Medal of Honor Monday: Army 1st Lt. Brian Thacker

When the enemy attacked, Army 1st Lt. Brian Miles Thacker knew the troops at his small Vietnamese firebase would be overrun, but he refused to let them get trapped. Thacker called in airstrikes on top of his own position to keep the enemy at bay, then survived for days in the jungle afterward. For his courage and selflessness, he received the Medal of Honor.

Thacker was born on April 25, 1945, in Columbus, Ohio, to Elmer and Mary Thacker. His father served in the Air Force during the Korean War and became a career officer, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel. A self-described ‘Air Force brat,’ Thacker and his three sisters grew up at installations all over the country. During his childhood, he played sports and built model airplanes, he told the Library of Congress in a September 2002 Veterans History Project interview.

After high school, Thacker attended Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. When the Vietnam War began, he joined the university’s ROTC program as a way to defer his service until he graduated in 1969. That August, he was put on active duty in the Army and received a commission as a second lieutenant.

Thacker spent six months in Germany before deploying to Vietnam. Because he was part of the 1st Battalion, 92nd Field Artillery Regiment, Thacker said he saw very little combat his first several months in-country. He served at Firebase 6, a mountainous South Vietnamese artillery site near the borders of Laos and Cambodia. Thacker, who was with Battery A, was the leader of a seven-man American observation team tasked with supporting South Vietnamese forces who were firing on enemy units in the valley below.

The calm he’d gotten used to was shattered on March 31, 1971, when a massive force of North Vietnamese army soldiers tried to take control of the isolated base.

Thacker said his team was aware an attack was imminent, but all they could do was wait for it. The base planned for the South Vietnamese to hold the outer perimeter. At the same time, according to a 2020 Department of Veterans Affairs article, Thacker’s men would secure the last line of defense inside to keep the enemy from getting to the base’s deadly arsenal of firepower.

“We knew early on that we weren’t going to be able to hold the firebase,” Thacker said in his Library of Congress interview. “We didn’t have enough people or the right weaponry to fight off the attack.”

They tried anyway. For about four hours, Thacker remained in an exposed position to direct U.S. airstrikes and artillery fire against attacking forces. The base’s soldiers repeatedly pushed back the enemy throughout the morning, even after the outer perimeter defense collapsed and three Americans were killed.

“Our little oval that we called the firebase just kept shrinking and shrinking throughout the day,” Thacker said.

Two helicopters attempting to resupply the base were shot down. The surviving crew members from those flights joined Thacker’s team in their defense. But soon, the situation became untenable. During a lull in activity, Thacker learned the enemy was regrouping for a massive attack, so he ordered the troops around him to withdraw — a difficult feat because they had to make a treacherous 1.5-mile escape through enemy-held territory to make it to an extraction point.

Thacker, however, stayed behind with a South Vietnamese machine gunner to cover the fleeing troops. Eventually, he ordered that soldier to evacuate, too, leaving him alone to fend off the enemy. Thacker then did the only thing he could think of that would stop the onslaught — he called for artillery fire on his own position, which he expected enemy troops to reach quickly.

“The only coordinates that I could give the firing battery that were valid were the coordinates of my own position,” Thacker said during his 2002 interview.

After making the call, he ran as fast as he could along the same path the other evacuees took. Along the way, he had to hide. So, he ducked into a bamboo thicket on a hillside. He said it was good shelter, but unfortunately, an enemy antiaircraft team quickly set up nearby, trapping him. For eight days, he had to stay nearly motionless with no food, water or any way of knowing if the enemy would find him.

“I could hear them signaling each other. I could hear the firing positions,” Thacker said in the Veterans History Project interview. “We got strafed by American gunships trying to suppress their fire.”

By the eighth day of hiding, Thacker knew that friendly forces had regained control of the firebase, so he decided to try to get back there. Slowly, he began crawling back up the hill.

“I was growing weaker every day,” he said in a 2012 Baltimore Sun newspaper interview. “I’d start up the hill, go a few meters and rest. When you’re in that condition, 10 meters is an eternity.”

When Thacker made it to the base entrance, he surrendered to U.S. troops — many of whom assumed he was dead. They tried to evacuate him immediately, but the North Vietnamese were listening in to U.S. communications, so antiaircraft fire kept any friendly helicopters from getting in that day. It wasn’t until the next morning that a medevac was able to extract him.

Thacker was taken to Pleiku Air Base before being sent to a hospital in Japan for treatment of extreme dehydration. It took him months to recover. He said he was close enough to the end of his two-year commitment that he never returned to his unit. Instead, he was sent home and discharged.

Thacker said he later learned that all of the men who withdrew from the base during the attack successfully escaped.

Thacker was in his first week of graduate school at the University of Hawaii when he learned he had been approved for the Medal of Honor. He received it from President Richard M. Nixon on Oct. 15, 1973, during a White House ceremony. Eight other men also received the nation’s highest medal for valor that day.

After graduate school, Thacker went to work at the Tibor Rubin Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach, California, in 1975. He continued working for the VA for 26 years, retiring in March 2002 as chief of management support services in Washington. He has lived in Wheaton, Maryland, since then.

Thacker continues to support the veteran and military communities. He’s worked with Gold Star families, spoken with students about his experiences and continues to attend veterans’ events.

In 2019, his alma mater, Weber State University, created a scholarship in his name.