American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  A little Bird Dog would not be out snooping and pooping unless the pilot was acting on information from intelligence. If that assumption was correct, Day could be in the middle of a heavy concentration of enemy soldiers. If there was only some way to get the Bird Dog’s attention, the pilot would radio for a rescue helicopter, and within minutes the close-air-support aircraft would be strafing the jungle and a Jolly Green would come in and snatch him.

  He lurched out of the jungle and stood on the edge of a bomb crater. Now the Bird Dog was approaching from the southwest on a course that would take him directly overhead. Day waved frantically. But the Bird Dog went into a shallow bank, and Day was blanked out by the bottom of the aircraft. Had the pilot been fifty yards either left or right, he almost certainly would have seen Day.

  Then the Bird Dog pilot reversed course. Again Day leaped about, waving his good arm. But for a second time the pilot banked and could not see Day.

  The pilot had come over the same area twice, a very dangerous maneuver. Clearly something on the ground was attracting his interest. It could only be enemy soldiers.

  Day was still playing out in his mind the details of a helicopter rescue as the sound of the Bird Dog softened, then disappeared. He slipped into a crushing and abysmal depression. Twice he had been within only a few feet, a few seconds, of being rescued. He knew he was no more than a ten-minute helicopter flight from Con Thien.

  Day lurched back into the jungle, back onto the heavily used trail, moving slowly, staying near the bushes, ready to duck into the undergrowth at the slightest sound. Several hours later he found a small stream and stopped to soak his feet. He sat silently for blissful moments. Then he drank as much water as he could hold and was refilling his canteen when he saw a sight that galvanized him: a thick, heavy land crab about three feet away. Food!

  Day stooped to seize the crab when he heard a chilling sound: someone was chopping wood no more than fifteen feet away. Day was afraid to blink for fear he would be seen. Slowly he raised his head and stared at the back of an enemy soldier.

  The crab was forgotten as Day crawled off the trail into the bushes. Seconds later a dozen soldiers appeared. Day had walked into the middle of the camp that the Bird Dog pilot had been searching for.

  Machetes were hacking away all around him, cutting camouflage. He was surrounded by soldiers who were setting up an ambush for the next Marine patrol that came this way.

  About noon the chopping slackened, and Day realized it was time for the siesta that was so popular in Vietnam. He waited and listened, and when he was sure that the camp was asleep and that no guard could see him, he crept onto the trail and limped south.

  He fought to hold on to sanity. The voice had returned, that loud voice that talked to Doris or prayed. He clamped his mouth shut, but a moment later the voice returned.

  Day knew he was losing his grip on sanity. That voice might cry out at the wrong time. He had counted how many enemy patrols? Thirty? Next time he might not hear the soldiers before they saw him. And there seemed to be no way he could control what was going on in his mind. He was seized by a great fear.

  Suddenly a large artillery piece fired from only a few feet away. He jumped in fright as round after round was fired south toward the Marines at Con Thien. Between explosions he heard the sound of running feet. Slap! Slap! Slap!

  He lurched off the trail and collapsed into the thick jungle.

  Day watched the bare legs of the soldiers pass by and knew he had used up all the luck any one person could have.

  He eased back onto the trail and several times in the next hour narrowly avoided more patrols — he doesn’t remember how many — but he either heard them a second before they appeared or moved off the trail when an inner voice told him to seek cover.

  He saw the Bird Dog again and then saw two Marine Corps helicopters, one holding high and providing cover for the one that was landing and replenishing supplies.

  He was in South Vietnam.

  He had made it.

  Up ahead, very close now, was the Marine Corps firebase. All he had to do was walk into the camp — slowly, with hands held high — tell them who he was, and within hours he would be in a hospital. They would take care of his injuries and feed him and put him on an airplane that would take him to a military hospital in America, where Doris and the children could visit. It was only a matter of hours.

  He pushed down the trail toward where the helicopter had landed. It was dusk when he rounded a corner of the trail and found himself looking at the back of an enemy soldier who was washing clothes in a stream. Day was caught out in the open; moving backward was as dangerous as moving forward.

  Slowly and very carefully he walked around the soldier, not making a sound. It took an eternity of seconds. Then he was around a corner in the trail and out of the soldier’s sight. It was almost dark and he was exhausted. He had to sleep.

  He lay down under a bush and said his prayers. His last thought before he fell asleep was that tomorrow he would be with the Marines. When he told them he had been a Marine in World War II, there would be handshakes and backslapping and Semper Fi. They would lay out the best meal they had for him and would summon a chopper to return him to the Air Force.

  The next day was cloudy and overcast — ominous and threatening. Day continued south. He heard helicopters. Jets flew overhead. He heard Marine artillery. Freedom was close. Euphoria swept over him, and he could almost taste the hot chow at Con Thien. He could almost feel the hot soapy water. He welcomed the operating room and the surgery he would have to have in order to heal his broken body.

  It was only a matter of an hour. Maybe two. “I got it made,” he said.

  Then there was an angry shout behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw two Vietnamese boys — they could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen — holding AK-47s.

  His first thought was I didn’t come this far to surrender to these sons of bitches. He ran. Or tried to run. He was lurching and stumbling, an easy target even for excitable boys. Bullets struck him in the left thigh and left hand. Still he struggled on, into the jungle, trailing blood, and rolled under a bush. A second later a stream of automatic rifle fire shredded the leaves over his head. The boys circled, looking, and then one of them stopped no more than a foot away. He kicked Day and called to his friend.

  Day was back in the hands of the enemy.

  The boys turned Day over to their superiors, a group of battle-hardened soldiers who had set up an ambush for Marine patrols. The soldiers were twenty or thirty yards farther up the trail to spring the trap. Day had walked into the back side of the ambush.

  Day’s captors were brusque and businesslike but without the brutality he had earlier experienced. When Day refused to give more than his name and serial number, the officer nodded and walked away to talk with a radio operator. A few moments later he returned, staring at Day with open curiosity. Day knew that whoever was on the other side of the radio transmission had identified him as the pilot who had escaped from Vinh Linh.

  The officer gave Day a ball of rice and a small container of nuoc mam, a highly flavored fish sauce, to pour over it. It was a feast.

  The cast on his arm was shredded and falling apart. A combat medic examined the ring finger of Day’s left hand. The fingertip was attached by little more than a thread of skin. The medic sprinkled the gunshot wound with powder and wrapped it. He took a long look at the festering shrapnel wound Day had received a week or ten days earlier and inserted a bamboo sliver into the wound. There was a copious discharge, and then the medic pulled the piece of shrapnel from Day’s leg.

  A soldier asked Day how long it had been since he had eaten a full meal. He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t know. I think it was about two weeks. Maybe more.” The enemy soldiers were as tough as any soldiers who ever took to a battlefield. But they could not go two weeks without food and still be on the march as had this American. They could not hike some twenty-five miles through enemy territory with nothing b
ut a canteen of water — not in the condition that this man was in. They stared in wonderment. It was good for them that not all Americans were cut from this bolt of cloth.

  Then five large Vietnamese appeared with a sling under a bamboo pole. One pointed for Day to get into the sling. Once Day was in the sling, he was blindfolded. The bearers took off at an effortless ground-eating trot. When Day — already thinking about escape — moved the blindfold to have a look, one of the bearers kicked him in the head. He continued to adjust the blindfold. Each time, he was kicked in the head.

  By evening Day was back at the banks of the Ben Hai, where he was dumped into a small boat and taken across the river. The bearers carried him all the next day, always north, and around evening stopped in a small village. The soldiers began laughing and celebrating, and Day knew he was back in North Vietnam.

  Early the next morning the bearers ordered Day back into the sling and they were off, miles disappearing beneath their feet. Then they stopped and one of the bearers snatched the blindfold from Day’s eyes. The bearer was smiling. Day didn’t understand why until he looked around and realized he had been returned to the camp at Vinh Linh from which he had escaped.

  He was ordered out of the sling. Since he had escaped by walking out of the camp, he was going to return by walking into the same camp.

  At every step he was kicked and jabbed and poked by local villagers. Had he not been accompanied by soldiers, it is likely the local populace would have killed him. The procession stopped. Standing in front of Day were the guards from whom he had escaped. It was bad enough to have lost a prisoner. But this prisoner had a broken arm and a swollen leg, and was blind in one eye. They had lost much face.

  One of the guards pointed to the same hole from which Day had escaped and ordered him inside. An angry guard jerked Day’s feet together and bound them tightly. Then the guard used wire to tie Day’s left hand to an overhead beam. All the while the guard was muttering, and punching and kicking Day. Once Day was securely bound, an officer pulled his pistol and jammed the barrel between Day’s eyes. He paused, then viciously pistol-whipped Day on each side of his head.

  The two guards who had been on duty the night Day escaped appeared, and one used all his strength to punch Day in the face and stomach. He continued the beating until he was soaked in perspiration and gasping for breath.

  Then other guards got into the act. Day could not move; all he could do was absorb the beating. His one good eye was almost swollen shut. He desperately needed to urinate, but the guards would not take him outside. So he urinated on himself, something he would do many times in the years ahead.

  Another group of soldiers appeared. When it was dark they returned Day’s flying boots and ordered him to put them on. The boots had no laces and were supported with a single strand of wire around his ankles. Within minutes, Day’s staggering pace resulted in dirt and small rocks collecting in the boot tops. The debris was trapped by the wire, and soon his ankles were a bloody pulp. Every time he stopped, his captors slammed him in the back with rifle butts. He had to keep marching.

  The captors marched Day from village to village, always northward, his boots filling with blood. That night he was thrown into another coffinlike hole, kicked and punched, and then tied to a beam with a piece of wire. Out of anger and pain and frustration and defiance, he shouted, “You miserable cocksuckers! You sons of bitches!”

  His captors did not understand the words, but they understood the tone. They beat him until he was unconscious.

  The next morning Day had his first real meal in three weeks: rice and potatoes and peanuts. This was followed by a bowl of rice with gravy. Embarrassed by his near nakedness, his captors gave him a cloth to wrap around his waist.

  After breakfast he was led from the village. The locals beat him and kicked him and spit on him, a pattern repeated in every village on the route.

  Day was concerned that he might contract blood poisoning in the gunshot wound on his left hand. He urinated on it frequently to keep it clean, an act that disgusted his captors, and each time he did so, they beat him.

  After about two days he arrived in Vinh, a city near the coast on the old railroad route from Saigon to Hanoi and a collection point for downed American airmen. The old railroad tracks had been torn out and the bed used as a road; it was one of the better roads in North Vietnam and a road often seen from the air by U.S. pilots. Over the course of the war, dozens of those pilots would later travel by small vehicle up that same road. They would find that they preferred the view from the air.

  Day was dumped in a bamboo building, where guards wrapped a chain around his ankles and secured it with two locks. He had escaped once; they were making sure he did not do so again.

  Early the next morning guards unlocked Day’s chains, and he was blindfolded and marched perhaps fifty yards away. Guards removed the blindfold, and Day found he was in a small pagoda, one of the few religious structures left standing in North Vietnam. He would remember the pagoda for the rest of his life because it was here that he would experience his first real interrogation.

  The session began slowly and easily, as do most effective interrogations.

  “Have you ever heard of Riner Robson?”

  “Who?”

  “Riner Robson.”

  Day realized his interrogator was asking about Robinson “Robbie” Risner.

  “No, I don’t know anyone named Riner Robson.”

  A rapid series of questions followed: “What aircraft do you fly?” “What is your unit?” “What was your mission?” “What was your job?” “What are the names of other people in your unit?”

  Each time he answered with his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth and said he expected to be treated in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva convention.

  The interrogator laughed, and Day heard for the first time a litany he would hear often during coming years: “The Geneva convention applies to war. Your country never declared war on my country. The Geneva convention does not apply to you. You are a criminal, a Yankee air pirate.”

  Day stared in amazement.

  The interrogator continued, “You escaped from the people. Your attitude is very bad. You are the blackest of criminals.”

  Then came a long lecture about Vietnam’s history of overcoming foreign invaders. Day responded by demanding medical attention.

  “The Vietnamese people are very short of medical supplies,” Day remembers his captor saying. “We don’t have to use it on criminals. Your medical treatment will depend on your attitude. You could help yourself by showing a cooperative attitude toward the people. Then the people would be humane and lenient.”

  Again came the questions regarding military information.

  “I don’t understand,” Day answered.

  He was returned to his cubicle with an uneasy feeling. He heard a noise down the hall and sensed another American officer was there. “This is Air Force major George Day and I need to go to the toilet!” he shouted.

  Down the hall, the other person cleared his throat, acknowledgment that Day had been heard. The guards also heard. One pounded Day to the ground. Day lay there, eyes closed, gathering his strength against a great unknown. The guard continued on down the hall, and after a moment Day heard a hammering sound — what he later would learn were the sounds of shackles being put on or taken off — and then deep moaning, the sound of a man in great pain.

  The sound came from Air Force major Norris Overly, a pilot shot down September 11 on a night mission. Overly had an enormous hematoma on his lower back, an injury that arose when he ejected and was dragged across the ground by his parachute. The infection caused him great discomfort, especially when he was forced to lie on his back.

  That night Day slept fitfully, caught between sleep and apprehension. The morning began with another interrogation. To any question beyond the “Big Four” — name, rank, serial number, and date of birth — Day answered, “I don’t remember.”

  The interr
ogator became increasingly angry and finally paused and stared at Day a long moment. “I will teach you to remember,” he said. “I will make you a cripple.”

  He made a motion with his hand, and two burly guards seized Day and jerked his arms behind his back, causing the cast to dig into his shoulder and send searing streaks of pain through the broken arm. The guards looped a rope over the cast and then around the left arm and jerked hard, lashing Day’s wrists together. They moved the ropes up to his elbows and again cinched down hard. Now his arms were tied together from wrist to elbow. As the guards knotted the rope, they occasionally jerked upward, pushing Day’s elbows toward his shoulder blades and causing him to believe his chest was being pulled apart and his shoulders were being yanked from their sockets. A pain he did not know existed swept over him.

  “What was your unit?”

  To talk would both give the North Vietnamese information about a top secret and highly effective unit that they did not know existed and lead to countermeasures that could result in the death of his Misty pilots. Day knew that a POW’s military unit is a fundamental bit of intelligence for captors; he would be asked this question many times. But he would never talk of the Mistys. Never.

  “I was hurt in the bailout. I don’t remember.”

  “I will make you remember.”

  The interrogator nodded, and one of the guards put a stick into the ropes at Day’s elbows and twisted, winching the ropes tighter, yanking Day’s elbows higher and higher. He felt his shoulders dislocating. Circulation in both arms was cut off, and his arms began swelling and turning purple. Tendons in his chest separated from his sternum, and it felt as if his chest were being ripped apart.

  He moaned. He knew the guard wanted him to scream, and he swore he would not give them that satisfaction. Nevertheless, sounds came from him that he did not recognize.

  Whoever wrote the Code of Conduct had never experienced this sort of pain. Day wondered how long he could hold out.

  The interrogation continued. To each question Day said, “I don’t remember.”