By Ben Stein on 10.16.09 @ 6:08AM
What makes Tom Norris -- and thus our country -- exceptional.
As you are reading this, the high school I attended, Montgomery
Blair, in Silver Spring, Maryland, is having its 75th anniversary
celebration. We are honoring some famous grads, including Goldie
Hawn, the actress, Connie Chung, the TV journalist, Carl
Bernstein, famous investigative reporter, Sonny Jackson, ace
baseball player, and several others. The one who counts is named
Tom Norris.
He was in my class, class of '62. He was a likable kid and a
cross-country runner and wrestler. After the University of
Maryland, he joined the Navy and became one of the first of the
super-elite Navy Seals.
In April of 1972, he was sent into the midst of 30,000 North
Vietnamese soldiers who were invading South Vietnam along with
five South Vietnamese soldiers. He survived behind enemy lines
for a week seeking to rescue a downed American flyer. Somehow, he
found the man, badly wounded, and got him out while engaged in a
constant, nonstop firefight with the enemy. Disguised as a local,
in a sampan, he got the pilot to safety.
A few months later, in another action behind enemy lines, Tom was
shot in the face and was barely able to escape to a nearby Navy
vessel, thanks to the heroism of another Seal named Michael
Thornton.
Tom was in surgery for years. He lost vision in one eye. In 1976,
he received the nation’s highest honor, the Congressional Medal
of Honor, for his first mission. Mike Thornton received the same
medal for his action saving Tom. This makes Tom the only living
American to be involved in two Medal of Honor actions. THE ONLY
ONE.
When he got out of the Navy, with vision in only one eye, Tom
joined the FBI and worked undercover against domestic terrorist
units, especially the Aryan Nations in my beloved North Idaho.
Thanks to his cool heroism, the Aryan Nations are pretty much
gone from North Idaho. Recently on a late summer night, Tom and I
sat by Lake Pendoreille and he talked of his deeds the way a man
might talk about washing his car, with that little bravado.
Now, many people say America is finished, that it does not have
the spirit that it once had, that its best days are behind. I beg
to differ, and I offer as Exhibit A, my childhood friend and
classmate and neighbor in North Idaho, Tom Norris, a man of total
fearlessness and total modesty, Blair class of 1962. If our
school had produced him and not one other person, it would still
be a place of honor.
topics:
Montgomery Blair High School, Congressional Medal of Honor
