by Robert Coram
The Air Guard unit in Niagara Falls was the only choice.
Day took a deep breath and decided he was going to make the Guard unit a combat-ready outfit.
ONE day in 1965, Bud heard that Robinson Risner — the famed Korean War ace he had met at Nellis back in 1958 — had been shot down in Vietnam but had been rescued. Later, in September, Day taxied in from a flight, and before he could alight from the aircraft, an officer came running up and said, “Bud, they shot down Robbie again. This time they got him. He’s MIA.”
Bud shook his head in sympathy.
DAY’S final ER at Niagara Falls tells the story of his three years there. The ER said Day had performed his duties “in an absolutely superior manner.” Not only had he made the 107th combat ready but he survived one of the most-feared experiences of a commander: a no-notice operational readiness inspection (ORI). An ORI begins when a group of senior officers drops in unannounced and outlines a wartime scenario, and for almost a week the unit operates on a high-tempo wartime footing. Both active-duty and Guard units often flunk a no-notice ORI. But Day’s group got through without a failure, downgrade, or makeup — the only Air National Guard unit in America that year to do so and get a combat-ready rating.
Day’s ER recommended he be considered for command of a fighter squadron. The ER said Day, out of all officers assigned to the unit since its creation in 1948, “is by far the most effective.”
For the three years he was at Niagara Falls, Day flew more than thirty hours per month as a test pilot, instructor pilot, and flight examiner. He accumulated almost five thousand flying hours. Very few pilots in the Air Force had as many hours of jet time as did Bud Day. Again, Day was rated “absolutely superior” — an almost never–bestowed evaluation. And the endorsing officer recommended that he be promoted “well ahead of contemporaries.”
DESPITE all this, it seemed to Day that back-to-back dead-end jobs meant his career had stagnated. He and Doris had many long talks about this. After Niagara Falls, he would have the time and grade to be considered for promotion to lieutenant colonel. But the promotion would almost certainly include a dreaded Pentagon assignment or a staff job. With his time in the Marines added to his time in the Air Force, he could retire in 1968 with twenty years of service. Bud and Doris decided that once he could retire, he would. They would then return to Sioux City, build a two-story brick house on Country Club Drive, and spend the remainder of their days in the place where they grew up, worrying about their real estate investments and little more.
THE year 1966 was pivotal for Bud and Doris. His tour at Niagara Falls was coming to an end, the war in Vietnam was escalating, and many of Day’s fellow fighter pilots had coveted combat assignments. That year Bud and Doris celebrated their seventeenth wedding anniversary. And in 1966 they again filed an adoption application. This time they were specific: they wanted a girl, preferably one about four years old, thus putting her between the ages of Steve and George.
Instead the adoption agency offered two girls — twins — who were sixteen months old. Bud and Doris named the girls Sonja Marie and Sandra Marie, “Marie” having been both the name of Doris’s mother and the middle name of Bud’s mother.
At last, the Day clan was complete. One son was born in Germany and another in California, and the two girls were from New York. The parents were from America’s heartland. In one sense, the Days were the perfect family of a professional Air Force officer.
Perhaps the one oddity was the name Doris Day, the same as a popular movie star of the time. Ever since they were married, people commented on her name. Now, if Doris called Bud’s office and asked to have him paged and said her name was Doris Day, the switchboard operator often hung up. It was difficult for her to cash checks. She began asking her friends to call her Dorie.
During all this, opposition to the war in Vietnam was growing at home: antiwar protests had taken place the previous year at the United Nations and at Rutgers University. Now demonstrations were spreading. The antiwar feeling was so strong that military people who worked at the Pentagon were advised to wear civilian clothes to work. Public officials were speaking out against the war. None of this made sense to Bud Day. To a Midwesterner, politics stopped at the water’s edge. America was at war, and it was the duty of every American to support the effort.
In early 1966 Day read an article in the Air Force Times saying there was a critical shortage of squadron commanders in Vietnam. He was a high-time pilot and a senior major who had been recommended for promotion below the zone to lieutenant colonel. He had years of glowing efficiency reports. He thought all this made him a prime candidate for a squadron commander slot in Vietnam. It could be his last assignment before retiring.
To a civilian, it seems bewildering at best, callous at worst, that a forty-one-year-old man with four children — three of them in diapers — would ask to go to war. But such is the nature of the warrior; a warrior rushes toward — not away from — the sound of the guns. Bud Day had volunteered for the Marine Corps in World War II and had volunteered for combat duty during the Korean War. Now he was volunteering again.
This time he would need no waivers.
This time he would find combat.
This time he would find everlasting glory.
Vietnam was his war.
DORIS was not happy about Bud’s volunteering for Vietnam. By now they had thirty-eight rental properties back in Sioux City, a tidy portfolio that was producing enough income that they were able to buy their first Cadillac. Doris was obsessed with the idea that one of the children might die. What if that happened while Bud was away?
And Doris had a premonition about Bud: something was coming, something big and maybe something terrible.
In December, Day flew to Fairchild AFB near Spokane, Washington, and went through survival school. Pilots were turned loose in the woods and told to make their way to a certain point. All were captured so they could be interrogated. Sleep deprivation gave pilots a hint of how disoriented they could become. But no matter how authentic the Air Force tried to make survival school, several underlying and self-evident facts kept the training from being too realistic: it cost the American taxpayer a half million dollars to train a combat pilot. If he was on the way to a war zone, it was expected that he should get there in top form. One could push, but only so hard.
BUD wasn’t alone in wanting to change locales: Doris did not want to live in the cold and rain of Niagara for another year. At last, she hoped to take the children to a place that was hot and dry. So Day began flying all over the country, looking at communities near Air Force bases. He settled on Phoenix, Arizona, next door to Luke AFB.
Bud wanted to visit home one more time before he left for Vietnam, so he and Doris and the children drove from New York to Sioux City. They visited St. John Lutheran Church, where they had been married and where George and the twins had been baptized. When church members heard Bud was en route to Vietnam, they gave him a medallion that stated I AM A LUTHERAN. He hung the medallion around his neck with his dog tags.
He went out to Graceland Cemetery to his dad’s grave and sat on the edge of the tombstone. As is the case with many sons who have troubles with their fathers, it was not until after his father’s death that the perspective shifted and Bud began to see his father in a different light. Sitting there in Graceland, Bud talked to him about not being able to come to his funeral and about all the unresolved issues from his childhood. He knew that his father understood, that he would have believed the most important priority was to bring Steve into the family.
Once he “set things right with the old man,” he was surprised how his perception changed. He remembered his dad fondly and with great respect. “He was a determined old bastard,” Bud realized. “Events were not going to overwhelm him. He was going to overwhelm events.”
In a few more years, men would say the same about Bud Day.
WHEN Bud and Doris arrived in Phoenix, Bud pointed and said, “Look at the mountains. Aren’t they
pretty?”
Doris glared. “Not as pretty as an Iowa cornfield.”
If anyone wants to know how adaptable are professional military people and how quickly they make decisions, consider this: The Day family arrived in Phoenix on March 7, 1967. On March 8 they found and rented a house at 5238 West Lewis Avenue, a four-bedroom home with a fenced yard. The furniture arrived from Niagara Falls on March 9. By March 13, Steve was in school.
Accommodations and education settled, Day showed Doris the route to the nearest shopping center, grocery store, and beauty shop, and to Luke AFB. He gave her the names and phone numbers of two pilot friends at Luke; she was to call them if there was an emergency or if she needed anything. Day went out to Luke and asked what else he could do for his wife to help her while he was gone. “Get her a credit card,” he was told. Day had never heard of a credit card. But he got one with a $500 spending limit, figuring that would be enough. He would, after all, be gone only a year.
Bud unloaded all of Doris’s pink fabrics and materials for making hats and whimsies and arranged them just as she wanted. He collected the family’s winter clothes and put them in storage. Next March when he returned, he would take them out of storage for eventual use in Sioux City. One morning he got up very early and spent all day grilling hamburgers and cooking roasts, enough to last the family several weeks. Every time Doris pulled one of these out of the freezer, she would say, “Your father cooked this for you before he left. He will be back home in . . . ,” and she would tell the children how many months remained.
Day opened a closet in the new house and showed Doris his black lawyer’s briefcase. He figured the worst thing that could happen to him in the next year was that he would be killed. If so, she would find everything she needed to know in the briefcase: a list of pallbearers, the location of their marriage license, his birth certificate, his military personnel file, a list of his life insurance policies and bank account numbers. Detailed instructions of every step she should take were in the briefcase. He thought he had covered every possible contingency.
ON March 18, Bud took Doris and the children to Las Vegas; he wanted them to see all the bright lights, to see the place where he first heard “Misty.” While they were there, Day went to the officers’ club at Nellis and ran into an officer who told him a mutual friend had been shot down in Vietnam and was MIA.
As they left the club, Doris asked, “What does ‘MIA’ mean?”
“Missing in action.”
That did not sink in. “What happens if you are missing?”
Day shrugged. No need for Doris to think about this. “You just pray they find you.”
IN the spring of 1967, America was preparing for what would go down in history as the Summer of Love — a summer of antiwar demonstrations, protest songs and marches, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was midafternoon on Easter Sunday when Doris and the four children drove Bud to Luke AFB to see him off. At the airport, she looked at him for a long moment. She did not want to cry. Air Force wives don’t cry when their husbands go to war.
Doris was nervous. She was still afraid one of the children might die. Her husband was going off to war and she was in a new town where she knew almost no one, and she was in charge of four children. Bud was more than her husband; he was her best friend. After the children went to bed every night, she and Bud sat up and chatted. And on Sunday afternoons after church, they went for long rides and talked. To her, Bud was an optimistic man who saw the bright side of everything. He would not tolerate gossip. He was a practical man, a courteous man, and he was understanding as are few men. He never criticized her. The closest he ever came was to say, “Doris, I don’t think I would have done it that way.” She thought of what a good and wonderful man and husband he was. His only flaw was that he got on her nerves with his incessant humming of “Misty.” But now that did not seem so important. Almost in desperation she said, “Bud, just come back. Even if you are in a basket.”
Bud put his hands on her shoulders, looked deep into her eyes, and said, “I will be back and I will be back whole.”
He knew of her fear that one of the children might die, and he wanted to strengthen her. He squeezed her shoulders so hard that she flinched. “Doris, you are a good wife and a good mother. God gave us these four children, and it will be His will if He takes one of them back.”
He dropped his hands from her shoulders, said, “I love you,” and turned and walked toward the waiting airplane. His back was straight and his head was high and he took long steps. As is the nature of fighter pilots, he never looked back.
Steve held his mother’s hand and wept. George, who was turning into a quiet and shy little boy, was mute. The twins tried to follow their dad to the airplane.
Day took off at 3:30 p.m., on schedule to the minute.
He flew to California and then to the Philippines for a week of jungle survival school. Officers from New York or Chicago or other big cities, men whose feet had rarely been off the concrete, found the jungle a terrifying place. They were particularly afraid of snakes. But back home, every time the Big Sioux flooded, Day’s yard had become populated by poisonous snakes; he kept a hoe leaning against the house just to kill them. And he had spent so much time roaming the Loess Hills and hunting pheasants that the outdoors held no terror for him. His Marine Corps training had taught him of edible plants, how to live off the land, and of land navigation. About the only thing Day had actually learned at the Air Force jungle survival school was that if he was shot down and had to “escape and evade” (E & E), he should stay off the trails and make his way through the jungle.
As was true for every member of every branch of the military assigned to Vietnam, adherence to the Code of Conduct was drummed into Day. He was told that if he was captured, the code would sustain him through any interrogation: “Just remember the code and you will be okay.” But Bud Day did not plan on getting captured.
7
Hit My Smoke
DAY arrived in Vietnam at the zenith of his career. He was a senior major who almost certainly would soon be promoted to lieutenant colonel. And he was about to be named a command pilot. He was widely known in the Air Force as a man with a curious reputation that combined macho and intellect. He was the guy who survived a no-chute bailout and whose gunnery and bombing scores were just about perfect. But he was also the guy who wrote the book on the delivery of nuclear weapons and on fuel management of fighter aircraft. He remained one of only two lawyer–fighter pilots in the Air Force, a fact that wrinkled many a brow.
On April 4, Day landed at Da Nang and the next day flew to a new base named Tuy Hoa. It took him only a few days to realize that the article in the Air Force Times was wrong: there was no shortage of squadron commanders in Vietnam; in fact, it was the opposite. Lieutenant colonels held every squadron commander job, and so many majors were running around that they were relegated to staff jobs.
Day’s assignment was with the 309th Squadron, which flew F-100Ds in close-air-support missions. Every pilot has a ground job, and Day’s was as a scheduler: the man who matched pilots and aircraft with assigned missions. Scheduling was a bookkeeping position usually held by a junior captain, thus it was a dead-end job for a senior major.
For the next two months, Day scheduled “monkey-killer missions,” meaning bombing missions where the intelligence was so faulty or so out of date that what was said to be a “truck park” or an “enemy camp” was nothing but jungle. It was a frustrating assignment. Day knew this would be his last war, his last chance to lead men in combat, and he was chomping at the bit. He was forty-two and in the best physical condition of his life. He worked out daily and could do dozens of one-armed push-ups. At five foot nine and 152 pounds, he was the prototypical smallish wiry fighter pilot, a man who could fit comfortably into the cockpit of an F-100. His hair was close-cropped, even for a military officer. He was movie-star handsome, with a direct stare, an erect stance, and a professional no-nonsense demeanor. And even in a baggy flight suit, h
e was a squared-away officer.
Day liked the wing motto: “Return with Honor.” But he was not doing what he imagined he would when he had volunteered to come to Vietnam. The only good thing about the assignment was that, once again, Day could schedule himself to fly as often as he wanted. And he did. He flew attack missions almost daily, sometimes two in one day, and by the end of May had flown seventy-two combat missions.
On one of those missions he came to the aid of an Army Special Forces camp that was about to be overrun by enemy soldiers. He laid his bombs down danger close, saved the Special Forces camp, racked up a body count of 143 enemy soldiers, and was recommended for a medal.
If Day thought he was qualified and ready for a bigger job, so did others. In late May, he was ordered to Saigon to meet with the director of operations for the 7th Air Force.
SEVERAL weeks earlier, two O-1 “Bird Dogs” had been flying a Forward Air Control (FAC) mission out of Da Nang. The Bird Dog is a small single-engine, propeller-driven “bug smasher” that crawls through the air at around a hundred miles per hour. FAC missions in South Vietnam were to locate and identify enemy-troop emplacements and then call in attack aircraft.
The two Bird Dogs were over the demilitarized zone (DMZ) when one was hit by a SAM and blown out of the sky. This was the first time SAMs had been utilized so far south, and the incident brought to a head what the 7th Air Force already knew: FACs had one of the highest mortality rates of any flying job in the war. Now that missiles were part of the equation, their mortality rate would climb higher.
Suppressing the SAMs was more than a tactical need; it had strategic implications in that the missiles themselves were supplied by the Soviet Union. The Cold War still loomed large in American military thinking. If war between these superpowers became a reality, the United States would use giant B-52 bombers to penetrate deep into the Soviet Union. The Soviets would use SAMs against the B-52s. The Soviets wanted to find out how effective their missiles were against the B-52s, and America wanted to find out if the electronic countermeasures were effective against the SAMs. Vietnam would be the proving ground.