American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  One guard ripped the small towel in half and forced it into Day’s mouth.

  “Down!” a guard shouted.

  Day slumped to his knees and then to his stomach and realized no questions had been asked. This was not about information. This was about punishment.

  Dear God, give me strength. Give me strength. Let me endure. Please, God. Don’t let me talk. Please.

  A guard across the room stood erect, tightened his grip on the fan belt, and grunted as he pushed off from the wall. He raised the belt high above his head and used the momentum of his dash across the room to smash the belt across Day’s buttocks.

  The towel did not muffle the noise. Day’s scream sliced through the dawn, and POWs knew another American had been called to torture.

  While the scream still hung in the air, the second guard launched from the wall and brought his fan belt down on Day’s buttocks.

  One scream merged into another as the guards bounced from wall to wall. From some distant remote place, Day realized the sound of the fan belt on his skin was crisp and sharp. Hour after hour the beating continued, the lashes falling from Day’s buttocks to his thighs and then up over his lower back, and after a while the sound of the belt hitting his flesh changed to a soft splatting sound and then to a wet plopping noise.

  God, give me strength. Don’t let me talk. Please, God.

  Occasionally, when the guards needed a break, the interrogator asked, “Are you ready to confess your black crimes?”

  Each time Day shook his head and the beating continued.

  He was frequently reminded that he was a Yankee air pirate with a bad attitude.

  Sometime in late morning the beating stopped so Day could eat, so he could have strength to endure the afternoon session. He slowly sipped the thin pumpkin soup and a cup of water.

  The men who had beaten Day were tired, and two new guards came in and gripped the fan belts and the session resumed. Late in the afternoon, when these guards were too tired to continue, Day was dragged to his cell and given another bowl of pumpkin soup.

  All he wanted was rest and sleep and to renew his strength for what would come with the new day. But he had not finished his soup when he was ordered to his knees, and the leg irons and hell cuffs were reapplied. When the guards finished screwing down the cuffs into Day’s swollen wrists, blood was flowing freely. He was kept on his knees all night. Every time his head nodded in exhaustion, he was prodded with a bayonet.

  On the morning of the second day, the torture resumed. Sometime that morning the three hundredth lash from the fan belt fell on Day’s buttocks. He lost count after that, too groggy from lack of sleep and too weak to keep track. Guards asked him about the hierarchy of the Pentagon and the CIA, two subjects that obsessed the North Vietnamese and two topics that invariably came up during a torture session. Day had never served in the Pentagon and knew little about the CIA.

  The beatings continued.

  Dear God, give me strength.

  He spent that night on his knees. Because he was so tired and weak, the bayonet pokes were more frequent.

  By the third day the shackles had cut so deeply into his ankles that his Achilles tendons were visible. The shiny white of his patella could be seen on both knees.

  On the morning of the fourth day, after Day spent another sleepless night on his knees, the guard shouted, “Are you ready to confess your black crimes?”

  “I hope your mother dies in a whorehouse,” Day replied.

  The beating continued.

  Now the guards stood at Day’s feet when they beat him. The fan belts sliced into his scrotum.

  Please. Strength.

  That evening he was tottering back and forth on his knees and being prodded so often with a bayonet that the guard ordered him to sit on a stool. Within seconds he fell asleep and slumped to the floor. During the subsequent beating, the guard broke two of Day’s front teeth, cutting his own knuckles in the process. This made the guard quite angry, and he slapped Day so hard that he ruptured the prisoner’s eardrum.

  When Day was dragged off to the quiz room on the morning of the sixth day, his buttocks and thighs were swollen and puffed out about three inches. Atop the hamburger-like flesh, from the middle of his thighs up to the small of his back, a scab was trying to form. Day’s lower legs were twice their normal size, and his toes were like overstuffed sausages. A watery fluid oozed from his testicles.

  The leg irons and hell cuffs were forced on him.

  He dropped his pants and slumped to the floor on the wet place where his blood was trying to congeal atop that of other POWs.

  Prayers were not enough. He was forced deep into himself, to the very core of his being. In that dark hour he found the rock to which he would cling, the words that symbolized his deepest beliefs and his deepest desire. If he died, these words would be his last thought.

  Return with Honor.

  That day he did what every POW did under sustained torture. He broke. He knew he had been crippled for life. He knew he was at the point of death. So he talked. But when he talked, he offered only lies. When the interrogator wanted to know about various escape committees and their functions, Day said there was a transportation committee whose job was to line up trucks to haul POWs out of Hanoi after the next escape. He gave them the names of every committee that every military organization for two hundred years had formed, information so trivial and so frivolous that he was amazed the guards accepted it.

  “Who are the committee members?”

  “I am the only member of each committee.”

  The fan belts ripped the scab from his back and flayed his testicles. He said everyone in his building was on every committee, an equal impossibility.

  Return with Honor.

  That night he was ordered back on the stool. His buttocks were so raw he could not sit on them, so he sat at an angle on his hips. When he fell asleep he was beaten and put on his knees.

  Sometime during that long night, he began projectile vomiting a mixture of blood and bile. Uncontrollable bloody diarrhea racked his body. A blood vessel in his stomach had been ruptured from the beating. He slumped in a pool of blood and vomit and piss and shit.

  The guards were disgusted.

  Return with Honor.

  The guard put him on his knees. When he collapsed, the guard beat him until he awakened.

  It was not his battered body that he thought about that night. He knew that if he lived, one day the pain would end. But the suffering that came with violating the Code of Conduct would last forever. Never mind that everything he told his guards was fiction or useless information. Never mind that every POW sooner or later talked to the enemy. All Bud Day could think of was that he had gone beyond name, rank, serial number, and date of birth: the Big Four. He was ashamed of himself, and his suffering knew no limits.

  The next morning the guard looked at the stinking scarecrow before him and asked, “How do you think of your treatment by the humane and lenient Vietnamese people?”

  “My treatment is brutal, uncivilized, inhumane, and far below the standards of the Geneva convention.”

  “Drop pants.”

  The guards knew Day was at the point of death, and the beatings lessened in severity. Still, July became August and the beatings continued. The guards wanted Day to write a statement saying the war was immoral. But Day did not have the luxury of free speech that civilians had; he was a serving military officer in the hands of the enemy, and he was bound by the Code of Conduct. He did what he did with full knowledge of the consequences.

  “I can’t do that.”

  As the beating began, he shut his eyes, his mind traveled to a different place, and he held on to his rock:

  Return with Honor.

  By now the guard and Day had fallen into a verbal shorthand.

  “Write or not?”

  “No write. Never.”

  “You write.”

  “No.”

  “Drop pants.”

  The beatings con
tinued on a daily basis, but now he received maybe a dozen lashes. Years later he would remember and say, “Happiness is a short quiz.”

  Sometime near mid-September the beatings ended and Day was dragged off to solitary. The door was barely closed before he crawled to the wall and began tapping that he had been in daily quiz for months and was in bad shape physically and mentally. “Do not send any camp news,” he said. “I don’t want to know anything that might get someone else tortured.”

  Larry Guarino tapped back that Day had made his country proud, that he had performed as a U.S. military officer should perform by continuing to be strong. He ended by saying that twenty-six POWs had been beaten to the edge of death. But a few days later, Air Force major Leo Thorsness tapped a message saying that none of the men in the barn had been tortured because of anything Day said during the quiz.

  Day wept.

  IN June 1969, Doris enrolled at a local junior college and took a course titled On Being a Better Parent.

  Many times that summer she awakened in the middle of the night — midday in Hanoi — with the sense that something was terribly wrong. She took Bud’s picture down from the dresser and talked to him. She stared into his determined eyes, and it was almost as if he were talking back to her, thinking of her at the same time she was thinking so longingly of him. Many times the thought came to her that he could be sick and dying, that he might not come home.

  Doris spent her days cartwheeling from grief to hope. The greatest pain of all was not knowing whether Bud was dead or alive, whether she was a wife or a widow. In this limbo she had only raw courage for sustenance.

  Her burden was greater because of the four children. They were uneasy. Once, they had seen her cry and were visibly frightened. At some level they must have been haunted by the fear of again being without a father. She had to remain always upbeat.

  But there were times when she went to the bathroom, locked the door, and sobbed.

  Doris became coordinator of family services at Luke AFB, the top civilian volunteer on the big base. She continued to visit every local newspaper, radio station, and TV station to talk about POWs. She knew as many reporters and columnists and editors as anyone in Phoenix. She became friends with the mayor and with Arizona congressmen. Anytime she called, the governor came to the phone. She made speeches to any group that would listen. (She recorded every speech so that, when he returned, Bud would know exactly what she had said.) She wrote letters to the North Vietnamese government. Meanwhile, Ross Perot and his people met with many of the POW wives, and together they became an increasingly powerful consortium.

  On August 26, 1969, the second anniversary of Bud’s shoot-down, Doris felt particularly low. She knew that things were just not right with Bud. She sewed much of the day. When she was sad and lonely, she always scrubbed the house. That evening she sent the children to bed early and stayed up scrubbing the walls until 2 a.m.

  She was worried about how she was handling the family real estate investments back in Sioux City. She had someone who was supposed to be doing maintenance. But she had gotten word that the city was about to condemn one of her rental buildings, a structure containing four apartments. Bit by bit, her world seemed to be falling apart.

  THE middle years for the POWs ended on September 3, 1969, with the tolling of bells in Hanoi. The guards were mopey and morose; some shed tears. Word got out to the POWs: Ho Chi Minh is dead.

  Ho’s death marked the end of their systematic and institutionalized torture. The Americans were still occasionally beaten but usually for taunting the guards or flagrantly disobeying camp rules. Day was thus the last American POW to undergo a prolonged period of torture. Afterward, he remained in solitary, in leg irons, and under intense pressure to write a letter saying the war was immoral — the only person in camp still under maximum pressure. Every guard, every cook, every functionary, was committed to making his life one of continuing misery. But even Day sensed things were getting better. He was allowed to wash his pajamas and told to take a shower, his first in months. His back and legs were so sensitive that the harsh lye soap seared his skin. Walking was so painful that he wondered if his knees were permanently damaged.

  Another event that had an impact on North Vietnamese thinking about the POWs was that in July, Secretary of State William Rogers had said Hanoi was “lacking humanity” in treatment of POWs. And in August, forty-two U.S. senators issued a statement condemning North Vietnam for its “cruel” treatment of American POWs. The North Vietnamese responded in the usual fashion, that the Americans were not POWs; they were criminals. North Vietnam did not have to identify its criminals nor did it have to release the sick and wounded nor did it have to allow Red Cross inspections. But by now, this response was sounding hollow, and the North Vietnamese knew that.

  Still another event that brought on better treatment for the POWs was a press conference held by three more early releases. Ironically, the press conference occurred on the day that Ho Chi Minh died.

  One of the returnees was Seaman Douglas Hegdahl, a nineteen-year-old ammunition handler aboard a Navy ship who, without permission, went topside one night to watch a bombardment and fell overboard. He was picked up by fishermen and turned over to North Vietnamese militia. To the guards, he was a simple, uneducated enlisted man hardly worth their attention. But Hegdahl had a phenomenal memory and knew the names of almost four hundred POWs. Because of this, and because the POWs wanted their identities known to the world, Hegdahl was ordered by superior officers to accept an early release. The two officers with him were under no such orders and were then and are today considered by those they left behind as part of the Fink Release Program.

  During the press conference, Hegdahl recounted in stark detail the abuses being suffered by POWs. His account reverberated across America and added to the growing backlash against the North Vietnamese.

  Soon afterward, three more POWs were released: Fred Thompson, Joe Carpenter, and Jim Low. Before he was released, Thompson made a tape that was played over “CBS” in which he urged the POWs to follow camp regulations. Guards told the POWs that Thompson had a “good attitude.” Day was mortified that all three releases were Air Force officers.

  The American media, for the first time, were beginning to take a serious look at the POWs. It started with a cover story in the October issue of Air Force magazine. The story was titled “The Forgotten Americans of the Vietnam War” and was reprinted as the lead article in the November issue of Reader’s Digest. References to the article continued for months. During that stretch, the POWs enjoyed a period of relative calm.

  On October 2, Day was given a package from Doris. The package included pictures of the four children. Day reverently sorted through the box and realized all his prayers had been answered. His family was alive and well. He had written nothing and signed nothing that would have disgraced him. Not one word of criticism against America had escaped his lips.

  Rules about the content and weight of packages sent to Hanoi were rigid. Doris found that when she weighed the package, it was several ounces lighter than the maximum. She wanted to send as many items as possible, but what weighed only a few ounces? She settled on a pink nail file. After Day received the package, word went out across the prison camp: Bud Day uses a pink nail file. Other POWs frequently asked if he remembered to push back his cuticles.

  Two weeks later, Day was taken out of irons. His spirits raised, his objections became more intense. One day in early December he was loudly protesting his treatment and demanding more privileges for his men. When he was told to be quiet, he said, “You can all go to hell.”

  About that time another guard came to his room and pushed an American inside. Navy pilot Jack Fellowes of Tucson, Arizona, looked at Day in amazement. The twisted arms, the swollen and bloody knees with the bones shining through, the rust-covered wrists and ankles, told the story — that and the hamburger-like backs of his legs. And the man’s eyes. My God, Fellowes thought, they looked like black holes, but they glistened
with an unquenchable fire. The frail man wobbled when he tried to stand. His right arm was bowed and his hands were curled.

  Whoever he was, this man was a tough resister.

  Bud Day’s face broke into a big smile. He stuck out his hand. “Hello, pal. I’m Bud Day.”

  Fellowes’s eyes widened. American POWs were scattered in a dozen camps around Hanoi and even up on the Chinese border. But they were shuffled from camp to camp, and most of them had heard the story of Bud Day. It was said that he was one tough son of a bitch, that when he looked at one of his captors, you could strike matches on his eyes. It was said that the very sight of a North Vietnamese guard made the hair on the back of his neck stand up in anger. And here he was, just after enduring six weeks of the worst that teams of North Vietnamese torturers could dish out, and he was telling them to go to hell.

  BY late 1969, Norris Overly, the man who had saved the lives of Bud Day and John McCain, was a sought-after speaker. He addressed universities, civic groups, congressional committees, military Dining Ins, state legislatures, the Air Force Academy, and CIA employees. From coast to coast, Overly got standing ovations. He was a former POW and everyone wanted to touch the hem of his garment. He even had a private chat with the Air Force chief of staff.

  Overly had made lieutenant colonel during his brief time as a POW and made full colonel not long after he returned. Every promotion since captain had been below the zone. Kidney stones kept him off flying status, but basically any desk job in the Air Force was his for the asking. He picked the Air Force Personnel Center, then under the command of Major General Robert Dixon, the same man Bud Day had invited out on the ramp to fight back in Korea.

  Dixon decided which colonels would become generals and boasted that he had destroyed the careers of more colonels than any man in Air Force history. He was a loud, angry man whose nickname was “The Alligator.” He terrified his subordinates, but the Air Force would continue promoting him all the way to four-star rank.

  Overly thrived in Dixon’s office, and Dixon was delighted to have in his command the glamorous former POW, so much so that he helped Overly receive a prestigious assignment to the National War College.