American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  But Mistys were warriors, and warriors don’t look for reasons to abort; they look for reasons to fly. If a Misty had ammo in his guns and the afterburner worked, he launched.

  A cornerstone of the Misty legend concerns some sporty flying performed by Bud Day during an early August mission. He was snooping and pooping when his Misty eyes detected an anomaly; perhaps it was a few wilted leaves, maybe the hint of a shape under a tree, maybe the glint of sunlight on AAA barrels, something so subliminal Day would have found it difficult to explain. He backed off and called in a strike force of F-105 “Thuds.” Then a jeep broke out of the jungle and went racing down the road. Day could see the local road network and knew there was only one way the jeep could go. He racked his aircraft around, and as the truck turned a 90-degree corner, Day was down low, coming straight at it. He launched a rocket that went through the windshield and blew the jeep to smithereens.

  When the Thuds arrived on scene, Day muttered to himself, “I’m going to light these bastards up.”

  He pointed the F-100 at the anomaly and fired a marking rocket.

  All hell broke loose.

  His rocket exploded a fuel dump and set off a chain of twenty-eight secondary explosions. For a Misty, happiness was a secondary explosion, especially when, as in this case, the explosions ripped the camouflage off a large truck park.

  More strike aircraft were called in. They did not have to ask for directions, as the column of smoke was visible for miles. One of the strike aircraft hit a SAM site, and the explosion cooked off several missiles.

  It was a wildly successful day for the Mistys.

  By mid-August the Mistys were having a measurable impact on the flow of war equipment into the South, in locating SAM sites, and in controlling rescue efforts for downed pilots. The Pentagon wanted to know more about this outfit, top generals craving good news that they could give to a Congress increasingly restive about the war. So Day was ordered to Japan to brief the vice chief of staff of the Air Force.

  The briefing went well, and Day was feeling good on the flight back to South Vietnam. He had bought a new $10 watch (a Seiko that had become the official squadron watch of the Mistys) and a case of Johnnie Walker to stash under his bunk. On September 11, less than three weeks away, he was flying to Hawaii to meet Doris for ten days of R & R — rest and recuperation. Doris already had reservations at the Reef Hotel on Waikiki, a standard room for $14 per day.

  On the morning of August 26, Day got up early and taped a message to Doris and the children. Then he did what he had never done before: he taped a second cassette, put both in the outgoing mail, and then, after a 4 a.m. breakfast, went to the ramp to watch the first Misty flight take off.

  He was flying the second flight, checking out a twenty-six-year-old Air Force Academy graduate named Corwin Kippenhan. “Kip,” as he was called, was Misty 13.

  Day grimaced when he saw they were flying an aircraft numbered 954. Every fighter has its idiosyncrasies, and 954 had a bad shoulder harness in the backseat. The harness could not be cinched down tightly, and no one seemed able to repair or replace it. Kip was flying in the front seat, and Day knew that when Kip began banking and yanking, he would be battered. It was going to be a rough flight.

  Day and Kip were crawling into the cockpit when an Air Force corporate jet landed. These little “Scatbacks” usually carried senior generals. Every commander at Phu Cat had a frisson of trepidation when this particular aircraft landed: it was from 7th Air Force, which was commanded by General William “Spike” Momyer, a man famous for flying onto a base and firing commanders. Momyer had fired so many colonels, men whose insignia of rank is an eagle, that he was known as the “bird killer.”

  But when the door of the aircraft opened, there was no frenzy of saluting: it was not Momyer. Instead it was a group of intelligence officers with photographs of an SA-2 missile site containing three SAMs in the launchers. B-52s were conducting frequent bombing missions in the area, so this site had to be destroyed.

  The intelligence officers drove across the ramp and showed Day the photographs. He recognized the area immediately. It was in what Mistys called the “Fruit Orchard” west of “Fingers Lake,” one of the most dangerous parts of the Pack. Strike pilots had been shot down here and never heard from again. No one knew if they were prisoners in Hanoi or if, as fighter pilots said, “They woke up on the wrong side of the grass.”

  This could be a day of sporty flying.

  A half hour later, Kip and Day were down in the weeds and ripping along at almost five hundred miles per hour, banking and yanking, grunting hard from the Gs. When they were a mile from the target, it seemed as if Hades had opened up and the residents were throwing fireballs at the sky. Day had never seen so much AAA. He and Kip flew through the barrage, and it was a miracle they were not hit. Day thought he saw a SAM, but he was not sure enough to call in a strike.

  Day and Kip worked another part of the AO, hit the tanker, and dove for the deck. This was Day’s sixty-seventh penetration of North Vietnamese airspace in about nine weeks. It was around 1:30 p.m. Maybe if they came in again on a different heading, they could find the SAM.

  “Let’s make one more pass,” he told Kip.

  Hey, faint heart never fucked a pig.

  This time they came in from the west, low over a karst out-cropping. The weather was hazy, with about three miles visibility. Kip dropped down to about a thousand feet and “cobbed it”; he was traveling at 575 mph, depending on speed and hoping for surprise.

  But enemy gunners were on alert, and a wall of flak greeted the aircraft. Kip pressed on, jinking hard as fireballs from 37 mm cannon filled the air. Kip and Day were hammered by almost continuous explosions.

  Then Day saw the missile. No doubt about it, this was a SAM site. At that moment, the aircraft took a direct hit in the aft end, lurched, shuddered, and seemed to stop in midair. Every warning light on the panel came on. This bird was going down.

  “I have the aircraft,” Day said, taking control.

  Day had written the procedures for such an emergency. He knew what to do: light the burner, scramble for sky, and turn for the coast. The ocean was about ten miles away, maybe ninety seconds of flying time, but at three thousand feet the aircraft lost hydraulic pressure, the controls locked, and the aircraft nosed over. The flight path was describing the outside of a circle and placing heavy negative Gs on Day and Kip. Day’s head and shoulders were jammed against the canopy. Papers, maps, the camera, a water bottle, dust, and dirt filled the air. The aircraft was pointed at the ground and about three seconds from crashing.

  “Eject! Eject! Eject!” Day ordered. He pulled the ejection lever. (In an F-100F, the backseater goes first, followed a second later by the frontseater.)

  When Kip’s chute opened, two panels blew out, and as he descended rapidly he noticed two things: The F-100 had crashed and exploded. And Major Day was maybe a quarter of a mile away, limp in the chute, clearly unconscious and descending so rapidly that he passed Kip.

  When Day and Kip ejected, automatic radios — “beepers” — on their parachute harnesses began broadcasting on the emergency frequency. A rescue helicopter was scrambled, and it homed in on the beepers.

  Misty 1 was down.

  It was the beginning of one of the most incredible sagas of the Vietnam War.

  8

  South Toward Freedom

  PAIN brought him back from unconsciousness.

  His right arm was wrecked. The ulna was broken about four inches below his elbow and was sticking through the skin. The humerus was broken midway between his elbow and shoulder. His left knee was dislocated and already beginning to swell. He could not see out of his right eye.

  The broken arm and dislocated knee were the results of ejecting at 575 mph while pressed against the canopy. His flailing arm and leg apparently had hit something. But the eye — how did that happen? The only thing he could figure was that when he bailed out, his oxygen mask did not separate properly and slammed him.
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br />   He had to call in the rescue helicopters, the Jolly Green Giants; he had to get out of here. He was down near Vinh Linh in one of the most heavily bombed areas of North Vietnam. Every time a Misty was shot at, Ray Bevivino marked the AAA site on his maps. This area was the most heavily marked part of the Pack. The local population would not look with favor upon a downed American airman, so this was going to be a race between the Jollys and the Gomers. And he was the prize.

  Day tried to reach into his flight suit to pull out his radio, but his right arm wouldn’t move. He switched to his left, placed the radio on the ground, and slowly extended the antenna. Then he picked up the radio and took a quick look around. He was on the edge of the jungle, only a hundred yards from a Vietnamese village.

  Someone was running toward him, threshing through the bushes.

  Day looked up. A boy — he could not have been more than fourteen years old — was pointing a rusty bolt-action rifle at him. The boy’s finger was on the trigger, and he was shaking from fear and excitement. Day froze.

  The boy tossed Day’s survival radio aside, then snatched the new Seiko off his wrist.

  Little bastard.

  All the time the boy was shouting, doubtless telling his comrades he had found the American pilot. He tried to snatch Day’s pilot-school ring. Day jerked his arm away. (Pilots don’t wear wedding rings when flying over enemy territory, so his was back in Phoenix.)

  The boy grabbed Day’s survival knife and began slicing the parachute harness with such reckless abandon that Day feared he might be cut by the sharp six-inch blade. By now the boy’s friends had arrived, and they were having a field day. Souvenirs from a downed American pilot were highly prized. One boy pulled at Day’s boots, another stripped him of his flight suit. In seconds, Day was down to his shorts.

  By now his plight was beginning to sink in. Just moments earlier he had been flying one of the most technologically advanced aircraft of his time, master of an almost limitless domain, with the might of the U.S. military behind him. Now he was badly injured, on the ground in one of the most dangerous parts of North Vietnam, almost naked and surrounded by panicky souvenir-grabbing teenage boys who were very anxious to get him away from the parachute. They knew that the beeper in his parachute harness had been transmitting since he ejected and that a rescue helicopter could be on the scene in minutes.

  If they wanted to keep him, they had to move him.

  The boys hammered him with their gun butts and prodded him with the muzzles. Day’s knee injury was so painful it was almost impossible for him to stand. He balanced on one leg, tottering, then began to limp along, his captors dancing about, looking over their shoulders. The little party had gone only a few steps when it seemed half the AAA guns in North Vietnam erupted around him. The splatting muzzle blasts of the 37 mm cannon told him the guns — which were in revetments — were depressed to the lowest level; they were firing almost straight across the ground.

  Then he heard the rapid whomp, whomp, whomp of helicopter blades. A Jolly was inbound, pressing hard into the face of the guns, homing in on the beacon in Day’s parachute. The helicopter was so low his wheels were dragging through the trees. The AAA fire increased; the sound was horrendous, and Day realized the gunners were hoping an air burst would down the chopper. But still the Jolly pressed on, weaving, swerving, the pilot ignoring the flak bursting above him and the countless AK-47s being fired at him. He was determined to find the downed pilot. Now that big beautiful chopper was so close that Day could see a man with a rifle in his hand standing in the open door. He did not know it, but the figure was Corwin Kippenhan, who had been rescued within minutes after landing. “We’ve got to find my buddy,” he told the crew. A crew member had handed him an M16 and said, “We’re going in. Shoot anything that shoots at us.”

  Procedures dictate that a rescue chopper doesn’t land unless the crew is talking to the downed pilot. Over the noise of the chopper, Kip could hear shouts and then long bursts from AK-47s. From the sound of it, he thought Day had been shot.

  Day saw the Jolly approach his parachute, pause a half second, then twist and dip and swing left. Had the chopper turned right, it would have flown over Day and, he believed, panicked his young captors and enabled him to escape. But it did not.

  The boys around Day were euphoric that the chopper had been driven off. They laughed and jumped about and waved their rifles in the air.

  Every second increased Day’s awareness of what a serious condition he was in — not just the fact that he had been shot down and captured by the enemy but the nature of his injuries.

  Fighter pilots are control freaks. They have to be in charge. But Day was not in charge, and he had no control over what was happening.

  His right arm hurt so much he wanted to scream. And his left knee hurt so badly he could not bear to put his weight on it. But his young captors were oblivious to his injuries. Slamming him hard in the back with their rifle butts, they forced him toward the nearby village of Vinh Linh, a place virtually destroyed by American bombing. There he was met by a village elder, who shouted out what Day thought was a list of America’s sins against Vietnam. Then the women and children of the village fell upon Day, beating and kicking and pulling and pinching. When he was beaten to the ground, they lifted him by his ears and the beating resumed.

  In retrospect, it is a miracle Day survived his first few hours on the ground. Other pilots and crew members shot down in this area had been summarily executed with bullets in the head.

  Day’s hell march continued through several villages until, about dusk, he entered a small camp. He had marched about four miles and was in shock. Day was pushed into a hole that had been shoveled out from the side of a bunker. It was about six feet long and maybe two feet wide, and he thought of it as being the size of a coffin. Over his head was a log roof covered by dirt.

  His left hand — his good hand — was wrapped in wire and tied to the logs. His legs were bound with rope, about thirty feet of clothesline with maybe a dozen granny knots, amateurish but effective. Day looked on in amazement, almost as if he were a dispassionate spectator, when locals paraded by his hole in the bunker. He did not understand Vietnamese, but it was not difficult to figure out what the locals were talking about as they stared at the broken bone protruding from his arm, chattered about the peculiar angle at which his right arm hung from his body, looked with astonishment on his left knee, which now was purple and about the size of a football, and pointed at his right eye. He did not know it, but his right eye was solid red from ruptured blood vessels and was a fearsome sight. Dozens of flies and insects buzzed about Day’s head and crawled across the broken skin of his arm. A guard handed him a bowl of watery soup and a handful of rice.

  Most people in Day’s condition would have thought only of getting some kind of medical attention. Day thought only of escape. E & E was his duty, dictated by the Code of Conduct. The code said nothing about the nature of injuries, nothing about the risk of being shot, and nothing about the risk of making his wife a widow or making his children fatherless. It was very simple and straightforward: if an American fighting man is captured, it is his duty to make every effort to escape. Bud Day knew exactly what he had to do.

  The Vietnamese looked at Day and believed he was immobile. Day reinforced the belief by defecating and urinating and remaining in his own waste.

  Guards jabbed him hard with the muzzle of their rifles. He groaned and wondered how long he would be able to endure his injuries and the beatings without sustaining further damage. But he did not move. He lay in his filth and plotted his escape. It had to be soon. Survival school taught that escape during the first few days when in the hands of ill-trained militia is much easier than escaping from battle-hardened soldiers.

  But that night the area was hammered by bad weather, the terrible and ferocious thunderstorms of Southeast Asia, some of the most violent on earth. Lightning and thunder and winds and prodigious rains lashed the landscape and made escape impossible.
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  The next morning the guards unwrapped the wire from his left arm, and that evening they did not retie it. When they wrapped his legs with rope, he offered no resistance. He lay there and moaned.

  Three days after his shoot-down, Day’s first English-speaking interrogator arrived. His English was rudimentary at best, mostly a collection of nouns and pronouns. But his intent was clear: he wanted military information from the downed pilot. Day moaned and did not answer.

  Then came a French-speaking Vietnamese doctor to repair Day’s arm. Because of Day’s numerous visits to Casablanca, he knew enough French that the two could almost carry on a conversation.

  The doctor sat Day on a bench and had a guard sit beside him, put an arm around Day’s neck, and hold tightly. The doctor washed Day’s arm with plain water; he had no soap and used no disinfectant. Then the doctor seized Day’s right hand and pulled hard, causing bones from the fractures to slide and pull apart. Day screamed. The guard laughed. It was going to be impossible to set the multiple fractures without anesthetic. The doctor pulled out what Day called a “horse needle” and injected novocaine into the broken arm. The guard wrapped his legs around Day’s waist and pulled hard on Day’s neck while the doctor braced himself and yanked on the pilot’s hand. The doctor pulled, massaged the bones around, then folded the arm at the elbow. Day knew this was not a proper orthopedic procedure. The bones were not aligned. A nurse prepared a plaster cast that went from the top of Day’s shoulder, down his arm, and over the knuckles. She used a rag to fashion a sling to support the cast. After the cast was applied, Day was flung back into the casketlike hole in the ground, weaker than ever.