THE NAVY SEAL WHO RAN INTO A HAIL OF BULLETS FOR A COMRADE

On 31 October 1972, during the Vietnam War, Navy SEAL Michael E. Thornton was tasked with scouting the enemy Cửa Việt base and taking Viet Cong prisoners.

Lieutenant Thomas R. Norris and three South Vietnamese special forces soldiers went with him on the mission. They were brought in by junk; after dark the men paddled on in a rubber boat and finally swam the last mile to shore.

Once ashore, the team realized they had landed too far north and were already in North Vietnam. Thornton went after an enemy soldier who had seen the intruders and shot him just short of the jungle. That alerted around 50 more enemy fighters, who now came after him. Despite a wound from a grenade, he kept changing position and engaging, so the enemy could never work out how strong the team really was.

For the next 4 hours a firefight raged in which the 5-man team held off about 150 enemy fighters, until they fell back to the beach shortly before dawn.

While Norris was covering his team, he was hit in the head and severely wounded. One of the South Vietnamese saw it and took Norris for dead. Thornton ran 370 meters toward the enemy fire to reach his comrade, picked him up and ran back to the shore, stopping again and again to fight off the enemy. A cruiser had come in to provide fire support and covered the beach with shells, which slowed the enemy down but also threw Thornton 6 meters into the air with the blast. He picked his wounded comrade up again straight away, got to the beach and took a South Vietnamese soldier along as well, who had also been hit. Under enemy fire he dressed Norris’ wound (“the entire side of his head was missing”) and swam out to sea with both wounded men. The cruiser assumed nobody had survived and turned away. Only later was the team picked up by the junk.

Against the doctors’ prognosis, Norris survived. Thornton was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1973.

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