Norman was born in Shreveport, and entered Louisiana State University where he enrolled in ROTC and studied law. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant when he entered the U.S. Army Air Corps. Assigned to the Sixteenth Observation Squadron, part of the Sixty-Eighth Observation Group, he shipped out on the SS Joseph T. Dickman, and arrived in time for the invasion of North Africa on November 9, 1942. A Higgins boat bringing in part of his unit turned over. Twelve drowned. "The first job I had to do was turn in killed-in-action reports for twelve people," he recalls. Later he set up a fighter-training center south of Casablanca at Berrechid, where he spent the summer of 1943, enduring temperatures of 118 degrees. It was so hot, he says, he couldn't sit in metal chairs in his office, nor touch the planes. Norman later joined a new squadron in southern Italy, where he worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and with Fifteenth Air Force headquarters. His unit dropped agents, arms, and supplies to the French resistance in southern France, as well as to freedom fighters in Albania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and Germany. Norman returned to America on a Liberty ship, arriving after an eighteen-day voyage in New York in October of 1945. "I landed in New York City and I can remember looking at the lady out there and crying," he recalls. Norman left active duty as a major, but spent seventeen years in the reserves. After graduating from Louisiana State University, and finishing law school, he worked in the oil business for much of his career.