American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  Perhaps he is right. But consider the context. Here was a Riverside boy, a bright boy and voracious reader who had learned through books both how mean was his world and how limitless was that outside it. He had done what no Riverside boy had ever done: graduated from both college and law school. But the rewards, the commission in his beloved Marine Corps and becoming a lawyer in Sioux City, had just been snatched from his grasp.

  Frank Work still shakes his head in sadness when asked about this time in Day’s life. He says Day was devastated. Work recalls how, after Day received the terrible news, the two of them went to have a beer and to talk. Day began bemoaning the consequences of getting drunk in Hawaii and the incident with the shotgun. He took a bar napkin and wrote on it that his wild-rabbit days were over; that henceforth he would be more serious about life; that he would buckle down and seek out every opportunity to make something of himself. He slid the napkin across the table to Work, tapped the napkin, and nodded his head in a silent promise.

  Most young men would have left the napkin on the bar and forgotten about it as another beer-fueled bugle of ambition. But Frank Work looked at the napkin and knew his friend was bound for glory. He kept the napkin more than forty years. And later, when people in Sioux City read of Day’s acclaim, Work said, “I could have told you that.” And he brought out the napkin to show them when it all began.

  DAY went to summer camp with the Army National Guard in 1950. Concurrently, North Korea invaded South Korea. Day was terribly disappointed when his Guard unit was not called to active duty, and when he applied for active duty, he was rebuked for his temerity.

  When a friend suggested he switch his commission to the Air Force, he was noncommittal. Then the friend talked to a general who not only offered a commission but said Day could go on active duty. It is easy to understand why the Air Force wanted Day. At the time, the military was still something of a jobs program. Most officers did not have college degrees. Efforts to build a professional officer corps were only just beginning. As a result, someone like Day was hot property.

  On November 28, 1950, Bud Day moved his commission to the Air Force Reserves. He was assigned to a unit in Sioux City and told to expect a call to active duty. The call came on March 15, 1951.

  In April, Bud Day left Sioux City for the beginning of a career that would last almost twenty-seven years and would take him to the distant corners of the earth. He would never again live in Sioux City.

  Because of his law degree and his experience as a detective, the Air Force called up Day as a special investigator. But the Air Force needed pilots, and Day took the physical and passed. However, there was a problem. Flight training took a year. Day had just turned twenty-seven, and Air Force regulations said a man had to finish flight training within six months after reaching that age.

  For the third time, Bud Day needed a waiver to go to war.

  4

  The Wild Blue Yonder

  IN the spring of 1951, the Air Force was gearing up for war so rapidly that prospective pilots were accepted faster than flight schools could accommodate them. Thus, young men were sent to Air Force bases around the country and assigned menial jobs until a new flight-training class opened. Bud Day was ordered to Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas. When the provost marshal, the top cop at Goodfellow, read Day’s personnel records, he thought Bud was a godsend. Usually, prospective pilots are placed in charge of officers’ clubs, supply facilities, and motor pools. In “pipeline status,” they do not receive an officers efficiency report (ER), the periodic report card that forms the basis for promotion. But Day was given a real job training air policemen and advising the provost marshal on legal matters. As a result, Day received his first ER a year before his contemporaries received theirs.

  An ER is awarded by the officer’s immediate superior and may be endorsed by a higher-ranking commander. There is no better way to evaluate the arc of an officer’s career than by thumbing through his ERs and seeing what his superiors thought of him at given intervals.

  Bud Day’s first ER covers a short period — June 4 through August 19. But the provost marshal wrote that Day did “an outstanding job,” that he had a “keen and alert appearance,” that he “eagerly accepts the responsibility of control, supervision, direction, and instruction of subordinates,” and that he “exacts rigid conformance with the standards of discipline and conduct expected of Air Force officers.” Finally, the ER said Day “makes a continuous effort toward self-improvement” by taking extension courses and completing them with record speed.

  Much about this is significant. The military considers second lieutenants among the most useless creatures on earth, and here was a second lieutenant receiving what the military calls a “water-walker” ER. In fact, the ER was so laudatory that a colonel subsequently downgraded it, saying no second lieutenant could be so good.

  To a civilian, the comments regarding Day’s appearance may seem of little importance, even trivial. But military officers are expected to have a “keen and alert appearance.” So by singling this out in Day’s ER, his superiors were stating that he was exceptionally well turned out. This, in turn, spoke volumes about his pride in being an Air Force officer. That pride was balanced by a perfect combination of ambition and humility. Day was better educated than his boss — something that would be true for most of his career. Yet he was driven at Goodfellow, as he would be at future assignments, to further his education.

  Doris was also getting quite an education. Life at Goodfellow was unlike anything in her experience. Her father was a successful businessman, and her last years at home had been quite comfortable. But at that time the Air Force did not pay to move an officer, and Bud could not afford to move their furniture from Sioux City. Now all he and Doris had were a roll-away bed, an ironing board, a hot plate, a coffeepot, a few plates, and a couple of wicker chairs. The ironing board also served as the dining room table. In the bedroom window was a radiator-like device that Day called the “swamp cooler.” A garden hose pushed water through the device and a fan sucked in outside air over the water-cooled container and lowered bedroom temperatures to almost tolerable levels. Doris, generations of Norwegian blood coursing through her veins, found the Texas heat so oppressive that she slept about twelve hours a day. Insects of a type never seen in Sioux City were everywhere. When storms came and the wind blew for days, dust filled the house. No matter how often Doris cleaned, the house was always dusty. One day she walked into the bathroom and saw what she thought was a bug emerging from the sink. She had earlier seen the same sort of bug crawling up the bedroom wall. “Bud, look at that funny bug,” she said as she lifted her bare foot to step on it.

  “Doris, don’t touch it. That’s a scorpion.”

  Doris remembers two things in particular about Goodfellow: From the beginning, Bud rarely talked about his work. “You can’t repeat what you don’t know,” he told Doris. He explained about wartime security, and because of her family’s experiences in Norway, she understood. She also remembers how messy Bud was. Never mind that his tailored uniform shirt had razor creases that lined up with the creases in his trousers. Never mind that his haircut was short and that his shoes gleamed; at home he was a slob. When he walked in the door, he took off his shoes and socks and left them in the middle of the floor. Doris grew weary of picking up his sweaty socks but accepted this as one of Bud’s quirks and as part of learning to be a good wife.

  In August, Day entered flight training at Hondo AFB. Hondo is about forty miles west of San Antonio, out in the middle of nowhere. The base had been closed since the end of World War II and was now reopened because of the demand for pilots in Korea. Most facilities were decrepit, broken, or nonexistent, but the runway was in good shape and that was all that mattered.

  Flying a jet aircraft in the early 1950s was a dangerous business.

  The flying class ahead of Day was filled with two groups: new Naval Academy and West Point graduates (there was not yet an Air Force Academy) who wanted to fly, and the
sons of Air Force generals. Many members of the class were given flying time before their training class began, anything to give them a leg up on their contemporaries. Academy graduates and generals’ sons were programmed for success.

  About 80 percent of Day’s class consisted of cadets, young men without college degrees accepted for pilot training who had not yet received their commission. (They would be commissioned when they were awarded their wings.) This means, of course, that the overwhelming bulk of new pilots, many of whom would make a career of the military, had no college degree. It would be another generation before the Air Force had an officer corps of educated professionals.

  The other 20 percent of the class were retreads from World War II, Day among a handful of newly commissioned officers. While the cadets were eighteen or nineteen years old, the retreads were generally in their thirties. Day was in the middle: seven years or so older than the cadets and about ten years younger than the retreads.

  Flight training begins with weeks in the classroom, studying the theory of flight, meteorology, navigation, radio procedures, and a host of other technical subjects. Then the student flies with an instructor.

  A student’s first solo flight is always a career milestone. On the afternoon that he soloed, Day came home to find a candlelight dinner. He smiled, thinking that somehow Doris had heard and this was a celebratory feast.

  “I have news for you,” he said.

  She smiled. “I have news too.”

  “You go first.”

  Her smile grew wider. “I got my driver’s license today.”

  An overjoyed Day laughed and congratulated Doris. Soloing an aircraft, he truly believed, took second place to the fact that Doris, at twenty-one, had her first driver’s license. It was the beginning of what would be a lifelong pattern for Day: no matter his deeds of valor, his awards and honors, he would always place his wife’s accomplishments ahead of his own.

  Because Bud and Doris had so few material things, they continued their practice of long afternoon and evening conversations. And while Day was learning to be a pilot, both he and Doris were learning about life in west Texas. It was like an exotic foreign country. Everyone talked slowly, and it seemed they all had two first names. Bud and Doris lived in the upstairs portion of a house where the landlady was named Ella Mae. She had two daughters, Meda Jane and Barbara Joann.

  Back home in Iowa, one name was enough for anybody.

  Everything was different. Doris had never heard of Mexican food, had never eaten fried shrimp, hot peppers, black-eyed peas, or pinto beans. And as isolated as Texas could feel, it was also strangely cosmopolitan to someone as sheltered as Doris. Back home, she had never heard of spaghetti.

  In other ways, it was as small as a shoe box. So many people went barefoot here. They even drove cars while barefoot. Everyone made it his or her business to know everyone else’s business. There was only one phone in the house where Bud and Doris boarded, and the landlady listened to every conversation. Once, Doris returned from a grocery trip to San Antonio and was talking to her father on the phone. She told him about a frightening thunderstorm she had experienced. A few minutes after Doris went back upstairs, the landlady called a friend and said, “Did you hear they had a really big storm in San Antonio today?”

  Sometimes on Fridays, Bud and Doris went into Hondo to a dance. The sides of the building were raised to let in a vagrant breeze. Men wore cowboy boots, jeans, hats, and T-shirts. They apparently did not bathe before coming, and Doris could smell cowboy from across the room. The locals danced in a fashion Bud and Doris had never seen: arms flapping, legs pumping, and boots stomp-ing, and whooping and laughing and holding their women tightly.

  In Sioux City, Lutherans did not dance.

  ONCE finished with basic flight school, Day, in February 1952, was ordered up to Big Spring, Texas, for additional training as a fighter pilot, specifically as a fighter-bomber pilot. He would fly the T-33, part of the first generation of notoriously underpowered Air Force jets, and would learn strafing and bombing techniques — how to put “iron in the mud.”

  At Big Spring, Day picked up one of those habits so revelatory of fighter pilots: he began using JP-4 — jet fuel — in his cigarette lighter. JP-4 was a high-grade kerosene with an odor that many found unpleasant but that was beloved by early fighter pilots. If the pilot was in civilian clothes, every time he lit a cigarette, he sent out an unspoken message: Hey, I’m a fighter pilot.

  Day’s instructor at Big Spring had flown propeller aircraft in World War II and resented being called out of civilian life to teach. He was an overly cautious man who never pushed aircraft to the outer edge of the performance envelope and, as a result, did not teach budding combat pilots the full limits of what they and the machines could and could not do. The instructor also was a screamer who shouted obscenities at students who — as students inevitably do — made mistakes. On one flight he called Day a “dumb son of a bitch.”

  Many students think such abuse is part of training. Not Day. He was a Riverside boy and a former Marine. When the aircraft landed, Day skidded down the ladder, shucked his parachute, and shouted up to the instructor, “Get down here! I’m going to kick your ass!”

  The instructor refused to dismount. Day eventually stalked off and told his flight commander that he did not want to fly again with “that chickenshit instructor.” Thereafter, he was assigned another instructor, a man who knew how to bank and yank, a man who knew how to fly a jet aircraft at maximum performance, a man who showed Day what six Gs felt like. This instructor could put the T-33 on the edge of a stall and hold it there longer than anyone Day had ever seen. The natural tendency of a jet aircraft is either to fly or to fall out of the air. To put an aircraft on the edge of a stall and hold it there, nibbling at the stall while still maintaining flying speed, was a virtuoso performance. It was also a skill that every air-to-mud pilot needed, because if he pulled too many Gs coming off a bomb run, the aircraft could stall and depart flight — which meant it assumed the flying characteristics of a brick.

  Thus, Day fared well the first time he challenged a nominal superior. As a young man, Day was a curious mixture of excellent manners and thin-skinned and prickly aggressiveness — a typical Riverside boy. With age he would become more temperate, and his manners would be ascendant. But throughout his military career, he never had any reluctance about criticizing his superiors. In the hierarchical Air Force, this would have serious consequences.

  Day graduated in September 1952 and received his wings. He was one of the few lawyer–fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force. And as one of the top graduates in class 52-F, the sixth flying class to graduate in 1952, Day had his choice of assignments.

  His overarching desire was to fly combat in Korea. But he faced a dilemma. If he chose to go to Luke AFB in Arizona or Nellis AFB in Nevada and take the “hard polish” course to become a combat pilot, he probably would go to Korea. But not all Luke and Nellis graduates went to Korea. Day wanted a sure thing.

  A lot of talk was going around about Operation Fair Play, a plan to use the F-94 Starfire, America’s first all-weather jet aircraft, as a night fighter and attack aircraft in Korea. At the time, the Air Force was limiting its fighting in Korea almost entirely to daylight hours. The reason was simple: fighter pilots in the new Air Force did not have the instrument-flying skills for night flying or for severe weather — too many were killing themselves in rather spectacular fashion by crashing into mountains. The very premise of Operation Fair Play acknowledged this deficiency. An Air Force that flies only in daylight hours and good weather is not truly an Air Force. Pilots accepted for Operation Fair Play would receive an advanced six-week course in instrument flying before going to Korea — and they would definitely go to Korea.

  Day volunteered and received orders for Moody AFB in Valdosta, Georgia.

  Valdosta was in central-south Georgia, a few miles from the Florida line. In 1952, it was, and remains today, a pissant little town that, if not at the end of th
e world, is in the same zip code. Here people married their cousins, spoke as if they had a mouthful of mush, and carried all manner of guns in their trucks and on their persons. For two people from Sioux City, this was another strange land.

  Every time Day took off with an instructor, he flew “under the hood”; that is, he wore a device over his head that restricted his vision to the instrument panel. Unusual attitudes, intercepts, landings, all were done under the hood.

  Often, pilots had a chance for real instrument flying. Powerful thunderstorms sweep off the Gulf of Mexico and cut across the area where Florida and Georgia meet. Pilots out of Moody went hunting for this fierce weather and, when they found it, tightened their seat belts, turned up the cockpit lights, and flew into the darkest and most violent parts they could find. Naturally, the trainees had some apprehension about this. But the standard response of the instructor as he pointed the aircraft into the heart of the storm was “Faint heart never fucked a pig,” and that became the watchword of young pilots who went through instrument training at Moody in the early 1950s. For years afterward, when facing an onerous task, they declared, “Faint heart never fucked a pig,” and then they did the job.

  When pilots graduated from Moody, they received a “green card” as proof of their proficiency in all-weather flying. Green cards were relatively rare. Having the card meant that in bad weather, the holder — and not an operations officer on the ground — made the decision as to whether or not he would fly. He could take off in zero-zero weather — that is, when the weather reduced both vertical and horizontal visibility to zero. Some considered the green card a license to go out and get killed. But as much as anything that happened to the operational Air Force in the 1950s, the school at Moody and the green card made a professional Air Force.

  Not only did Day demonstrate his flying proficiency by receiving his green card at Moody, but he also first demonstrated his intuitive genius as a pilot there.