Surviving Hell. Leo Thorsness
If Surviving Hell is in part a self-help manual, it is also a straightforward memoir of Thorsness’s captivity as a prisoner of war. As such, it takes its place on the bookshelf alongside such noteworthy memoirs of captivity during the Vietnam War as James N. Rowe’s Five Years to Freedom, Jeremiah Denton’s When Hell Was In Session, Robinson Risner’s The Passing of the Night, Medal of Honor recipient James Stockdale’s In Love and War (written together with Stockdale’s wife, Sybil Stockdale), Medal of Honor recipient George E. “Bud” Day’s Return With Honor, and John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers (written with Mark Salter). The title of this book obviously recalls Denton’s. As a memoir, this book could also be titled Remembering Hell.
Thorsness’s book is extraordinarily understated in its remembrance of hard times. Especially when it comes to his own ordeal, much of the suffering is left unstated or implicit in the text. Consider Thorsness’s reflection on his first three years in captivity: “It was indescribably difficult surviving the first three years of prison, and, if treatment had not improved, I would not have made it through the next three years.”
Thorsness’s story is also representative of the stories of those whose service has brought them the Medal of Honor. Thorsness is one of only five living Air Force recipients of the Medal of Honor. He is active with the Medal of Honor Foundation, seeking to convey the stories of living Medal of Honor recipients to a wider audience. One of the foundation’s projects was the production of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, a book that depicts and briefly tells the stories of living Medal of Honor recipients.
The text of Medal of Honor was written by the founder and original publisher of Encounter Books, Peter Collier, who donated his services to the project. Collier drew on his experience writing the book for a Wall Street Journal column on Memorial Day 2006, called “America’s Honor.” He noted our inattentiveness to heroes such as Thorsness, and our decreasing ability to understand them. “The notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration,” Collier explained. “We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.”
One reason we have a hard time understanding men such as Thorsness is their rarity. In this book, Thorsness provides a case study of the “great-souled” or magnanimous man at the summit of human excellence of whom Aristotle speaks in the Nicomachean Ethics. If it were not for the example set by men such as Thorsness, we might doubt that such men actually exist.
Aristotle explains (here I am borrowing from the superb translation by Joe Sachs) that the great-souled man is especially concerned with honors and acts of dishonor. The great-souled man, because he holds few things in high honor, is not someone who takes small risks or is passionately devoted to taking risks, but someone who takes great risks. When he does take a risk, he does so without regard for his life, on the ground that it is not just on any terms that life is worth living.
In his Memorial Day column, Collier eloquently explained why we should attend to the story Thorsness exemplifies:
We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason only: We’re also the home of the brave.
Thorsness’s memoir proves this point several times over. It is a book that can provide comfort and assistance to us in our own hard times. It is also a book that can point the way to a life well lived. In its own modest style, this is a great book by a great man.
—Scott W. Johnson
November 2010
CHAPTER 1
MEDAL OF HONOR MISSION
On April 19, 1967, my backseater, Harry Johnson, and I took off from the Takhli Air Base in Thailand and headed for North Vietnam. We were counting down the few missions we had to go before reaching the magic number of 100, which provided a ticket home from Vietnam. We had about a dozen to go. By this time, we were the lead F-105F “Wild Weasel” crew.
The two-man Weasels were designed to deal with the Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations. Originally, the plane was called the Mad Mongoose, but the Air Force discovered that this name was already taken and so it became the Wild Weasel. We affectionately referred to the F-105 as the “Thud” because it was unwieldy and lumbering, but reliable with a strong heart. The guys in the bombers were particular fans because we took out the SAM sites so they made it out alive after dropping their loads.
Just a few weeks earlier, a Weasel flight usually involved a two-man crew, like Harry—the Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO)—and me, in an F-105F, and three wingmen in the single-seater F-105D. But more F-105Fs were arriving and, on the way back home after a successful mission, Harry and I came up with the idea of having two Weasels in our flight and splitting the four planes into two elements just before entering the target area. If we put one two-man Weasel along with a single seat F-105D on each side of the target, we could attack two SAM sites simultaneously instead of just one. By this point in the war, the entire North Vietnamese defense system—flak gunners, MiG pilots, SAM site operators—had set reactions when an attack—24 American planes—headed their way. Under the new scenario Harry and I worked out, by the time the Weasel flight split, they would have their game plan set and would not be able to make last-minute adjustments.
Of course, there was a down side to the plan. Splitting the flight meant that each half would have only one leader and one wingman to watch for surprise SAM launches and sneaky MiGs. And we would have less firepower. We would have just two planes with bombs to wipe out the SAMs, destroy their radar and control van, and kill the launch crew.
On April 19, our target was the Xuan Mai army barracks and a storage supply in the flat delta area 30 miles southwest of Hanoi. As we refueled over Laos, we had a flight of four F-4 Phantoms to defend us against MiGs and four flights of four F-105D strike aircraft—Thuds heavily loaded with bombs to hit the SAM installations.
The second Weasel crew in my flight was Jerry Hoblit and his EWO, Tom Wilson: both experts at their job. Jerry and I had known one another for years and had the “split-the-Weasel-flight” system down pretty good.
We were still about 80 miles from the target area when Harry radioed me, “It’s going to be a busy day, we’ve already got two SAMs looking at us with acquisition radar, and there are bound to be more.”
The closer we got, the more SAM sites were tracking us. A SAM’s practical range was about 17 miles. We carried an AGM-45 SHRIKE missile that homed in on the SAM’s radar, but its range was about seven miles. They got to shoot first. That was their advantage. Ours was that if they missed, we had a window of opportunity to kill them. The camouflage on their sites was useless once they launched, as the SAM kicked up debris and often left a smoke or vapor trail that we could home right onto.
As we approached our preplanned split, about 25 miles southwest of the target, our SAM scope was overflowing; no less than four sites were tracking us, plus several 85mm flak radars. To keep from alerting the enemy on the radio, we used visual signals. I gave a large fast rock of our wings, and Jerry and Tom split off. In our pre-flight briefing, we had decided that Jerry and his wingman would take the north side of the target area, Harry and I the south.
Airborne electronic intelligence aircraft, B-66s mostly, circled at a relatively safe distance and alerted us when MiGs were airborne. They transmitted on Guard frequency—the emergency channel. When our channel and Guard transmitted at the same time, both became garbled and hard to understand. That garble added to the age-old axiom: “more