American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  As the men grew more rambunctious, the guards grew sullen. The showdown came on Sunday, February 7, 1971, when the POWs in Room 7 decided to hold an organized church service, the first ever in Hoa Lo. The Bug was advised in advance and ordered the POWs not to meet. But plans continued. Robbie Risner, who knew church liturgy as well as any minister, led the service.

  The concept of church was unknown to the Bug. It was okay for the POWs to stand around in small groups and talk. But the Bug equated one man standing in front of a group with the Communist political indoctrination session. To the Bug, Risner was talking his fellow POWs into rebellion.

  Risner began by leading the men of Room 7 in the Pledge of Allegiance. The Bug came to the window and ordered him to sit down. Risner ignored him. The POWs sang “Rock of Ages” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” and Risner began preaching.

  Suddenly the door banged open, and the Bug, accompanied by armed guards, bayonets at the ready, entered, seized Risner, and marched him off to quiz.

  After the relaxed attitude of the past few months, this turn of events was shocking. The POWs watched almost in disbelief.

  In that frozen moment, Bud Day jumped atop one of the concrete beds, waved his arms in the air, and began singing.

  Oh, say can you see

  By the dawn’s early light

  The POWs turned to look at him and a few joined in.

  What so proooooudly we hailed

  Now everyone in the room joined in. And with great volume.

  At the twilight’s last gleaming

  Larry Guarino interrupted and began chanting, “This is number seven, number seven, number seven. This is number seven. Where the hell is six?”

  The men of Room 6 chimed in.

  Gave prooooofff through the night that our flag was still there

  Then Room 5 kicked in, followed by Rooms 4, 3, and 2.

  (Room 1, where the collaborators were housed, did not participate.)

  Oh say, does that star spangled banner yet wave

  O’er the laaannnd of the free and the hoooomme of the brave

  Robbie Risner heard the singing, and his back straightened and his head was high. Later he said he had “felt nine feet tall” when he heard Bud Day leading the POWs in singing the National Anthem.

  The song had barely ended before Day began another one. Bud Day is not a singer. But he had the volume and the passion, and everyone knew the words.

  My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty

  This time the other rooms joined in immediately. And when the chorus came, hundreds of American voices soared up and over the walls of Hoa Lo and through the streets of Hanoi. From every corner of that old and fearsome place of horror and death, a place that had echoed with screams of anguish for more than a half century, voices for the first time were raised in pride and exultation. And it was a song that allowed the POWs to release all that their guards had tried for years to suppress, a song that gave words to their fight, a song that lifted them beyond the walls and back to all that was dear to them.

  Gooooooodddd bless America, my hoooooommmmeeee sweet hoooooommeeee

  And outside in the streets of Hanoi, passersby, who often averted their eyes when they passed Hoa Lo, stopped in bewilderment. Those were American voices. And they could be heard for blocks.

  Hoa Lo was rocking.

  Goooooooodddd bless America, my hoooooommmmmeee sweet hoooooooommmee

  On that Sunday morning, the POWs sang every song they could recall. The Air Force Hymn, the Navy Hymn, the Army Hymn, and the Marine Corps Hymn. Then they sang “California, Here I Come” and “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Georgia on My Mind” and “Sioux City Sue.”

  The Bug came back, this time with dozens of soldiers. The chin straps on their helmets were snuggled down tightly and bayonets were at the ready. They ran into the room and backed every POW up against the wall with a bayonet tip in his belly. What the guards later referred to as the “Church Riot” was quelled. The guards thought they had prevailed.

  But from that moment, the big rooms were known as Camp Unity. And for the rest of their lives, men would be proud they had been in Room 7.

  THE day after the “riot,” Orson Swindle, a big Marine pilot, tapped a message saying, “You have to stand in line to get in trouble with that crowd.” In a short time, Day would meet Swindle, who, along with McCain, would become one of his closest and most lasting friends. Swindle, like many of the POWs, was from a small town — Camilla, Georgia — and had small-town values. He was raised by a grandmother whose constant admonition was “Do the right thing.” He was a roguish fellow who, other POWs acknowledge, was the unsurpassed master at giving guards a “fuck you” look.

  The Bug considered Bud Day the instigator of the riot; after all, it was he who jumped atop the bed and led the other prisoners in song. The Bug called Day to quiz and lambasted him as a black criminal with a bad attitude, a Yankee air pirate who had killed many women and children and who had never been sincere, never respected the humane and lenient treatment afforded by the people of Vietnam. And then, curiously, he gave Day a letter from Doris. It was his first letter in three years.

  Day was now forty-six years old. He was becoming deaf and his eyes were beginning to dim, in large part from being beaten in the face and temples so many times. Day could not read the letter and told the Bug he needed glasses.

  “You are an old man,” the Bug gloated. “You are going blind. Your wife may take a new husband because you are so crippled.”

  “Yeah,” replied Day, “and she probably has gone to work in the Pentagon for the CIA.”

  Later, the Bug went through all the rooms at Hoa Lo and picked out the malcontents, the incorrigibles, and the troublemakers. On March 17, the guards loaded thirty-six of these men on a truck. Among them was Bud Day, SRO. McCain and Swindle and Fellowes were also on board. The men were taken to Skid Row, a camp about ten miles southwest of Hanoi.

  As they were hauled away, someone said, “Well, there go the Hells Angels.”

  The North Vietnamese POW camps were all different levels of squalor and misery. Skid Row was among the worst. It was a long building with eighteen cells on either side. Each cell measured six feet by four feet and was a fetid mud hole. The building had no electric lights and no bathing facilities. There was no ventilation.

  Bud Day was put on his knees for a day and a night and then pushed into his cell. He celebrated his fourth anniversary as a POW in solitary.

  In that bleak place, he remembered the English professor at Morningside who had made him memorize poetry. Then, he had thought it was a waste of time. Now he rejoiced that he remembered and could recite aloud a verse from one of the poems forced upon him:

  Stone walls do not a prison make,

  Nor iron bars a cage;

  Minds innocent and quiet take

  That for an hermitage;

  If I have freedom in my love

  And in my soul am free,

  Angels alone, that soar above,

  Enjoy such liberty.

  THAT Friday afternoon he tapped “HH.”

  Sunday morning he tapped out a strong “CC.” And the Hells Angels stood up, faced east toward America, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and prayed in their individual ways.

  Monsoon rains began early in 1971 and were particularly heavy. The Red River rose and threatened to inundate Skid Row. On June 17, Day and his posse were moved back to Hoa Lo.

  POWs peeped through cracks in the doors or slits in the windows and watched the Hells Angels return. They were gaunt and hollow-eyed and limping and covered with filth, but they swaggered. They were the toughest sons of bitches in the Red River Valley, and Bud Day was their leader.

  Day and the other malcontents were thrown into Room 2 at Heartbreak Hotel, the most brutal part of Hoa Lo. They were in the cell adjacent to Larry Guarino. One day word went out that Guarino was about to be taken out for exercise. Day peeped through the slit under the door, expecting to see the giant of a man
who for years had been sending out such stirring messages of resistance. Guarino was a scrawny little guy who weighed no more than a hundred pounds. Guarino’s scarred wrists and ankles and his swollen knees told his story, and his eyes revealed his fighting spirit. Day wept when he saw him.

  Most of Day’s posse would remain together until they were repatriated. Day was SRO, and as his communications officers he chose McCain and Swindle, two of the most facile “flaggers.” McCain would stand on Swindle’s shoulders and flag messages through the window to other POWs. (Swindle was the better communicator, but McCain pulled rank on him and stood on his shoulders.)

  Day and McCain and Swindle talked politics endlessly. It was here that Day realized he no longer was a Democrat; he had become a Republican, and he thought Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were great leaders. The three men particularly liked the tough stance that both Nixon and the California governor had taken against war protesters and demonstrators.

  EXCEPT for caring for her four children, Doris Day’s sole focus in life was working on POW/MIA issues. She was a child of the heartland, unsophisticated and inexperienced in many matters. But she never doubted that she could change the government of America and the government of North Vietnam. Her husband was in jail and she wanted him home, and she would do whatever it took.

  In the spring of 1971, the National League of Families chartered a jet to fly to Geneva for a Red Cross rally, the purpose of which was to appeal to North Vietnam to release the sick and injured POWs.

  Doris wanted to go. The four children would understand. She was seeking information about their dad.

  Before she left, she attended a dinner to receive an award for her advocacy. Air Force general Chappie James was there and tried to discourage her from taking the trip to Switzerland. “If you were my wife, I wouldn’t want you to go,” he said.

  “Well, Chappie, that’s the big difference,” she snapped. “You are not Bud Day. He would understand.”

  James said dealing with representatives of a foreign country was the job of the State Department.

  “We don’t have diplomatic relations with North Vietnam,” Doris replied.

  Once the Department of Defense and the State Department realized the wives could not be dissuaded, they relented enough to brief the wives before they departed.

  Doris hired a nanny to stay at the house. The woman came the day before Doris left. That night Doris showed her the food she had prepared for the nine days she would be gone. Clothes for those nine days were lined up for each child.

  On May 21, she flew to Dallas and then to Dulles, and from there to Geneva. She was among 174 POW/MIA family members.

  In Geneva, the family members split into different groups. Doris’s party elected to go to Sweden to visit the North Vietnamese embassy in Stockholm. Since she spoke Norwegian, she could understand a bit of Swedish.

  Once in Stockholm, she was so nervous that she had diarrhea and was vomiting. But she got control of herself, called the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and asked for an appointment. When she was told to come to the embassy, she said, “Not just me. My friends also. We have traveled a long way.”

  The four women and one POW father showed up at the embassy and were escorted to a large room with a big coffee table and lace curtains on the open windows. A large picture of Ho Chi Minh was on the wall, and a vase filled with red tulips sat in the middle of the coffee table. As they waited, they remembered one part of the State Department briefing: expect the room to be bugged.

  The women looked around the room. “I think the bug is behind Uncle Ho,” Doris said.

  “No, it is in the tulips,” said another.

  “No, I think it will be in the cuff links of whoever we see,” said a third.

  After about twenty minutes the consul entered and greeted each wife by name. Doris found to her astonishment that the consul spoke beautiful English. She would not need to speak Norwegian or to have a translator.

  The consul sat at the big table and shot his cuffs. He was wearing very large cuff links. The wives tried hard not to laugh.

  The slender Vietnamese man took the initiative by opening a folder filled with pictures of babies killed in Vietnam. “This is why your husband is in prison,” he said to Doris. “He kills women and children, and bombs churches.”

  “No, my husband is a good and decent man.” She pointed at the pictures. “Those people in the pictures look as if they are in South Vietnam.”

  Another wife agreed. “Those pictures were taken in South Vietnam.”

  The consul did not like these aggressive American women and launched into a litany of crimes alleged to have been perpetrated by their husbands.

  “But what about the Geneva convention?” asked Doris.

  “These men are criminals. The Geneva convention does not apply to criminals.”

  “I have not heard from my husband,” Doris said. She was determined to keep the initiative, to talk about the wives’ agenda and not the consul’s.

  “Mrs. Day, how can you say that? You received a letter in the last group sent out.”

  She was shocked. How did a consul in Stockholm know she had received a letter in Phoenix?

  “He is not receiving packages.”

  “How do you know that?”

  The consul opened another folder and took from it picture after picture of civil rights disturbances, of antiwar marches. He had newspaper clippings from each wife’s state of residence. He asked Doris about prison riots in Arizona.

  She was stunned. The idea that the North Vietnamese subscribed to a clipping service covering such stories rattled her. But there was more.

  “Mrs. Day, we don’t want your son coming to our country to fight in a few years.”

  Doris was speechless. The consul knew that Steve was almost of draft age.

  When she left she knew that the consul, and the government he represented, did not care if her husband was in jail another year or another ten years.

  This was an even bigger battle than she had realized. Doris knew she would have to become even more active in politics. George McGovern was running against Nixon and supported a unilateral withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, a move that would have left the POWs to the mercy of the North Vietnamese. Nixon was her man.

  On July 2, 1971, the Phoenix Gazette quoted Doris as praising the Nixon administration, and speaking on behalf of POW/MIA wives, she said Nixon “has our total and unqualified support.” She said the wives, unlike much of America and for obvious reasons, opposed an immediate and unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam. She received a letter of thanks from Nixon, the first of a half dozen he would send her.

  That was important to Doris. But even more important was the fact that the Lutherans at St. John Lutheran Church back in Sioux City continued to pray for her husband. And they did.

  13

  The Freedom Bird

  AS was the case in 1968, the Vietnam War was the pivotal issue in the 1972 presidential campaign, and the two candidates — Richard Nixon and George McGovern — could not have been more opposite in their views. The hawkish Nixon wanted a military victory and to bring the POWs home. The dovish McGovern wanted America to pull out of Vietnam immediately and to settle the POW issue later.

  The antiwar movement was at the height of its power, and McGovern was its darling. Nevertheless, the movement did not have a face; there was no single leader.

  That changed on April 22, 1971, in Room 4221 of the New Senate Office Building. At 11:05 a.m., Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, called his committee to order and asked a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran to speak. The decorated veteran was a reserve naval officer and a leader of a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Handsome and eloquent, he delivered a showstopping speech, flawless in presentation and devastating in content.

  He began by saying that his presence was symbolic, that he represented a group of a thousand that, in turn, represented a much lar
ger group of Vietnam veterans, and were it possible for all of them to attend, they would give the same testimony he was about to give.

  Then he talked of “war crimes” being committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated instances but “crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He said American troops raped Vietnamese civilians; cut off their ears, heads, and limbs; applied electric shock to genitals; blew up bodies; and randomly shot at civilians. He said American troops shot cattle and dogs for fun and razed villages “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” He said that in the Vietnam veteran, America “has created a monster,” that these men were given the chance “to die for the biggest nothing in history.”

  He asked for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and said veterans “are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.” He estimated that 60 to 80 percent of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam “stay stoned twenty-four hours a day.”

  The impassioned young man grew more intense. He was educated and polished, and the ribbons on his fatigues gave great weight to his words. Senator Fulbright and the packed chamber listened closely. Television cameras representing the major networks and reporters from the major dailies were there when he said Vietnam was a racial war in that black soldiers “provided the highest percentage of casualties” and that free-fire zones — places where U.S. soldiers shot at anything that moved — showed “America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.” He said weapons were used in Vietnam that “I do not believe this country would dream of using” in Europe or any non–third world country. In response to one question, he said America “murdered” two hundred thousand Vietnamese annually.

  One line the reserve officer uttered was particularly powerful. It crystallized the feeling of the antiwar movement, was the ideal sound bite, and decades later would still be repeated: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”