“Nasty,” he says, “I don’t see the Qua Viet river, which means we’re not where we’re supposed to be.” So he should have been able to pick it up on the starlight scope. And I said, “Okay, Mike.” And he’d kind of look at me, you know, like — “You nut, we’re not where we’re supposed to be.” And he’d go back to the back of the line and off we’d go and patrol some more. And you know, every time we’d stop he’d let me know that, you know, “Hey, dumb-dumb, we’re not where we’re supposed to be!”

Michael Thornton: We were seeing bunkers and bon fires going and all these guys bouncing around.

Thomas Norris: We were patrolling through heavy, heavy North Vietnamese units. There were bunker complexes like I had never seen before.

Michael Thornton: We figured we were in North Vietnam.