by Robert Coram
For the first time in his life, Day knew real fear. This is understandable. The survival schools were broader than they were deep. A big part of the training regarding how to resist interrogation was more intellectual than practical. Day was taught to resist as much as possible, to lie, mislead, misinform, alter the facts, and dodge questions. That was what he was trying to do. But they were beating the hell out of him and — except for the primitive cast — refusing him medical attention.
At Phu Cat he had prayed every night for the safety of Doris and the children. And he prayed for the safety of the men under his command. He knew in an intellectual sense that death was always very close. But now he needed more than the once-a-day prayers. He needed help on a minute-to-minute basis. There was an urgency to his prayers that had never been there before.
THE rescue helicopter had taken Kip to the hospital at Da Nang. He turned out to be okay, one of the few pilots to go through a high-speed ejection without injuries, and hours later he was back in the Misty command post at Phu Cat.
The mood was somber. Misty 1 was down, and Kip believed Day had been killed. The news brought home to the Mistys what a deadly business they were in. For the next three or four days, every Misty flight flew through the hell of the Fingers Lake looking for their boss, trying unsuccessfully to raise him on the emergency radio frequency. Kippenhan suffered such a classic case of survivor guilt that he soon left the Mistys and finished his tour with another outfit. He did not want to fly again, so he became a scheduler. A few years later he resigned his commission and became an airline pilot. For the rest of his life, he never got over the fact that he was rescued and Day was not. Decades later, he said, “When two guys go out and one comes back, that’s not a good deal.”
BY now Day’s boy-guards were disgusted with the odor of stale urine and old fecal matter that clung to him. They were tired of repeated trips to bring him water. They filled a canteen and left it in his den.
Day tried to keep track of time. On what he calculated was the fourth day after his shoot-down, two guards came and motioned for him to get out of the hole. He refused and was dragged out and marched a few yards away to a young man in civilian clothes who the interpreter said was a colonel. When Day refused to answer military questions — the name of his outfit, the type of aircraft he flew, where he was based, his mission — the guards beat him with rifle butts. The young colonel snapped and unsnapped his holster, pulled out his pistol, and pointed it at Day as the interpreter warned Day he would be shot if he did not answer questions.
“Drop dead, kid,” Day said.
The colonel pressed the pistol against Day’s head. Day pretended to faint. The guards beat him with gun butts and kicked him. But he would not talk. It grew dark and he was taken back to his hole.
Day knew it was only a matter of time before soldiers arrived to take charge. In the meantime, it would be a real coup for the ill-trained militia to wrangle information from him. He suspected their methods would grow more harsh.
He was right. Early the next morning the interrogation resumed in an open A-frame hut with exposed beams. When Day refused to talk, a rope was tied around his ankles and the other end thrown over a beam. He was hoisted into the air and hung there, head down, feeling the bones in his broken arm being pulled apart, then forced together, then pulled apart. In agony, he was left for hours as flies and mosquitoes crawled on his exposed skin, as sweat coursed down his body onto his face and into his nose and mouth. The hemp rope stretched, and after a while Day’s head touched the ground. For the next hour or so he thought his neck would break as the full weight of his body pushed down on his head. Then the rope stretched more, his shoulders took more of his weight, and the pain was relieved. At dusk he was untied and shoved, kicked, and dragged back to his hole.
Day knew there would be more torture. And he knew he did not have the strength for such an ordeal. Every session would leave him weaker. He had to escape. Soon.
The next evening, after another day of beatings, he made his move.
The jungle was only a few miles from the camp. He had flown over this part of North Vietnam so many times that he could have drawn a detailed map of the surrounding countryside. The jungle was safety. He had to reach the jungle.
As they had for the past several nights, the guards did not bother to wire Day’s good hand to the rafter, and there was only a big granny knot holding the rope on his legs. Day’s eyes never left the guards, who stood on the nearby road, laughing and carrying on a loud boisterous conversation as he unwound the rope from his legs. He grabbed his canteen and whispered, “Help me, Father.” As he slithered out of the hole and crawled around the bunker, he prayed he would not be shot in the back. He elbowed his way over the edge of the rice paddy and stood up. His foot slipped in the mud and he fell on his broken arm, causing more pain than he had ever known. He gritted his teeth to avoid screaming. He noticed that his shorts were almost torn from him. Now there was little left except for the elastic waistband and the pouch — rather like an athletic supporter.
Day listened. Silence. He took a quick glance skyward to where the Milky Way pointed south toward freedom and he was gone, limping and lurching and staggering across the rice paddy. He was virtually naked and with injuries that would have put a man in the intensive care ward. But he was on the move, following the code.
Escape and evade.
Day was about two miles from the camp when he heard the loud gongs and urgent whistles that signified his escape had been discovered. He was beyond the rice paddies now, and the ground that looked so smooth and level from the air was in fact bumpy and irregular. Every hobbling step was agony. His broken arm pulsated with pain. Because the cast was bound to his body, he could not use his arm for balance. And since he was blind in his right eye, he had no peripheral vision and very little depth of field. He seemed always off balance, always lurching, always in danger of falling. The lack of food, the pain of his injuries, and the soreness from the beatings, combined with the tension of being a hunted man, were draining his energy reserves. He was on the edge of sliding into shock.
He remembered that no American pilot had ever escaped from North Vietnam into South Vietnam, and at some level he knew the very idea of escape was ludicrous. He did not exactly blend in with the indigenous personnel: a bare-assed American, seriously injured, with no food, attempting to cross some thirty miles of enemy territory. One sighting of him, even from a distance, and he would be recaptured.
He lurched on into the night, now guided by a giant thunderstorm far to the south. By the first hint of dawn, Day figured he had walked about six miles. He saw that the jungle where he hoped to find sanctuary was a thin and wispy forest. A lake was between him and this forest. On one edge of the lake were numerous artillery emplacements used to shell American bases just beyond the DMZ. He decided to walk around the other side of the lake. Finding a place to hide and to rest would be almost impossible in the scraggly copse of trees that was his destination. Nevertheless, that was the only sanctuary.
Suddenly, from the skies overhead, he heard a long shriek, then another, and another, and bombs began exploding less than a mile away. One of the most frightening and devastating experiences of the Vietnam War was an attack by B-52s, dropping bombs from so high that the aircraft are neither seen nor heard. The only indication of their presence was horrendous explosions that marched across the landscape, shredding the jungle and blowing great craters in the earth. The devastation caused by a single B-52 is about a block wide and can be a mile long.
Such an attack was known as an Arc Light, and Bud Day was caught in one.
The explosions came closer, tossing tons of mud and dirt into the air. Day clasped his hands over his ears and crouched in pain. Every seventh or eighth bomb was caught in the burst of the previous bomb and exploded about a hundred feet above the ground. These airbursts had the effect of “daisy cutter” devices, blasting vegetation in a wide radius, blowing down trees, uprooting bushes, and sending red-hot
shrapnel flying in all directions. The very earth writhed in pain. It was like Armageddon.
The strike seemed to go on forever. Dozens of bombs were dropped, the last one landing about a hundred yards away from Bud. Had the strike begun one second later, Day would have been killed.
Then there was silence. Day was alive but overwhelmed with fatigue. His feet were lacerated and bleeding. For the past week he had eaten only a watery soup, and he was losing weight rapidly. He needed food for the march south. But there was no food.
Every North Vietnamese for miles around was awakened, and now they would be moving, checking for damage. Then the gun emplacements on the lake, the ones not damaged by the bombs, began firing. It was almost daylight when Day crawled under a bush to hide. Only yards away, children were moving around and adults were carrying food to the gun crews. Day’s body cried for sleep. But if he went to sleep he might snore and someone would hear him. Instead he peeped out of the bush and planned his escape route for that evening. It would be through the area just bombed — not the safest path because of the danger of unexploded bombs but the most direct route. He was in a free-fire zone — anything that moved was fired upon. This was an area of heavy enemy activity, and he knew this part of North Vietnam was subject to artillery barrages. Sometimes pilots who had been flying farther north dropped unexpended ordinance here. He was traversing one of the most dangerous parts of North Vietnam. All day long he drifted in and out of consciousness, fatigue pulling him toward blessed sleep, pain and the fear of capture keeping him awake.
Evening came and the activity around him slowed. No moon was out and the darkness was palpable. But the stars were visible, pointing the way south toward freedom.
As Day limped and lurched his way through the area where the bombs had exploded, he wondered if he had made a good decision. Bomb blasts had fused the substrata of sand into sharp glassy material that made walking almost impossible. His feet were leaving a bloody trail.
Clouds moved in and obscured the stars and brought the torrential unrestrained rains for which Vietnam is renowned. Day could find no shelter. The cast on his arm grew soggy.
Eventually the rain slacked but the clouds remained and he could not see the stars. Which way was south? He would stop and wait for the weather to clear.
Day did not realize it, but the first signs of disorientation were wrapping their loving arms around him. He had pushed to the edge of his physical and mental limits. He found a bush, lay down, and went to sleep, so utterly exhausted that he could not swipe at the clouds of mosquitoes chewing on his bare body. Rest. Blessed rest. Tomorrow would be a better day.
He did not know how long he slept or whether it was the middle of the night or dawn when either a bomb or an artillery shell exploded nearby. One moment he was asleep, the next minute he was flying through the air, vomit streaming from his mouth and blood cascading from his nose and ears. He landed in a sprawl, and the most sickening nausea he had ever known swept over him. His ears were ringing. His body was racked with convulsions.
The dry heaves continued long after his stomach had emptied. Now his sense of balance was gone. He crawled aimlessly like a wounded animal, searching for safety.
After a while, he settled down and took stock. He was dehydrated from vomiting, so he took a slow and deliberate drink of water from his canteen. The water kicked off another round of uncontrollable vomiting. Eventually, he collapsed into a troubled sleep.
DORIS was fidgety all day Saturday. She was troubled and did not know why. She cleaned the house and ironed clothes. She had prepared enough food for the children to last the ten days she would be in Hawaii. She had hired a babysitter to stay with the children. She had lost weight in preparation for the trip and was down from 122 pounds to 105 pounds. She wanted to look her best when she met Bud.
Saturday afternoon she decided to iron more clothes. She reached for a can of spray starch but accidentally picked up a can of oven cleaner. She pressed the button on the aerosol can. The can was empty and made a hissing psssssst, pssssst. The sound was like a knife to her heart; in that moment she knew something had happened to Bud.
She uttered a silent prayer. Then she made a pot of coffee and sat down and waited for the phone call.
The message arrived at Luke AFB about 1:30 a.m. Sunday saying Day had been shot down. But the duty officer decided to let Doris sleep through the night. He knew there would be no sleep after the message was delivered.
The knock on the door came at 7 a.m. Sunday.
Her first thought was one of annoyance. The knocking might awaken the children. She threw on a robe and opened the door and saw two men in Air Force uniforms and a woman. She knew who they were: the “notifying officer,” a chaplain, and a woman from Family Services.
Her hand flew to her throat. “Oh, no. Not me too,” she said.
“Mrs. Day, he’s just missing,” the chaplain said. “He had a good chute and we heard his beeper.”
“Then he’s okay if he had a good chute,” Doris said. She wondered what a beeper was and made a mental note to call a friend and ask.
She looked at the chaplain and smiled. “They really got themselves a tiger this time.”
The notifying officer said, “Major Day was in an aircraft with another pilot who was rescued. There was a strong chance Major Day also was rescued. If so, we will be notified within the next few hours.” He showed her the note saying Major George E. Day had been shot down over North Vietnam.
Doris looked up. “North Vietnam? I didn’t know he was flying up there. I thought he was in South Vietnam.”
She called Charlie Hubbs, the family friend she and Bud met at Niagara Falls, and told him what happened. “Charlie, what’s a beeper?” she asked.
He told her and then said Bud Day was either a POW or on the move, pushing through the jungle toward South Vietnam. “We call it ‘escape and evading,’” he said.
Doris awakened Steve and said, “Stevie, Dad’s been shot down. They’re looking for him but can’t find him.” Then she called her stepmother and her sister and said, “Bud has been shot down in North Vietnam. He is listed as missing. They haven’t found him yet. Please pray for him.”
All day long Doris waited for a message saying Bud had been rescued. It never came. That night when she went to bed, her Air Force status had changed. Now Doris was an “MIA wife,” a wife whose husband is missing in action. It would be six months before she had another word about her husband. And in that time she would not know if she was a wife or a widow.
WITH dawn came the most severe headache Bud Day had ever known. His skull was bursting with pain. The constant ringing in his ears told him his eardrums were ruptured. Blood from his nose and ears had crusted on his face and neck. Vision in his one good eye was blurred. But worst of all, he had lost a night of travel. He had to move south. His goal was to find Tara and from there cross the DMZ to the Marine outpost at Con Thien.
It is a measure of the man that in this most desperate of moments, his thoughts were not of despair. For Bud Day the glass was half full. Years later, in an autobiography, he would describe this moment, writing that he mumbled, “Count your blessings. It isn’t all bad. At least you’re out of the hole and free.” The recent storms had washed the air, and the air was sweet. It was a glorious day.
But every time he tried to stand, nausea overwhelmed him. He could not walk. He collapsed and fell into a deep sleep and slept through the day and all through the night, letting his body rest.
It was midmorning when he awakened, and the growling in his stomach reminded him he had not eaten in four days. He looked around and saw he was in an area of scrubby bushes. It was another clear and beautiful day, a good day for a walk.
Almost reluctantly he sipped from the canteen, wondering if the debilitating nausea would overcome him again. But it did not. He put the morning sun to his left, which meant south was straight ahead. He stooped so his head would not stick above the bushes and began limping south.
After t
hree or four steps he collapsed.
It would have been easy to give way to self-pity, to be captured. But Bud Day subscribed to the idea that if he put his mind to a task, he could do it. Obstacles did not matter. His dad taught him that the job at hand was everything. As he later wrote, if he believed there were things he couldn’t do, he would still be working at the meatpacking plant in Sioux City.
Propelled by pure willpower, he stood up and pressed on. But the side effects of the bomb blast, the pain of his numerous injuries, the weakness from lack of food, the growing disorientation, all compounded, and sometime in midafternoon he realized he had been blundering along, as he said, with the “blind staggers” and taking no steps to avoid capture.
The growing disorientation manifested itself in brief and disconnected flashbacks, quick slices of memory. He was near the breaking point; he was becoming delusional.
He discovered a new pain in his lower right leg. A piece of metal was sticking out of the skin — shrapnel from the bomb blast. If it wasn’t already, Day’s leg, he knew, would soon become infected.
He found a large banana tree whose leaves were filled with water and replenished his canteen, drank his fill, then replenished the canteen again.
Rapid mood swings were overtaking him. Now, having drunk a great deal of water that alleviated his hunger pangs, he found that his spirits climbed. I survived the explosion, he said to himself. It has to be all downhill from here. I’m going to make it.
A few moments later a thought hit him. I wonder who is drinking that case of scotch I stashed under my bed.
His mind was rambling.
What did they do with my pictures of Taiwan and Japan?
What is that quote from Teddy Roosevelt I had on my wall? Something about war. This war is . . . I can’t remember.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.
Which Misty will send my things home to Doris?