was taken out of combat and put on “corps reserve.” But the rest wasn’t for long—when the Battle of the Bulge began, his unit was loaded onto trucks and sent to the front. They were on the way to relieve the garrison at Bastogne when American troops, mistaking them for Germans, opened fire on them. Wiedorfer’s commanding officer had to drape their vehicles with white sheets to convince the Americans to cease firing.

At around noon on Christmas Day 1944, Wiedorfer’s company was near Chaumont, Belgium, clearing a wooded area of enemy snipers. The day was cloudless and very cold; the three-inch snowfall from the previous night had turned to ice. One of the platoons was crossing an open area when two German machine guns, flanked by riflemen, opened fire from dug-in positions. The Americans scrambled for cover behind a small ridge.

Afraid that his immobilized buddies would be cut to pieces, Private Wiedorfer stood up and charged the enemy. Slipping repeatedly on the frozen ground until he got to within a few yards of the first machine-gun nest, he tossed a grenade in, then shot the three enemy soldiers manning it. He continued to fight his way through the snow, crouching as he ran toward the second position, all the while sensing and hearing the shells from the small-arms fire the Germans were concentrating on him. He counted it a miracle that he wasn’t hit. When the grenade he threw at the second enemy position killed one soldier, six others stood up and surrendered to him. By this point, the pinned-down American platoon was able to get up and advance with the rest of the company.

Private Wiedorfer’s platoon leader had been killed several days earlier; when his sergeant was also killed in this action, he took over and led the unit for the next several weeks. In early February 1945, fighting on German soil, he was hit during a mortar attack. Although the body of a GI, killed instantly near him, stopped some of the shrapnel, Wiedorfer was struck by fragments in the stomach and in both legs. His left leg was broken; his right hand was shot through. He was evacuated to England, where he was treated for two months, then sent home, where he was hospitalized at Walter Reed for the next two and a half years. One morning, a sergeant in the bed next to him, reading the GI newspaper Stars and Stripes, said, “Hey, Paul, what’s your last name?” Wiedorfer spelled it for him. The sergeant looked up. “Hell, you got the Medal of Honor, man!”

Wiedorfer thought someone would just come by his hospital bed to hand the medal to him. But by the time Brigadier General E. F. Koening, the commanding officer of the hospital, arrived to make the presentation on May 29, 1945, he was surrounded by hundreds of people—officers, nurses, and a full military band.

Medal of Honor: Gary G. Wetzel

Daily Nightly Editor — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Every weekday for 110 straight days we will feature a different living recipient of the Medal of Honor. These are the men who have received their nation's highest military honor. Brian is a board member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. The words and photos are courtesy of Artisan Books, publishers of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty by Peter Collier with photographs by Nick Del Calzo.

Gary G. Wetzel
Private First Class, U.S. Army 173rd Assault Helicopter Company, 11th Combined Aviation Battalion, 1st Aviation Brigade

Gary Wetzel grew up as the second oldest of nine children and joined the Army at the age of eighteen. It was only one month after his nineteenth birthday when he landed in Saigon. With aspirations of being a pilot, he reenlisted to be guaranteed the duty station of his choice. Assigned to the 173rd Assault Helicopter Company, the Robin Hoods, Wetzel served as a door gunner. About ten days before he was scheduled to return home after serving two tours, he was shot down for the fifth time on January 8, 1968.

Wetzel’s helicopter, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, had its left front blown apart and was trapped in the landing zone by intense, hostile enemy fire. Two of the crew were killed outright by enemy fire. While going to the aid of his aircraft commander, Wetzel was blown into a rice paddy by a homemade grenade that shredded his entire upper left arm and caused severe wounds to his right arm, chest, and left leg. Without hesitation, and despite profuse bleeding, he staggered back to his gun well, tucked his mangled arm into his waistband, and took the enemy under fire. Wetzel’s machine gun was the only weapon placing effective fire on the enemy, and although severely wounded, Wetzel remained at his position until he had taken out the automatic weapons emplacement that had been inflicting heavy casualties on the American troops and preventing them from moving against the enemy.

Passing in and out of consciousness, Wetzel sustained a stab wound to his right thigh from a bayonet. He disregarded his own wounds and returned to aid his crew chief who was attempting to drag the wounded aircraft commander to safety. He continued to grab other wounded and pull them across the rice paddy, all the while losing consciousness and blood.

After Wetzel and the other survivors were rescued the next morning, he spent a week on the critical list. His arm was amputated in a field hospital, but he had to undergo another surgery in a Tokyo hospital because of infection. After about five months in hospitals, Wetzel began to learn how to live a productive civilian life with a prosthetic arm.

While working as an expediter in Wisconsin, Wetzel was approached by a colonel, a major, and a first sergeant who told him that he was going to Washington to receive the Medal of Honor. It took the officers two weeks to convince him that they were sincere. Wetzel received the Medal of Honor from President Lyndon Johnson on November 19, 1968, in a ceremony at the White House.

When asked what the medal means to him, Wetzel replied, “When I was in the Tokyo hospital, where the doctors took out more than four hundred stitches, some of the guys I pulled out who were recovering from their wounds found out I was there. They would walk up to my bed and ask, ‘Are you Gary Wetzel?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and they would pull out pictures of their wives, kids, or girlfriends and say, ‘Hey, man, because of you, this is what I’ve got to go back to.” And then Wetzel would reply, “I’m not Superman. I was just a guy doing his job.”

Today, Gary Wetzel lives in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and works as a heavy equipment operator.

Medal of Honor: Ernest E. West

Daily Nightly Editor — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Every weekday for 110 straight days we will feature a different living recipient of the Medal of Honor. These are the men who have received their nation's highest military honor. Brian is a board member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. The words and photos are courtesy of Artisan Books, publishers of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty by Peter Collier with photographs by Nick Del Calzo.

Ernest E. West
Private First Class, U.S. Army 2nd Squad, 3rd Platoon, Company L, 3rd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division

Private First Class Ernest West did his basic training as part of the 25th Infantry in Hawaii—a “paradise” in comparison to what he would experience in Korea, which he regarded as a frozen hell in the winter and a suffocating hell in the summertime. For a Kentucky boy who had dropped out of high school to take a job on the railroad before being drafted in 1950, Korea was simply the most unfriendly environment he could imagine.

In the fall of 1952, West’s unit was near Sataeri. It was a hilly area, and after dark the U.S. soldiers were monitoring Chinese troops with primitive night vision equipment. The Americans were struck by how tall the enemy troops were—six-footers from northern China and Mongolia, who were dug into bunkers along a high ridgeline.

On October 12, West was one of sixteen Americans who volunteered for a mission to try to capture some of the enemy for interrogation. Moving as silently as possible through a valley separating the U.S. and Chinese positions, they came to a rise leading up to the enemy bunkers. Half of the group stayed behind with machine guns. The others began to climb up toward the enemy, with West walking ahead as the point man. Suddenly the Chinese began to roll grenades down onto them. One passed between West’s legs and exploded near his lieutenant, who was just behind him. Two other Americans also went down. Realizing that his contingent had walked into an ambush, West ordered those who were not hurt to retreat. Then he ran through heavy small-arms fire and exploding grenades to his lieutenant, who was badly hurt. Using his body to shield the helpless officer from flying shrapnel, West picked him up and started down the hill. Four enemy soldiers came at him, but he killed them with his rifle. West made it back to the U.S. position with the lieutenant, then returned for another wounded American, killing eight more of the enemy along the way. As he dragged the second man to safety, a grenade exploded near him, deadening his left arm and sending shrapnel into his eye. Bleeding heavily, West returned for another wounded comrade and got him down the hill.

West spent the next ten months in the hospital, most of it at Walter Reed. Doctors tried to save his eye by positioning a large powerful magnet over it to draw out the shrapnel, but the procedure didn’t work and the eye had to be removed. Finally released from the service, West returned to Kentucky. It was hard for him not to feel that he was still at war. On his first day back at his old job on the railroad, a co-worker came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. West instinctively turned and wrestled the man down. He quickly apologized: “Sorry, but you’ll have to give me a month or so. Just talk to me, don’t touch me.”

Early in 1954, West got a telegram informing him that he was to receive the Medal of Honor. His railroad arranged to make a special stop in his hometown of Russell, where he boarded a private car that carried him to Washington, D.C. After putting the medal around his neck on January 12, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said to West, “In addition to this decoration, you have an old soldier’s admiration."

Ernest West returned home and continued to work on the railroad until his retirement in 1993

Medal of Honor: George E. Wahlen

Daily Nightly Editor — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

George Wahlen started his Navy service with his own version of Catch-22: Having volunteered in 1943 in hopes of becoming an aircraft mechanic, he was selected for medical corpsman training instead. When he protested, his commanding officer hinted that if he did well in his medical training, he might yet realize his ambition to work on planes. So he worked hard and finished near the top of his group—but when he again brought up the possibility of becoming a mechanic, he was told that the Navy couldn’t afford to lose its best corpsman. He was attached to a Marine battalion as a pharmacist’s mate second class.

In 1944, his unit boarded a ship for Guam. After the ship was underway, the top brass decided the unit wouldn’t be needed in that battle, so it was shipped back to Hawaii, where Wahlen trained for another six months. In February 1945, his division headed for Iwo Jima.

As he was going ashore on February 19, Wahlen, not a religious man, found himself praying, “Please help me not let one of my buddies down; please help me do my job.” Over the next few days, his unit was in constant action. On February 26, he was treating a wounded Marine when an enemy grenade exploded nearby and sent shrapnel into his face, temporarily blinding him in one eye. Refusing treatment, he continued to do his work in the midst of intense fighting. In one instance, he ran through fierce fire to carry a wounded Marine to safety on his back. In another, when an adjacent platoon lost its corpsman, he rushed through heavy mortar fire to take care of its wounded as well, treating fourteen casualties before returning to his own unit.

On March 2, Wahlen was wounded again, this time in the back. Again he refused evacuation. The next day, he moved out with his company in an assault that took him over more than six hundred yards of open terrain in the face of Japanese fire. He was hit in the leg; unable to walk, he crawled fifty yards to administer first aid to another fallen Marine. Of the 240 men in Wahlen’s company, only five came through the battle of Iwo Jima without being wounded or killed. Counting replacements brought up during the fighting, the company suffered a 125 percent casualty rate.

Wahlen was taken back to Guam on a hospital ship, then to Hawaii, and finally to Camp Pendleton, where he was hospitalized until his release from the Navy in December 1945. While at Pendleton, he received two Navy Crosses and was ordered to go to Washington to receive the Medal of Honor. President Harry Truman made the presentation on October 5, 1945. “Well,” he said to Wahlen with a smile, “I’m sure glad a pill pusher finally made it up here.”

In 1948, Wahlen enlisted in the Army as a medical technician. He became an officer, served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and retired as a major in 1968.

Medal of Honor: Jay R. Vargas

Daily Nightly Editor — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

The son of immigrants—an Italian mother and Hispanic father—Jay Vargas had two older brothers who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in World War II, and a third who fought in Korea. Vargas himself got as far as the Class A Portland team in the Los Angeles Dodgers farm system in the early 1960s before he realized he probably wouldn’t make it as a big-league baseball player. He decided to play for the Marines instead.

By 1968, Captain Vargas was in command of Company G of the Fourth Marines in Vietnam. On April 29, his unit, positioned along the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam, was the last American element in the area. It was supposed to be lifted out, but when the helicopters came under heavy fire, Vargas’s men had to march to base camp during the night. Along the way, hundreds of enemy artillery rounds burst around them, but the impact of the shells and the spray of shrapnel were partially absorbed by the soft muddy soil of the rice paddies, and everyone made it back to base without serious injury.

The next day, although they hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours, Vargas and his men were loaded onto landing craft and taken down the Bo Dieu River to an area around the village of Dai Do where two other Marine companies were in a battle with a North Vietnamese Army regiment. Company G went ashore at about one in the afternoon. Vargas had been ordered to attack across seven hundred yards of open ground; the company made it about one third of the way before the NVA opened fire. When one of Vargas’s platoons was pinned down at a hedgerow by machine guns and mortar and artillery rounds, he hurried toward it with a reserve platoon. Although wounded by a grenade, he took out three machine-gun positions by himself. Company G finally entered the village in the afternoon and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with enemy soldiers popping up from spider holes and out of abandoned huts.

Vargas thought he had secured Dai Do when suddenly the NVA launched a massive counterattack. Taking cover in the village cemetery, Company G dug up fresh graves, tossed out the bodies, and used the holes for cover. The fight raged through the night.

The next morning, the bodies of more than three hundred enemy soldiers lay near their position. Vargas’s battalion commander arrived on the scene and ordered a renewed assault on the village. Low on ammunition, Company G pistol-whipped, stabbed, and beat the enemy with rifle butts. Vargas killed a North Vietnamese soldier with his knife. He carried to safety a Marine whose arm had been severed, and when the soldier pleaded for his arm, Vargas went back and found it. When the battalion commander, fighting like any other rifleman, was shot in the back three times, Vargas dragged him a hundred yards to an evacuation point, firing at the enemy as he went with an AK-47 he had picked up on the battlefield. By the end of the third day of battle, the North Vietnamese melted away and Vargas finally allowed himself to be treated for a bullet wound in his side and shrapnel from mortar blasts.

Jay Vargas received the Medal of Honor from President Richard Nixon on May 14, 1970. After the ceremony, his father struck up a conversation with the president. The next day, the senior Vargas disappeared for several hours. When he returned and his son asked him where he’d been, he replied nonchalantly that the president had asked him to come to the White House and have a sandwich with him.

Medal of Honor: Leo K. Thorsness

Daily Nightly Editor — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Every weekday for 110 straight days we will feature a different living recipient of the Medal of Honor. These are the men who have received their nation's highest military honor. Brian is a board member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. The words and photos are courtesy of Artisan Books, publishers of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty by Peter Collier with photographs by Nick Del Calzo.

Leo K. Thorsness
Major, U.S. Air Force 357th Tactical Fighter Squadron

Leo Thorsness enlisted in the Air Force in 1952 at the age of nineteen, largely because he had a brother serving in Korea. Though he didn’t make it to Korea himself, he stayed in the military, becoming an officer and a fighter pilot. In 1966, he went to Vietnam as part of a squadron of F-105s. The “Wild Weasel” was a specially modified two-seat F-105 and had the job of finding and destroying surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites. The Weasels were capable of lingering in target areas longer than other fighters, and as a result suffered a high loss ratio; not many Weasel pilots completed their hundred-mission tours.

On April 19, 1967, Thorsness was on a mission deep in North Vietnam. He and his wingman took out an enemy SAM site with missiles, then destroyed a second site with bombs. In the second attack, the wingman radioed that his plane, hit by intense antiaircraft fire, was going down. “Turn toward the mountains and I’ll keep you in sight,” Thorsness told him. As the pilot and his backseater ejected from the damaged aircraft, Thorsness circled above to keep them in sight. Suddenly, he saw an enemy MiG-17 fighter setting up a gunnery pass on the parachutes. Although the Weasel was not designed for dogfights, Thorsness attacked the MiG and destroyed it with bursts from his gatling gun.

Dangerously low on fuel, Thorsness quickly air-refueled from a tanker andreturned to the MiG-infested area to protect the downed crew from North Vietnamese soldiers. When his rear-seat weapons officer spotted four more MiGs in the area, he turned back through a barrage of North Vietnamese SAMs to engage them. He hit another one (although he never got credit for the kill because his gun camera had run out of film) and drove the remaining enemy planes away.

Heading for Udorn Royal Thai Air Base, the closest U.S. airfield, Thorsness climbed to thirty-five thousand feet. Seventy miles from base, with his fuel tanks on empty, he pulled the throttle to idle, knowing he could glide two miles for each thousand feet he fell. Just as he was landing, the F-105’s engine ran out of fuel and shut down.

Two weeks later, he was shot down over North Vietnam on his ninety-third mission. He bailed out and was captured, and wound up a prisoner of war in the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he ran into the two F-105 crew members he had tried to rescue. After two years of unremitting torture, he learned, through a secret “tap code” among the prisoners, that his name had been submitted for the Medal of Honor. (The officer in charge of writing Thorsness’s citation had been shot down himself and brought to the same prison.)

When the war ended in 1973,Thorsness was released and sent home. He had knee injuries, sustained when he had bailed out of his plane at six hundred knots, and back injuries as a result of torture. He received the Medal of Honor on October 15, 1973, from President Richard Nixon. “We’ve been waiting for you for six years,” Nixon told him. “Welcome home.”

After retiring from the Air Force as a colonel, Thorsness was an executive with Litton Industries and later served the people of Washington as a state senator. In 2002, he started speaking on his personal mantra, “Do what’s right—help others.”

Medal of Honor: Michael E. Thornton

Daily Nightly Editor — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Michael E. Thornton
Petty Officer, U.S. Navy, Navy Advisory Group

Although he came from the landlocked hills of South Carolina, the idea of being in the Navy seized Michael Thornton’s boyhood imagination when he saw movies such as The Fighting Sullivan Brothers and Frogmen. He enlisted in the Navy shortly after graduating from high school, went through Underwater Demolition Recruit Training, and became a member of the elite SEALs.

In the fall of 1972, with the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia winding down, there were only three officers and nine enlisted SEALs left in Vietnam. Thornton was one. Their primary missions were rescuing downed American airmen and doing “sneak and peek” reconnaissance on the North Vietnamese Army’s inexorable advance into the south.

On October 31, a five-man SEAL patrol was ordered to gather intelligence about enemy activity at the Cua Viet River Base. The patrol was made up of three

South Vietnamese SEALs, Lieutenant Tom Norris, and Petty Officer Thornton. Both of the Americans were experienced combat veterans. Earlier that spring, in fact, Norris had led a similar team on a heroic mission to rescue a pair of U.S. airmen who had been shot down

in enemy territory, an action for which he would be recommended for the Medal of Honor.

Launched in a rubber boat at dusk by a Vietnamese junk, the SEAL patrol paddled toward the beach in the gathering darkness. About a mile offshore, the men left their small boat and swam to shore. Then they moved inland, passing silently beside numerous enemy encampments. They patrolled all through the night, gathering important intelligence. As daybreak approached, seeing no identifiable landmarks, they realized that they had come ashore too far north; in fact, they were in North Vietnam. As they moved back toward the beach, Lieutenant Norris established radio contact with the fleet. However, they were soon spotted by the enemy and began to take heavy fire. More than fifty enemy soldiers attacked, closing to within five yards.

During a five-hour firefight, Thornton was wounded in his back. Norris ordered Thornton and two of the South Vietnamese SEALs to fall back to a sand dune to the north and provide covering fire. Not long after, the Vietnamese SEAL who had stayed behind arrived at Thornton’s position and told him that Norris had been killed. Thornton charged back over five hundred yards of open terrain to Norris. When he got there, he killed two enemy soldiers standing over the lieutenant’s body. He lifted Norris, barely alive and with a shattered skull, and began to run back toward the beach, enemy fire kicking up all around him.

The blast from an incoming round fired by the USS Newport News blew both men into the air. Thornton picked up Norris again and raced for a sand dune and then retreated three hundred yards to the water. As he plunged into the surf, Thornton lashed his life vest to the unconscious officer’s body. When another SEAL was hit in the hip and couldn’t swim, Thornton grabbed him and slowly and painfully swam both men out to sea. Despite his wounds, Thornton swam for more than two hours. All three wounded men were rescued by the same junk that had dropped them off sixteen hours earlier.

On October 15, 1973, Michael Thornton was on his way to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor from President Richard Nixon. Lieutenant Norris, still a patient at nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital, had been forbidden by his doctors to go to the ceremony, but Thornton spirited him out the back door of the facility and took him along. Almost three years later, Norris himself received the medal, with Thornton looking on.

Medal of Honor: Brian M. Thacker

Daily Nightly Editor — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Son of a career Air Force officer, Brian Thacker graduated from Utah’s Weber State College and was commissioned in the Army through the ROTC program. After a tour in Germany, where he was “allowed to make a lot of second lieutenant mistakes,” he was sent to Vietnam in the fall of 1970, serving with the 1st Battalion, 92nd Artillery.

He was first assigned to a battery of guns that provided support for combat engineer operations. Then, in the spring of 1971, he took charge of a six-man observation team organized by the battalion. Along with an interpreter, the team was ordered to a hilltop in Kontum Province called Fire Base 6. There they supported South Vietnamese (ARVN) artillery in firing down on North Vietnamese units operating in the valley below.

On the morning of March 31, when the enemy launched a coordinated attack along a sixty-mile front, Fire Base 6 was among the positions hit. Thacker was asleep when he heard sounds of the heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, satchel charges, mortars, and recoilless rifles. The North Vietnamese had penetrated the South Vietnamese perimeter; three of Thacker’s five men were killed as the American and ARVN force retreated from bunker to bunkerin hand-to-hand fighting throughout the morning and early afternoon. Calling in air support, Thacker rallied his forces to hold on against the superior North Vietnamese.

The first U.S. helicopter trying to resupply Fire Base 6 was shot down; its crew climbed out of the wreckage and joined what was left of the U.S. team. When a second chopper trying to rescue the first crew was shot down as well, Thacker knew his beleaguered force couldn’t hold out.

The nearest extraction point was another fire base six miles away along the ridgeline. During a lull in the fighting, as the enemy prepared for a final assault, Thacker organized a withdrawal of the remaining friendly force, lingering behind to provide covering fire before joining his comrades. He called in U.S. artillery on his own position in a desperate effort to keep the enemy at bay, but in the ensuing chaos, he became cut off. Finding himself alone, he ran for cover deep in a heavily overgrown bamboo forest. He stayed there for the next eight days without food or water. The North Vietnamese were often so close around him that he could hear—and even smell—them. The bamboo canopy kept him cool during the hot days; his wool nightshirt protected him during the cold mountain nights. Several days after the ARVN ranger unit retook the fire base, Thacker decided he could move to safety. Over a period of several hours, he slowly crawled from his bamboo refuge back to the fire base. He was medevaced out the next day, given medical treatment in Pleiku, and sent to Japan for hospitalization.

By May, Thacker was back home. His father, who was stationed at an Air Force base, told him of rumors that he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, but Thacker didn’t think it was possible. Two years later, however, he received a phone call inviting him to the White House, where President Richard Nixon presented him with the medal on October 15, 1973