The fuel gauge read empty when the runway at Udorn, just across the Mekong in Thailand, came up in front of the nose. Maj. Leo Thorsness had pulled his F-105F back to idle with 70 miles to go, by his own account, and glided in. In the back seat, his electronic warfare officer, Capt. Harold “Harry” Johnson, called the afternoon of 19 April 1967 “a full day’s work.”

Johnson was understating it. In about four hours the pair had knocked out two surface-to-air missile sites, shot down a MiG-17, damaged another, flown back into North Vietnam alone to guard a rescue, and sent their tanker to another Thud pilot who was about to run dry. Col. Jack Broughton, their wing’s vice commander, said Thorsness “took on most of North Vietnam all by himself.”

The mission earned Thorsness the Medal of Honor. He would wait more than six years to receive it, and word of his nomination reached him in tap code, through the wall of a North Vietnamese prison. Eleven days after that glide into Udorn, he was shot down.

Bait With a Back Seat

Thorsness, born on a Minnesota farm in 1932, was 35 that spring and the “chief Weasel” at Takhli, in Thailand, flying with the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing’s 357th Tactical Fighter Squadron. Wild Weasel crews had a job description that read like a dare. They went into the target area first, trolling for surface-to-air missile batteries with their own aircraft as bait, and came out last, after the bombers had gone.

The quarry was the Soviet-supplied SA-2. When a site’s Fan Song guidance radar painted a Weasel, the crew heard a crackle in their headsets called the “rattlesnake.” Once that radar was on the air, the Weasels could kill it with an AGM-45 Shrike, a missile that homed on the radar beam, or guide the strike onto the site. The catch was that the SAM operators got the first shot.

That is why the second seat mattered. The first Weasels, two-seat F-100F Super Sabres, were too slow to keep up with the F-105D strike packages they protected. Their replacement was the F-105F, the Thunderchief’s two-seat trainer version: fully combat capable, with room for an electronic warfare officer to decipher the threat receivers and steer the pilot onto the target. F-105F Weasels began combat missions in June 1966, and five of the first 11 were lost in July and August.

The arithmetic was ugly. Against fighters, the SA-2 could reach about 17 miles; the Shrike, by Thorsness’s reckoning, about seven. The saying among F-105 pilots was that by your 66th mission you would have been shot down twice and picked up once, and 26 Wild Weasel aircraft were shot down in 1967 alone. By April, Thorsness and Johnson had nearly 90 missions behind them and had dodged 53 SAMs.

Kingfish Over the Black River

The target on 19 April was the Xuan Mai army barracks and supply area, 37 miles southwest of Hanoi. Thorsness led Kingfish flight in F-105F 63-8301, with two more F-105F Weasels and a single-seat F-105D, ahead of four flights of bomb-laden Thuds and a flight of F-4 Phantoms for MiG cover. Near the target he split the flight, sending Kingfish 03 and 04 north and taking the south side with Kingfish 02, Majors Tom Madison and Tom Sterling.

The first SAM radar came up southeast of Xuan Mai. Thorsness fired a Shrike from seven miles, and the signal vanished almost at once. A second site came on so strongly that the scope was “growing hair,” in Weasel slang; through broken cloud he saw it, missiles in firing position, ringed by guns. He attacked through 37 mm and 57 mm flak and put his CBU-24 cluster bombs squarely on it.

Then the day turned. Kingfish 02 was hit by anti-aircraft fire, and Madison and Sterling ejected over the foothills near the Black River. To the north, Kingfish 03 and 04 had run into MiGs, and when Kingfish 04’s afterburner would not light, both headed for home. Kingfish 01 was now the only American fighter crew in the area.

Thorsness circled the two parachutes, relaying their position to the rescue center, until Johnson spotted a MiG-17 low at their nine o’clock. The F-105 was built to deliver nuclear weapons at low level, not to dogfight, but Thorsness dropped in behind the MiG and opened up with the 20 mm Gatling gun. The MiG’s left wing came apart and it spun into a rice field. With more MiGs closing from behind, he lit the afterburner, outran them and went looking for a tanker.

A short MedalOfHonorBook film on Thorsness and the 19 April 1967 rescue fight.

Going Back In

Topped off, he turned straight back into North Vietnam. Rescue helicopters and propeller-driven A-1 Skyraiders, the “Sandys,” were orbiting the downed crew, and darkness was less than two hours away. Thorsness found four MiG-17s and went after them with all he had left: 500 rounds of 20 mm ammunition.

“One of the MiGs flew right into my gunsight at about 2,000 feet and pieces started falling off the [enemy] aircraft,” he told Airman magazine in 1974. “They hadn’t seen us, but they did now.” Out of ammunition, he dropped to 50 feet and outran the rest. The MiGs turned on the Sandys and shot one down, and Thorsness, his gun empty, turned back anyway, hoping to draw them off the surviving Skyraider.

He never had to find out how that would end. Another flight of F-105s arrived and took on the MiGs, and Thorsness headed for the tanker over Laos. On the way, an F-105 pilot separated from his flight called in with 600 pounds of fuel. Thorsness sent the tanker to him instead, worked out that his own jet could just reach Udorn, about 200 miles closer than Takhli, and turned south.

Officially, Kingfish 01 destroyed one MiG-17 and damaged another, as the Medal of Honor citation puts it; the second could not be confirmed, partly because the gun camera had run out of film. The Weasels also did their main job: no aircraft was shot down or damaged by a SAM that day, though the guns claimed several. The rescue force never reached Madison and Sterling, and both were captured.

Eleven Days Later

On 30 April, Thorsness and Johnson flew a morning mission, then stood by as a spare crew. When a Weasel scheduled for the afternoon aborted with radio trouble, they volunteered to fill in, flying as Carbine 03. “We were trying hard to get home by Mother’s Day,” Thorsness said. It was their 93rd mission; he had seven to go.

Over northwest North Vietnam, two MiG-21s came up behind the flight unseen. Carbine 04, Lt. Bob Abbott in a single-seat F-105D, went down first, and within a minute a missile hit Thorsness’s jet. “All they had to do was pull up their nose and hose off their air-to-air missiles—and we were toast,” he said later. He ejected at close to 600 knots, and the windblast blew out both of his knees.

Vietnamese accounts credit the F-105F to MiG-21 pilot Nguyen Ngoc Do of the 921st Fighter Regiment. Abbott’s Thud was the first victory for Do’s wingman, Nguyen Van Coc, who would go on to be credited with nine American aircraft. Broughton’s rescue effort failed.

Six Years in Hanoi

Thorsness came down in mountainous jungle, where villagers armed with rifles and machetes cut off his clothes and pulled a black bag over his head; the last thing he saw was a man drawing back a machete, aimed at his stomach. The blow never came. About a day and a half later, he was in Hanoi.

He was held in the Hanoi Hilton and other camps and was known as a hard-core resister. For that he was denied medical treatment, spent a year in solitary confinement and suffered back injuries under torture. He also shared a cell with another downed pilot, John McCain, who later said Thorsness had “never let this experience break his spirit.”

At home, his wife, Gaylee, and their 11-year-old daughter, Dawn, went 11 months without knowing whether he was alive. Over the years he was allowed to send Gaylee 13 messages on seven-line forms. Most of her letters to him came back unopened, some stamped “Deceased” on the envelope.

Prisoners had to bow 90 degrees to the guards or be beaten. One day Thorsness refused and looked the guard in the eye. It struck him that the two of them could have been born in each other’s places; he had “won the flip of the coin.” From then on, he said, he felt sorry for his captors: “just by birthright, I was handed this fantastic amount of freedom.”

Thorsness talks about his years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

A Medal Tapped Through a Wall

His Medal of Honor recommendation went up in 1967 and was signed by the Secretary of the Air Force, but the Pentagon held it until the prisoners came home. Accounts differ on whether the award was formally approved during or after his captivity; either way, it was kept quiet so his captors could not use it against him. Thorsness learned of the nomination by tap code. The officer who had written it joined the wing after Thorsness went down, was shot down himself, and ended up in the same prison.

On 4 March 1973, Thorsness walked out of captivity on crutches. Delayed in Hawaii by illness, he flew the last leg home in a C-141 of his own. Off the California coast at night, the crew let him make the position report as “Homecoming 7.” The reply was “welcome home,” then “Don’t Fence Me In” and presidential clearance direct to St. Louis; his thought, he said, was that “for a Minnesota farm kid, this is not bad.”

President Richard Nixon presented the medal at the White House on 15 October 1973. The citation names him Lieutenant Colonel Thorsness, though he had flown the mission as a major, and Johnson received the Air Force Cross for the same flight. With his ejection and torture injuries ending his flying career, Thorsness retired from the Air Force ten days after the ceremony.

The Second Act

Politics came next, with mixed luck. In 1974 Thorsness challenged George McGovern for a US Senate seat in South Dakota and lost. In 1978 he lost a House race to a 31-year-old Democrat, Tom Daschle, by 139 votes after a recount, out of more than 129,000 cast; Daschle later became Senate Majority Leader. Thorsness finally won office in Washington state, serving in the state senate from 1988 to 1992.

He also served as a technical adviser on the film The Hanoi Hilton and in 2008 published a memoir, Surviving Hell: A POW’s Journey. Gaylee said he often talked about how lucky he was to be born an American, “where people are free.”

Leo Thorsness died of leukemia in St. Augustine, Florida, on 2 May 2017, at 85, and was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery on 14 February 2018. His daughter, Dawn, offered the simplest explanation of 19 April 1967. In combat, she said, he would ask himself: “If not me, who? And if not now, when?”

Sources: Air Force Magazine, Full Day by John T. Correll, June 2005; Air Force Magazine, Valor: Wild, Wild Weasel by John L. Frisbee, April 1985; Congressional Medal of Honor Society, recipient record and citation; PBS American Valor, Leo Thorsness profile and interview excerpt, 2003; Associated Press via Chicago Tribune, 5 May 2017; US Air Force, Medal of Honor recipient, former POW laid to rest, 14 February 2018; Fox News, The true legacy of Leo Thorsness by Dan Hampton, 11 May 2017; POW Network biography; Clerk of the US House of Representatives, Statistics of the Congressional Election of 7 November 1978; Internet Archive catalogue record for Surviving Hell (Encounter Books, 2008); Wikipedia: Leo K. Thorsness, Republic F-105 Thunderchief, Tom Daschle, Nguyen Van Coc, Nguyen Ngoc Do