Pushkin Hello. Hello. Before we get on with our show, I want you to know that your Pushkin Plus subscription grants you early access to Medal of Honor episodes one week before they were released to the public. That's one week of exclusive access. If you want to listen to more episodes a week before they're widely available, sign up for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or by visiting Pushkin, dot Fm, slash Plus. Now onto the episode. It was the fall of nineteen seventy two, the waning days of
the Vietnam War. American troops have been sent home, leaving the South Vietnamese to keep fighting on their own. President Richard Nixon called this policy Vietnamization.
We can continue our program of withdrawing American forces without detriment to our overall goal of ensuring South Vietnam's survival as an independent country.
There were fewer than twenty Navy Seals left in the country by that point. They were there to quote unquote advise the South Vietnamese military. In reality, the seals were running missions at the front lines and sometimes dangerously behind them. On October thirtieth, Petty Officer Michael Thornton was about to set out on one of those missions. Thornton's hometown was Spartanburg,
South Carolina. He was six foot two, thickly muscled, with a reputation for carrying twice the loads of ammunition as other guys alongside Burns, a cleft chin, and an elvis pout. His fellow seals called him the Mighty Thar. At seventeen, he had been given the choice between reform school and the military. He chose the military. With him that night in October was Lieutenant Thomas Norris. Tommy Norris was twenty eight,
a seasoned officer. He cast a completely different shadow than Mike lah He was fine boned and wiry, five foot six, one hundred and twenty pounds, soaking wet. A high school wrestling champion back home in Maryland, his nickname was Nasty Norris. There was nobody tougher. The two seals knew each other, even though they'd never been on a mission together before. There were so few seals left that they all knew
each other. When Tommy was asked to choose one other seal to accompany him on a scouting mission, he chose Mike the Mighty thor and Nasty Norris They were meant to investigate a naval base that had been taken just a few months earlier by the North Vietnamese Army during its relentless southward march. The Seals knew they were entering dangerous territory, so they planned to do their reconnaissance under
cover of darkness. A Navy ship got them close than a dinghy closer, and finally, Tommy, Mike and three South Vietnamese Navy men dropped over the sides into the South China Sea and swam silently to shore. Everything that could go.
Wrong was about to go wrong.
I'm Malcolm Glawell and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty. The Medal of Honor was established in eighteen sixty one at the outset of the Civil War. There have been three thousand, five hundred and seventeen people
awarded the medal. Since each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer on the field to the highest office in our nation. It's not just approved by the Secretary of Defense, it has to be agreed to by the President. This show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage. And this episode is about what happened on Halloween nineteen
seventy two. It was one am the five soldiers reached the shore. They were looking for an enemy occupied naval base on the southernmost outskirts of North Vietnamese Territory, a place in the North Vietnamese Army they referred to them as the NVA would have just started to settle down in but something seemed off. From what they could tell
in the moonlight, this was not some newly settled encampment. Later, Mike Thoughton would remember how he felt in that moment when he realized they'd been dropped off miles north of their intended target.
We're walking through areas.
It's been no way in hell they could have built all the stuff up in two months, so right then we knew we're way north.
Listen to his tone, by the way, he sounds like he's describing how he went to the grocery store and realized he forgot his shopping list at home. Mike saw bunkers the size of hotel buildings, weapons, soldiers sleeping on mats on the ground. They'd been dropped on top of a major North Vietnamese Army installation. The seals crept along in a line, hunched over so as not to be spotted. Tommy was at the front, Mike was at the rear.
Between them were the three South Vietnamese Navy men. Mike had gone on previous missions with two of them, Deng and Kwan, and hand picked them for that night. Both of them were confident, seasoned in combat, and unflappable in the face of danger. Mike liked and trusted them both. Third was a young and inexperienced officer, Lieutenant Tie. Mike kept creeping up to Tommy to check if Tommy was seeing what he was seeing.
They had tanks and gun and placements. They had guys with big bonfire, so we.
Knew they were afraid, you know, letting them know who they were. And I'm biting down as falls. I say, Tommy, you see this. Yeah.
By the time they confirmed their suspicions, they were five miles from where they dropped in. It would be light soon there was no chance they could get back to see before daylight came, so Tommy decided that their best hope for survival would be to return to the beach, hide out between the dunes, radio for help, and wait for night to fall again. Once it was dark, they'd swim back out to sea and be extracted. Silently, stealthily,
they worked their way back to the beach. They waded through a stream and waste high water all the way.
We could move much faster than the water, and we wouldn't have to worry about stumbling over somebody's sleeping because we could hear a guy snore, and it was unbelievable.
Once they made it to the beach, the five men split up and hid behind two large dunes. There was a lagoon to one side, a wide swath of open sand to the other. The sun was rising and they settled into the long wait for darkness. But then they saw two North Vietnamese on patrol.
Kwan come flying around and tapped me and tapped him on his shoulder and gave him the sun for two enemies back there. So I went back around and saw these guys coming. I could just see their silho whips.
They knew they needed to capture or kill them. Discovery would be catastrophic. Mike crept up behind one and cold cocked him. Kwan, tied him up, gagged him, and dragged him out of sight. Mike silently signaled to Lieutenant Tie to eliminate the other one, but instead Ty called out to the soldier and ordered him to stop.
He didn't stop, and that guy had an AK forty seven. He was about three hundred yards away, and he opened fired up on Tie. Tied to jumped down and started running back towards me. So he's running back towards me, and I'm running past him because I'm trying to get this guy, because we could see that he was heading for the village.
The North Vietnamese soldier was running back to where he came from, firing off shots to alert everyone to the situation that the dunes. Mike was in pursuit.
So I'm hauling can and I stopped on one knee, took two breasts and cranked off two rounds to hit him in the back and the guy fell. But when I looked up, there is a quick reaction for us coming with the village with about fifty guys.
You can picture it, right, a huge group of men descending on Mike. Mike knew he had only one option run.
So I turned around, started running back, and Tommy sees me running back, and here's all these bullets going off, and he doesn't see me shooting, So he knew like hell that we were in a world of trouble.
A world of trouble. That's where Medal of Honor stories are made, in the places where the odds are so long and the risk is so great that it will take an act of extreme bravery for anyone to survive.
But where does that bravery come from? That's one of the questions that got me so obsessed with Medal of Honor stories, because I think sometimes we just assumed that curry is a trait, something you're born with, and that what happens in moments like on that Vietnam beach is that we suddenly learn who has it and who doesn't. One of the things that happens when you listen to enough Medal of Honor stories is that you begin to realize that courage is not a birthright, it's a choice.
Mike was being chased by a mass of North Vietnamese soldiers. Tommy saw him hauling can back towards the group and fired a rocket at a tree, exploding it and creating enough of a diversion so Mike could dive back into the dunes. It was total chaos because now they were being straighted with bullets. Tommy was desperately radioing for help. He needed a ship to send cover fire and drive the NVA back. Two Navy warships wanted to come to their aid, but they didn't know where the seals were.
Any help was hours away. It was a series of problems that would seem overwhelming to anyone, but Mike broke down the big problem into components. They were five against an entire encampment of NVA, but the NVA didn't know how many of them there were, right, So solution number one make it look like they were ten or twenty of them. So Mike started impersonating an entire seal platoon.
And as soon as I saw the top of their head coming up, I'd take about an inch shot and saying I'd get a headshot. Every time i'd take a couple of shots like that, I'd roll over and come out in another position. They didn't know if we had fifteen people in there or five.
Mike keeps shooting, ducking and rolling for hours, and then someone threw a grenade over the top of the dune.
And I just screamed out and I got hit six times when my back was wrapping them, and you could hear Tommy yelling, Mike, Buddy, Mike. But he just saw me laying on my back and I said. I didn't say a word, and about four guys came over and I was laying on my back and I eliminated all four of those guys. Two fell on my side, the two fell back, and Tommy was watching what was going on.
Mike was on his back, expecting a surge of more North Vietnamese any moment now they knew he was hit, but instead the action just stopped.
Tommy yelled down at me, said, they're falling back. We couldn't understand whether they were falling back. And they had had lost a great number of their of their unit, and to do this, and I still don't think they ever knew exactly how many people we had.
A silence descended on the beach. Everything went eerily still. The five men began to regroup, got cautiously hopeful. Had their strategy actually worked.
No, it hadn't, Tommy, he said, while they're falling back, and I said, pointed across the lagoon, and we started kunting. A great number of NVA troops coming from both sides around the lagoon.
They were close to one hundred North Vietnamese troops. They were now outnumbered twenty to one. Tommy realized they needed a better position. He spied a dune in the distance that would give them a potential defense. The NBA would have to cross nearly a quarter of a mile of open sand to reach them.
There.
In theory, they could pick them off one by one if they could hold onto the high ground for that long. Tommy decided that Mike Kwan and Lieutenant Tye would run for the dune first. He and Dang would come after. The three started sprinting, crossing the five hundred yards of sand to the new dune.
So we fell back.
And while I was yelling Tommy, fall back, fall back, and I could see Dang, and this was like one o'clock, one thirty in the afternoon, because the far fight had gone on for over five hours, was running down the dune by himself, and he was running by himself and I said, my grab and I said where Tommy. He said, Mike, aw, he's dead and I saw he sure, said he said he was shot in the head.
He's dead.
Tommy, the leader of the team, was shot in the head and dead. Mike trusted Dang. They'd been on missions together before, his hand picked him for this one. Dan knew what he'd seen, and Mike had no reason not to believe him. The situation for the rest of them
was getting more dangerous by the minute. The team was about to be surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers, but seals have a core value leave no man behind, So Mike decided he would go and get Tommy, putting principal above self preservation.
I said, stay here, I'll go back and get tom and Kwan and Dane both grabbed me and held me.
Said no, Mike, you stay, and I said, no, I'm going back. Y'all stay hear you cover me.
Mike ran back across the beach, back almost a quarter of a mile, directly into the gunfire. He reached Tommy just as five North Vietnamese soldiers did, and he shot them all.
I picked Tommy up.
He was shot through the left temple, and the bullet had exited through his forehead and the whole front level part of his front brain was gone. His cheekbone was gone, his eye sucket was completely gone, and I thought he was dead.
On some level, it didn't matter if Tommy was alive or dead. Mike knew he wasn't leaving that beach without him. We'll be right back. Here's where the story of that night on the beach is so interesting to me. At this critical point, Mike Thornton, a supremely rational guy who talks about the most dramatic night of his life as if it's a trip to the grocery store, is making what seems like an unbelievably irrational decision as he runs
across the sand to Tommy Norris. He's being driven by something.
What is it?
You've probably heard the saying courage is contagious. It's one of those bits of folk wisdom that turns out to be true. Research has shown that seeing or even just hearing about an act of courage makes it more likely that you will be courageous yourself. The scientific term for that idea is pro social contagion. When you witness kindness or heroism. Two separate areas in your nervous system are activated. Your awareness is heightened, your desire to protect others grows.
You catch your heroism from others. We see this all the time. One person holds a door open for the person behind them, and then suddenly a whole string of people are holding open the door as well. That's a small example, but think about the passengers on flight ninety three on nine to eleven, A group of terrified average people who made a collective decision to fight back against
terrible odds. They inspired heroism in one another. So what's driving Mike Thornton to make his totally bonker's decision to race across the beach? Something he knew about that happened in Vietnam. Six months before that spring, an Air Force flight was shot down over North Vietnam, with one survivor left behind the front lines. He had top secret intel, so the Air Force sent mission after mission to rescue him.
Each one a catastrophic failure, men dying aircraft destroyed, Then a second pilot, one of the rescuers, got stranded behind enemy lines. Finally, the Air Force called in the Navy Seals. The Seals sent in one of their best. He snuck into heavily patrolled enemy territory and found one of the pilots. They got out alive, but barely. Then he went back
for the second one. This time it was even more of a suicide mission, but the seal did it anyway, disguised as a fisherman paddling a canoe, and he succeeded. Everyone in the seals knew that story, especially Mike Thornton, because the seal who rescued those two pilots was Tommy Norris. So when Mike raced across the beach to get his friend, his commanding officer, he was doing what he already knew Tommy had done himself and would do for anyone. Tommy's
courage was contagious. Back to the firefight, a naval destroyer has finally arrived to give them cover. Mike was running as fast as he could with Tommy on his shoulders, as the ship started shelling the beach.
I heard the first eight inch round coming in and the concussion blew me almost twenty feet in the air, and I looked at Tommy and he's flying off my shoulders.
Mike got blown sideways. He was dazed stumbling. Tommy, of course, had already been shot in the head. Now he'd been tossed through the air by a shell from a Navy destroyer. If he wasn't dead before, he was certainly dead now once again, Mike chose to go back for him.
I looked down, I saw my weapon, I saw Tommy's weapon. I saw Tommy over here, and I ran over and he's laying on his back. And I looked down at him to grab him, to pick him start running with him again. And he had to ride eye open like that, he says, Mike, Buddy, I said, the son of a bitch is still alive.
Tommy was alive, and Mike had to keep him alive. Mike looked to the far away dune where Dang and Kwan were still waiting, then back to Tommy.
Half his head's hanging out, you know, and about picking him up. And I put him back on my shoulders and I started running.
Dang and Kwan started shooting, giving them cover. Ty was gone. As he had watched Mike run to Tommy. The young lieutenant had given up. Hope, jumped into water and swam away, deserting the firefight as a lost cause they're radio was shot to bits, useless, no more calling for help. The only option was to get off the beach and swim to safety. The navy warships were far offshore, but maybe they could reach them. Anything was better than remaining on
the beach. Mike, Kwan and Dang leaped frog towards the surf, each one taking turns spreading to the water as the other two covered him. They had almost no AMMO left. The North Vietnamese surrounded them on three sides. The team had nowhere to go with the ocean. By now, Mike had a bullet through his calf and he was still carrying Tommy.
We got to the beach and I stumbled and fell and Tommy rolled over like that, and I said, gush, if they ain't killed, I'm gonna kill and dropping him.
All this time.
There were swells four feet high. Mike tucked Tommy under his arm and dove in, pushing him underneath the waves to get him through the surf zone.
And without me knowing about, I was basically drowning Tommy. I felt him because he has been pretty quiet there period of time, and he actually started hitting his hands and hit me in the back. And I looked down and I had his head stuffed in the water.
The shots kept coming from shore. The soldiers on the beach never stopped firing.
As we swam through the surf song, you could see the bullets just going through the water, just like you did in the movie, you know.
And I was saying, good Lord, don't let hit me. Now. God.
Out past the breaking waves, the water was calm except for the sound of bullets splashing around them. Now Mike had to figure out just how he was going to stabilize Tommy. He took his life jacket and put it over Tommy's head as carefully as he possibly could so he wouldn't make the wound any worse. He tied a line around him, securing Tommy to his back. He saw Dang out front of him swimming another of his men accounted for. He was hopeful to tie the young lieutenant
was out there swimming too. He was worried about him, even though Ty had left them for dead. Then he spot a quan floundering in the water. He was wounded and drowning.
He was shot through his right hip and off his whole cheek of his butt, and he couldn't swim. So I grabbed him put in front of me, and I had had him wrap his arms ar me like this. I had arms underneath his arms, and he held on Tommy and I swam for appartiately three three and a half hours.
So now Mike was holding two men after a five hour of firefight. Shrapnel in his back, bullet in his leg. He can't even see the boat he's meant to swim to, but he starts to swim.
You stay focused on the motion, You keep swimming, You never stop, you keep swimming.
You can just keep focused a lot. Let this go, keep us alive.
Tommy, tied to Mike's back, drifted in and out of consciousness, waking up only to ask if all the men were safe. Mike lied and said he hid all of them, didn't mention the missing tie. Tommy got quieter and quieter, and Mike kept swimming. He had been keeping his eyes on the horizon, where he'd seen glimpses of the USS Newport News, the largest cruiser in that part of the South China Sea. He knew it had a medical team on board, which was a rarity since most of the American military had
gone home at the top of a swell. He saw the ship again, but it seemed to be sailing away.
Wow, so the worst lighter saw my wife. I saw a big boat turn arounding, started going seaward.
It was enough to make the mighty thorer give up hope.
Almost later on we found out a ford a server plane had said there's nothing but a bunch of bodies on the beach, and they thought we were dead.
Mike watched the big ship retreat into the distance. Tommy was slipping away, but Mike just kept swimming.
He's going in really deep shock. He could fill him. Just shaken on your back, and there's not a damn thing you can do.
Another hour passed. Mike and Tommy, Kwan and Dang had been in the water for more than three hours. Then they saw a boat, a traditional sailing vessel called a junk, a type of boat that had been used by both sides in the war. Friends and foe.
I saw the junk out there, and I wasn't sure. I was so tired. That was a Vietnamese drunk or what.
Mike used the last of his strength to signal the boat, and as it got closer, he discovered that not only was it safe. It had been looking for him. It was one of two jars, thanks led by another Navy seal, Woody Woodruff, who, because he was a seal, of course, had steadfastly refused to leave without finding the missing team, even as the bigger ships departed for safety. The crew pulled Quan and Dang aboard, and then Mike carefully passed Tommy up. Mike was the last one out of the water.
Lieutenant Tie had been found by the junks an hour.
Before I called the Newport News. The Newport News turned around. We started steaming towards the Newport News and the joant you know, Woody met us, met us there, and we rafted up to the Newport News, got Tommy up on the fantail. I picked Tommy up and took him down and put him on the guarney.
Mike stay with Tommy as long as he could until the doctors took over. The prognosis looked grim, in fact, it looked impossible, but the doctors were another kind of hero.
And there's a Lieutenant commander doctor. And later on we met the doctor again several years later. That was on the Newport News, and he said, I swore to God that he would never lived.
Anyone would have given up Tommy Norris for dead when he had been shot through the head, or if somehow you missed that after he'd been blown sideways by a shell from a naval destroyer, or when he'd soaked in the sea for hours, after both those wounds. But somehow he made it through.
He survived, the grace of our God, My God, he's still with us.
He wasn't just the heroics of Mike Thornton that save Tommy Norris. It was Kwan and Dang staying on the beach to give them cover. It was the persistence of Woody Woodruff refusing to call off his search. It was the surgeons on the Newport News and then the doctors who took over when Tommy was shipped home. And what started this chain reaction Tommy's own courage the previous April, that social contagion of a willingness to try improbable things.
You can still hear that courage, Tommy's voice as he remembers the early days of surgery that turned into years in the hospital.
The doctors even came in and said, we didn't think we were ever gonna save you, and so I don't know how you know you stayed alive and made it through.
But he said you just.
Wouldn't give up, And I get I think that's part of what it was.
You just have a determination not to give up. And my injury.
When you see the death and destruction to other people that you see in war, I mean, what I have is nothing. So I lost an eye, part of my head and brain, and had some other bodily injuries.
But what is that? I mean, I have another eye.
He has another eye. When you hear stories of courage, your valor, it forces you to ask the question of yourself, what do I have within me? That's what Tommy's story did for Mike. It lifted him up and then in turn, Mike carried him home. One day. A year later, in October of nineteen seventy three, Mike Thornton decided to bust Tommy Norris out of the hospital against doctor's orders. He
was an absurd thing to do. He had surgery the next day, but they were going to the White House because Mike had been awarded the Medal of Honor.
I'll never forget that day.
My mom and dad was there, my brother was there, Tommy was there, and the President asked me and said, Mike, you know what does this mean to you? Is President Nixon and we're in the East room, and I said, sir, if you could take something, cut this in half. I about to give the other half this medal to the gentleman standing behind me, and that was tom.
Mike kept his medal intact, which was fine because three years later he was back at the White House watching Tommy get his own medal of honor for his rescue of the two pilots. It goes on from there. They are more than former conrads and arms. They're best friends. They finish each other's sentences. They laugh about everything, even the worst night of their lives. When they were wandering through that North Vietnamese encampment, he.
Kind of looked at me like, yeah, you're we're not where we're supposed to be.
And he go back to the back of the line and off we go.
We patrol some more, and now every time we'd stop, he'd let me know that, you know, hey, dumb, dumb, we're not what we're supposed to be.
Mike and Tommy helped to bring Lieutenant Tie and Kwon to the US. Dang didn't make it out before the fall of South Vietnam, he was captured and executed. Despite the loss of his eye, Tommy became an FBI agent, acing the entrance exam and the training. Unsurprisingly, eventually he was one of the founders of the Hostage Rescue Team, which feels fitting for someone who is so doggedly obsessed
with getting people to safety. Mike went on to be a founding member of Seal Team six, working in counter terrorism. He's considered to be the ultimate Seal, a giant of a man acres of ribbons across his dress Whites.
I love my brother to death, but I'm closer to Tommy and I am my own brother. I mean to live through what we've lived through together and continue our friendship for all those years. It's it's just a magnificent thing. And it's not just about our friendship, you know. I've known people's been wounded together, and I've been wounded with other guys in Silching, but never the camorader and the friendship with Tommy and I holding now together today.
Tommy, for his part, believes his courage isn't extraordinary. He thinks it's waiting to be sparked to life within all of us.
I don't feel that I was anybody special. It was a time and a place in a mission that needed to be accomplished, and I was fortunate to be the one that was successful in that. But I don't feel that I this was something that at least I would like to think that somebody else in my position would have attempted to do the same thing if they could have.
They're both retired now. Mike lives in Houston, Texas, Tommy lives on a little ranch in northern Idaho, but they still see each other at least ten times a year. After all, it's only a four hour flight. Even if they had to swim it, they'd still find a way back to each other. Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins,
Constanza Gallardo, ben Adaph Haffrey, and Izzy Carter. This episode was edited by Peter Clowney, Design and additional music by Jake Krski, Recording engineering by Nita Lawrence, fact checking by Arthur Gombert's original music by Eric Phillips. The rest of our team includes Carl Catele, Ashley Weaver, Greta Cone, Christina Sullivan, Sarah Nix, Nicole Optenbosch, Eric Sandler, Kerry Brody, Taly Emlin,
and Jake Flanagan. Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the Pritzkert Military Museum in Library and Adam Plumpton, and extra special thanks to Dan McGinn. If you want to learn more about our Medal of Honor recipients, follow us on Instagram and Twitter. We'll be sharing photos and videos of the heroes featured on the show. We'd also love to hear from you dm us with a story about a courageous veteran in your life. If you don't know a veteran, we would love to hear a story
of how courage was contagious in your own life. I'm your host, Malcolm Glabba.
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