Michael Thornton Interview (page: 3 / 9) Medal of Honor	Print Interview

How did the two of you meet? Was it in Vietnam? What were you doing?

Michael Thornton: Tommy and I both had previous tours in Vietnam so we were combat ready. I had been in a lot of fire fights. I had already received numerous awards, you know. I had heard of Tommy but I personally didn't meet Tommy until the first time that we met in Vietnam. I think it was in Da Nang.

Thomas Norris: Yeah, it was in Da Nang. In '72, I think. I learned about Mike very quickly. If you're a member of the team, your capabilities are automatically substantiated.

How did you come to work together in Vietnam?

Thomas Norris: You have to understand where Vietnam was at that time. Each president had a different idea of how the Vietnam War would be run.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Under Nixon we were in a mode called Vietnamization, which meant the U.S. military was pulling out. We were giving command of the military to the South Vietnamese to defend the country on their own. The only reason that -- the only thing -- we resumedbombing runs then but it was mostly in support of their aggressive action in order for them to achieve whatever goals they were achieving. But it was limited and most of the U.S. personnel were being pulled out of Vietnam. In June the only people on land -- active units -- were the Navy Seals.

Michael Thornton: They still had some support areas down around Saigon and areas like that, but as of September the 6th, 1972, there was nobody left at all except for a few of us and that was it.

Thomas Norris: We still had ships to help support the South Vietnamese forces. Most of the air units had been drawn down, and they had to bring those back again because of the Easter offensive, which was a shock or surprise to the command. They brought the B52s in and they started intensive bombing raids to try and help stop that invasion. Prior to that most of those units had been dismantling and they were scrambling to try and get personnel to make those missions.

Give us an example of a SEAL team assignment. What would you be challenged to do?

Michael Thornton: Well, there's a lot of different things. In my first tours, which were all down south in the swamps, we were trying to infiltrate and mess up their logistic plans, their infrastructure. If you could capture a province level chief, the information -- the intelligence -- you could gather from this guy is unbelievable. They break it up just like a state. You had a province level just like the governor, and then you have a district, and then you have a village, and then you have a hamlet. So whenever you could disrupt that chain of command it was really hard to replace. There were always disruptions, and somebody waiting around to make another decision.

A good thing that they tried to teach us in training is, "Make a decision why you're there. Make that decision and move on." There were a lot of operations where I'd gain intelligence and I'd take these personnel and I'd move and hit three different operations, because the intelligence was live, it was right there. I knew if we waited too long I wouldn't be able to get to that position and that guy would be gone. So basically intelligence was everything.

Thomas Norris: The SEAL teams started out as intelligent gathering units. The only area that the Navy had responsibility for in Vietnam was the Lan Tao shipping channel. We were under the command of Admiral Zumwalt, who was kind of a radical in his own right. He later became Chief of Naval Operations. A marvelous man and a very good commander.

The only control the Navy had in Vietnam was that area and that's where we were sent, initially to keep those shipping channels open, and we were very successful at doing that. So we expanded. We gained intelligence on other things and we'd feed it into the command system. It would go to Army units to run those missions, but they were so heavily involved in their own operations that they couldn't handle some of the information we were giving them. So we started running our own missions.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. A SEAL platoon is made up of 14 people: two officers and 12 enlisted. And then you're divided into two seven-man squads, and you would either operate as a seven-man squad or sometimes one or two or three people would go out on missions. And we would get our intelligence from either people that "chu hoi'd" or gave up, people we captured and turned over, interrogated, and came up with information from various sources. I mean, we lived with the Vietnamese people. And then we would penetrate into areas where nobody else would go. We ran into the base areas of the Viet Cong. We went to places where big army units didn't go. And we ran our operations. Unconventional warfare is a different type of battle. It's not on line tanks and military units facing each other. We fought an underhanded, dirty, ruthless type of a war, and we were usually -- always -- outnumbered. Our main goal was intelligence, to give us information on where the VC were, where their heavy weapons units were, where their mortar positions were, where their strike positions were, where their manpower was, and then go target those positions. And that's what we went after.

We went after their main military positions and we penetrated into areas where nobody else would go.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I guess if you sat down and thought about it afterwards, you'd probably go, "Why did we do that? What are we doing here?" But when you get back from a mission -- you don't really think about it during a mission. Or you're in a heavy fire fight and your mission is a heavily involved contact one. And when you get back you don't really let that -- you can't concentrate on that. You can't sit there and say, "Geez, I almost didn't make it," or you wouldn't operate again. You just wipe it out of your mind and you go on. And you gather -- you have almost a sixth sense when you run operations. You feel things almost before they happen. It's hard to explain to somebody that's never been there what it's like to work in an area where you're outnumbered.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Michael Thornton: Every time.

Thomas Norris: So you depend on the fellow members of your team to do what they're supposed to do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Michael Thornton: I mean, they're your family. They're everything. It's like my father, the values. Your family is everything, and they were my family there. Good? Bad? War stinks! There's nothing good about it. But you know the whole thing, it's you or them. We were projecting in areas where nobody else would go, the reason why it was called "free fire zones." And a free fire zone was a fire zone because it was controlled completely by the NVA and the Viet Cong.

That's where they lived and that's where they stayed because they had the freedom to move as they wanted to. They knew that they were safe. So for us to get them, we had to go after them.

I went on one operation in this place down in the very bottom of Vietnam at the very point. That whole area was divided by a river, and this is one of the areas where they didn't use a lot of Agent Orange to defoliate for bombardment. These tunnel rats were all over the place. We knew there was a province level chief. This is like the governor. This guy was a tax collector. They had already sent a platoon of SEALS down there, and out of 21 people 19 were injured. They had to cut cables across the river to get in there.

I had captured a district level chief, and this district level chief was a logistics guy, and I captured him and I got the intel for him, and I took him, and he had the passwords to drop us. And we took a junk, and I had myself and two other guys lying down in the back of this junk, and I had what they call the KCS -- Kit Carson Scouts -- which were all ex-VC at one time. And these guys were up there dressed like VC on this junk with this district guy, but this district guy knew that his life was in my hands, all right, basically. So we went 11-and-a-half clicks in badman territory just to get this guy, and my whole objective was to capture this guy but when I jumped up to grab him, he had two bodyguards, his bodyguards opened up on us. And of course you don't want to, but you have to eliminate that thing, because good, bad or indifferent, this is the whole bad thing about war: people get hurt.

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