American War Hero · Vietnam War · Notice Nearby
No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the service and the writing, not an invented face.
Thomas O. Zorn Jr.
June 14, 1946 – unaccounted for since September 17, 1972
Born Atlanta, Georgia (home of record Waycross, Ware County, Georgia)
Loss location: Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam (loss location)
Captain, U.S. Air Force; pilot, 17th Wild Weasel Squadron, 388th Tactical Fighter Wing, Korat RTAFB; F-105G Thunderchief 62-8360 (Condor 01), SAM escort / Weasel mission, September 17, 1972
Missing in action — DPAA lists Capt. Thomas Oneal Zorn Jr. as Unaccounted For (Active Pursuit), profile a0Jt00000001UXeEAM (verified 2026-09-28). Pilot of F-105G 62-8360 (Condor 01) hit by a SAM September 17, 1972; both crew ejected; parachutes seen into the Gulf of Tonkin; SAR observed bodies below the surface but could not recover them under harassing fire. EWO 1st Lt. Michael S. Turose also Unaccounted For. Memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall (Panel W1, Line 74). Birth date June 14, 1946, and Waycross, Georgia, home from POW Network bio z355 / Virtual Wall / Hall of Valor (public). Active Pursuit is an analytic category, not a recovered grave.
Thomas O'Neal Zorn Jr. was born June 14, 1946 — Atlanta on the Hall of Valor line, Waycross, Georgia, on the home-of-record line — and entered the Air Force from that state. By September 1972 he was a captain in the 17th Wild Weasel Squadron at Korat, flying the F-105G work that drew SAM fire away from strike packages headed for Hanoi.
On September 17 he flew Condor 01 — tail 62-8360 — escorting a strike force. A surface-to-air missile hit the Thunderchief. Both men got out. Two good parachutes went into the Gulf of Tonkin. Searchers later saw bodies below the surface and could not pull them up under harassing fire. Neither Zorn nor his electronic warfare officer, 1st Lt. Michael S. Turose, came home.
DPAA profile a0Jt00000001UXeEAM still lists him Unaccounted For, analytical category Active Pursuit. He is on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu and on the Wall at Panel W1, Line 74. A finding of death after an unrecovered water loss is not a recovered grave.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1965-031
- Content hash
- 90ccff98 bfbf50f8 f651f050 8f23d865 67d7e2f5 c7f5f69e 99def11c d02525d3
- Base anchor
- 0xf126e3 182a95f9 0372092b 12e850ef 7b5076fd a4745687 99d7b27c 3b0d0f9b 87
Base stores the content hash, publication number, memorial id, and timestamp — not the full obituary text. The complete memorial remains on Notice Nearby. This is not a legal affidavit.