American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  ON November 15, 1969, some 250,000 people marched on Washington, the largest antiwar protest in American history.

  In December 1969, Ross Perot chartered two jets from Braniff Airlines. One he jammed with everything from Bibles to Christmas dinners and then announced he was taking the goods to the American POWs. The second jet was filled with POW wives and flown to Paris for an appeal to the Vietnamese diplomatic mission there. The North Vietnamese would not allow Perot’s food and medicine-laden aircraft to land in Hanoi, but the media coverage as he bounced around Southeast Asia focused world attention on the plight of the POWs, caused considerable embarrassment to the North Vietnamese, and made the Nixon administration wonder if Perot was a loose cannon. The POWs had no such reservations. When the guards told them of “Ross Pirate,” they knew he was their friend — indeed, more than that. For the remainder of their lives, the POWs would consider Ross Perot their hero. Day hoped that one day he could meet the combative Texan.

  12

  The Years of the Locust

  AFTER several weeks of recovery, Day, though still wobbly, resumed his job as SRO. His first order was vintage Day: he told the men under his command to cease bowing to the guards.

  The next morning the Bug came to preside over the head count and Day refused to bow. It was an act of extraordinary defiance. No matter that the rules were somewhat relaxed in the aftermath of Ho’s death, such defiance could not go unpunished.

  Again, the Bug ordered Day to bow.

  “Back off or I will order my men not to stand up when your guards enter the rooms,” Day said.

  Fellowes rolled his eyes in amazement. Day could barely stand, and he was defying the Bug.

  “I’m tired of bowing to these little pricks,” Day told Fellowes.

  When Day was not tortured, the POWs knew change was in the air.

  Even so, discipline and good order had to be maintained. The Bug’s countermove was brilliant. A guard came to the cell and told Day and Fellowes that each could write a letter to his wife. These were the first letters they had been allowed to write. Once finished, they were to bring the letters to the Bug, who would proofread them for proper content before mailing them.

  Day and Fellowes walked into the Bug’s office carrying their letters. The Bug insisted they bow. Day did not miss a beat. He bent forward so low that his head almost touched his knees, a sign not of respect but of contempt.

  The Bug screamed and waved his arms, and his right eye began an erratic journey. He knew that if Day bowed correctly, those under his command would follow.

  The Bug smiled and tapped the letters on his desk. Unless Day and Fellowes bowed in a proper, respectful fashion, there would be no letters home to their wives.

  “Pound sand,” Day said.

  The Bug did not understand the colloquialism. But he did understand the tone. He had a guard march Day and Fellowes back to their cell. It would be another year before they were allowed to write home.

  PERHAPS nothing reveals Day’s constant and unending defiance as much as a single game of checkers.

  As the mood of the prison relaxed, one of the guards began playing checkers with the POWs. Each day he would take his board and his checkers and go into individual cells to play. An unofficial agreement among the POWs was to let the guard win. The thinking was that this made the guard feel good and might in some small way lessen the indignities they had to endure.

  Day’s reputation was such that the guard never asked him to play.

  As time went by, the guard defeated every POW in the building, not once but numerous times. This must have given him great confidence because one morning he walked up to Day in the courtyard and said he wanted to play checkers.

  Day stared at him a long moment. “Okay.”

  As the guard walked away to get his checkerboard, Fellowes turned to Day and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to whip his ass.”

  The guard was jovial and expansive as he set up the checkerboard. Fellowes remembers that Day was very intense and studied every move.

  He trounced the guard so quickly and so thoroughly that the man was humiliated. The guard stormed out of the room and never again played checkers with a POW.

  Fellowes looked at Day with raised eyebrows.

  “I didn’t want the son of a bitch in my room anyway.”

  IN January 1970, Ross Perot offered the North Vietnamese $100 million to free the POWs. The North Vietnamese refused and went on “CBS” ridiculing “Ross Pirate.” The affection and respect the POWs had for Perot continued to grow.

  IT was a few months later that Norris Overly went to Paris to talk with North Vietnam diplomats about the plight of POWs. Overly says the idea for the trip originated in the Pentagon.

  He flew to Paris, reported in at the American embassy, then rode the metro out to the distant suburb where the North Vietnamese diplomatic mission was housed and knocked on the door.

  “I told them they were making a mistake sending home healthy guys like me. ‘Why not release the sick and wounded?’ I asked them. ‘Why don’t you release John McCain?’”

  He spent about three fruitless hours talking with a diplomat. When he returned to the States, he reported in as a student at the National War College, a necessary assignment before a colonel can be promoted to general.

  OCTOBER rolled around and Day marked his third year in Hanoi. He was one of six men in Heartbreak Hotel, a cell block within the Hilton, and was SRO by default, as Navy commander Ken Cameron had been beaten senseless and was unable to command. Air Force captain Earl Cobeil had been driven insane by torture. Navy lieutenant J. J. Connell was a hard resister who had endured great torture. Day frequently had asked for medical help for the three men, for Red Cross packages they were entitled to receive, for writing materials. The standard answer was “In some moments,” which meant never. In mid-October the guards took away Cameron, Cobeil, and Connell, and they were never seen again. Later the North Vietnamese said they had died in a hospital. But Day knew the guards had killed the three Americans.

  Now only he and Fellowes and Ben Pollard were in Heartbreak. Their names and the fact that they were prisoners had never been made public by North Vietnam. If the guards had already killed three men, who was to say that the remaining three wouldn’t also disappear?

  That thought did not slow Day’s resistance. He found that by unhooking the wires from the speakers in his cell and rubbing them together, he could short out the entire camp radio system — he could take “CBS” off the air. Thereafter, whenever he did not like what was on the radio — which was often — he shorted out the system and that was that.

  EARLY Sunday morning on November 21, 1970, the POWs were awakened by the sound of distant explosions. U.S. Special Forces had made a daring raid into Son Tay, a POW camp about twenty miles southwest of Hanoi, and had killed numerous guards. But the main purpose of the raid — rescue of POWs held there — did not happen because the prisoners had been moved to another camp some four months earlier.

  Many in America ridiculed the military and said the raid was a dismal failure. But a bellicose Mendel Rivers, the South Carolina congressman who was then head of the House Armed Services Committee, said the raid showed that American forces could go into Hanoi if they chose. The North Vietnamese must have believed him, because a few days later, all of the American POWs in North Vietnam were moved into Hoa Lo, and many of them were placed in large rooms. For the first time in all their years of captivity, the POWs were together. Men who had tapped messages to each other but had never met now saw each other face-to-face.

  New shoot-downs told some of the old heads that no one had seen their parachutes and that they were considered dead. The family of a POW named Porter Halyburton had even held a funeral for him and placed a marker on his grave. Yet here he was, alive.

  The POWs appeared to have been jammed helter-skelter into six of the big rooms at the Hilton. But one chamber was different: the guards gave considerable tho
ught to which POWs they placed in Room 7, a twenty-five by seventy–foot room in the back courtyard. That room was for the hard cases.

  Today Americans tend to lump all the POWs into one group. That is wrong. The sharpest division is between the twelve men who came home early (excluding Hegdahl) and those who remained until the spring of 1973. If ever you meet a man who was a POW, the first question to ask is “Were you an early release?” If he says yes, you may wish to walk away. If he says no, ask him what room he was in at the Hilton in late 1972. If he says he was in Room 7, you may wish to shake his hand because you are talking to a hard-assed resister, a defiant and unbending air pirate with a bad attitude, a true American hero. Bud Day was there. So were James Stockdale, Robbie Risner, and John McCain. Day and McCain had not seen each other since the spring of 1968. McCain told Day the guards had broken his arm during a quiz. “Damn, John. You must have pissed them off,” Day said, thrilled to see his friend alive and still feisty.

  In a few more months, Room 7 would become the most famous room in Hoa Lo.

  ON June 26, 1970, the North Vietnamese for the first time released a list of names of Americans who were captive — 335 of them. Bud Day’s name was not included.

  Doris was filled with dread. There had been more early releases, and several of those men had called her to say they either had seen Bud or had heard of him. But if the North Vietnamese would not publicly acknowledge the name of a man — even if he was known to be a POW — that man could disappear and there would be no accounting.

  General Chappie James, the Air Force officer in charge of dealing with the POW/MIA wives, came to Luke. Doris had been picked as Military Wife of the Year at Luke and had been a finalist for Air Force Wife of the Year. She was no retiring flower and she was not going to be dissuaded by double-talking Air Force generals. She had hard, specific questions for James. But he was evasive. “We don’t want to draw attention to the POWs,” he said.

  By now, Doris and other wives were writing letters by the hundreds to Hanoi. They were generating more and more newspaper and television coverage of the POWs. With Ross Perot backing them and with the Nixon administration showing an ever-increasing interest in the POWs, the wives sensed a change was coming. But they also knew that with each passing day the chance of loss was even greater.

  IN late summer of 1970, the Mistys were disbanded. The air war, like the ground war, was winding down. Almost one-fourth of the Mistys had been shot down, some of them several times. And the Mistys had worn out so many F-100Fs that there were simply not enough left in the inventory to carry on.

  Former Mistys back in the States decided to mark the occasion with a reunion at Luke AFB. They had a lot to celebrate, as the Mistys had become one of the most storied outfits in Vietnam.

  So much had happened since Misty 1 had been shot down. Someone had designed a shoulder flash for them, the word MISTY stitched in white letters against a dark blue background with a red border.

  The Mistys had a highly unusual refueling technique, used by no other pilots in Vietnam. Ordinarily a fighter pilot approached a fuel-laden tanker in a very cautious manner. He slowed down, pulled up off the tanker’s wing until the speed of the two aircraft was equal, then gently slid in behind the tanker to receive the refueling boom. The departure was equally cautious: a slow and easy drift out to the side until he cleared the tanker, and then a gentle turn.

  Not the Mistys. They radioed the tanker, “My nose is cold” — cannons are switched off — “requesting a Misty approach.” They zoomed in behind the enormous lumbering tanker, homing in like a beagle sniffing a Saint Bernard, hooked up, topped off, then asked for a “Misty departure,” which meant they backed off slightly on the throttle, rolled that puppy inverted, and dove for the deck.

  Shit hot!

  As part of his indoctrination, every new Misty had been told the story of the outfit’s first commanding officer, every new Misty given the mandate to carry on with the same aggressive nature. And at every gathering, every going-home party, the Mistys raised their glasses and offered a toast: “To Misty One and his safe return.”

  Bill Douglass was a key figure in the Misty reunion at Luke. On his first tour in Vietnam he was a Bird Dog pilot who was shot down and wounded. On his second tour he was a Misty. Then he came back on a third tour as a Thud driver so he could drop bombs on the people who held Bud Day in jail.

  When Douglass organized the gathering, he decreed that since Misty 1 was a POW, this had to be a practice reunion. The real thing would be held when the boss returned.

  Douglass called Doris and told her that Bud’s outfit was meeting at Luke and she was invited. She laughed when she heard that they were called “Misty.” Bud loved that song so much.

  This was the first time that any of the Mistys had met Doris, and in the beginning the party moved slowly and was very awkward. What do you say to a woman whose husband is in jail? By now the Mistys knew something of the torture the POWs were experiencing. A Misty named Jack Doub had access to highly classified intelligence reports that said Day was being singled out for special torture and might no longer be alive.

  But Doris made every Misty relax. Every pilot sat and talked with her, and she made them feel as if they had known each other for years. They talked of Bud as if he might walk in the door any minute.

  The party began to loosen up. There was talk of how during a refueling, Charlie Neel stood up in the pit to urinate into a bottle. He looked up at the tanker and saw a camerawoman from a television network shooting tape of the refueling. Exactly what he said over the radio has become garbled with time, but it was something about pleasing the viewing audience back home.

  There was talk of Dick Rutan, who, when he had the first predawn flight of the day, would switch on his clearance lights and turn them up brightly so the North Vietnamese gunners would fire at him. And Ed Risinger, who, as a captain and on his own initiative, commandeered three aircraft and led the later-famous “Risinger Raid” into North Vietnam to bomb a SAM site. And the party really loosened up when Ron Fogleman, who later would become a four-star and the chief of staff, swung on a chandelier and sent it crashing to the floor.

  At some point in the evening, the Mistys grew serious and presented Doris with a large silver snifter, on which was engraved:

  HOLD FOR RETURN OF

  LT. COL. GEORGE DAY

  MISTY ONE

  1ST PRACTICE REUNION 18 JULY 1970

  “We’ll fill it with champagne when Bud comes home,” Douglass said. “He can drink it down at the first reunion.” He began talking of what a great leader Bud was and how he set such a high standard for Mistys to follow. Douglass became so emotional he could not continue.

  But The Viking could.

  She stood up, and her voice carried to every corner of the room. Every Misty stopped what he was doing and gave Doris his full attention. “Bud is very proud of all of you,” she said. “He wrote me and said he was flying with the finest men he had ever known.”

  She talked for about ten minutes and ended by saying, “I pray this is our last practice reunion.” She raised her glass and asked the Mistys to join her in a toast. “To my tiger. May he never lose his fight.”

  All around her, men who had flown down the barrels of AAA guns were weeping.

  IN December 1970, Senator Ted Kennedy went to Hanoi and brought back an updated list of POWs that, for the first time, included Bud Day’s name. After more than three years, the North Vietnamese had finally acknowledged his presence.

  A few weeks later, Doris received a package of four letters from Bud. One was dated in September, another in late October, and two more on November 23.

  BY early 1971 the POWs were experiencing more leniency on the part of the guards and entered into a period of relative calm. In that calm, Day’s ideas about forging the POWs into a separate and distinct military unit became more firmly rooted. He tapped out a message to Colonel John Flynn, the senior American prisoner, that the POWs should organize themselves into
the 4th Allied POW Wing. The 4th because the Vietnam War was, after World War I, World War II, and Korea, the fourth American war of the century. He told Flynn there was only one appropriate motto: Return with Honor. And just because a man had been a POW did not automatically mean he was eligible for membership. Those who came home in the Fink Release Program would not be eligible. Nor would the small group of officers and enlisted personnel who had collaborated.

  Flynn endorsed the idea and tapped out a message to that effect.

  The POWs began conducting classes about ten hours each day. Day taught business and construction law, contracts, and how to invest in real estate. Other officers taught everything from playing golf (the bamboo “shit stick” used to push fecal matter down a trough served as the club) to architecture to physics to philosophy to math to a half dozen languages. Day became relatively proficient in French and German. The POWs talked of what they wanted to do when they returned to America. One of the favorite ideas was to fly a fighter under the Golden Gate Bridge.

  As the guards became more lenient, the POWs became more boisterous. Jim Stockdale sensed how quickly and how viciously the guards could react and tapped out a message telling the POWs to “learn to live with prosperity.” But these were, all things considered, good times.

  And the fighter pilots who, during the brutal years, had obeyed orders without question now were beginning to be fractious and contentious. They argued endlessly about the meaning and intent of the Code of Conduct, especially the phrase that if captured, “I am required to give only” the Big Four. What did “required” really mean? What did “only” really mean?

  It was here that Bud Day’s great strength as a leader emerged. And again, it was the sensibilities of a Midwesterner that seized the day. He brooked none of the onanistic arguments from the men under his command. It was all very simple, very straightforward, very unequivocal. And the “SRO is the only guy around here with a vote that counts.” POWs in other rooms disagreed with their SROs on virtually everything. But not in Room 7.