by Robert Coram
“General, is that a rhetorical question or are you really interested?”
Jones blinked. The chief of staff is a demigod surrounded by sycophants who strew roses in his path. Almost never does the chief hear blunt talk.
“I’m really interested.”
“Then the answer is ‘Not worth a damn.’”
Day told of Sam Johnson, a former POW who, even though he was senior in rank to several of his superiors, was number five in the command structure at a wing at Seymour Johnson AFB. He told how he did not get the wing at Eglin. Day went on about how the Air Force continued to treat the former POWs as second-class officers when, in fact, they had proven their character and their ability in a way that few other officers were ever called upon to do.
Unspoken but hanging in the air was the obverse side of Day’s argument: the men in TAC (who had not been POWs) who had been promoted to general officers usually were Dixon’s men, officers who had said their wings were 65 percent combat ready.
Within a week after Day’s courtesy call, the chief ordered General Dixon to give the tactical fighter wing at Homestead AFB to Sam Johnson. Johnson later retired from the Air Force and became a long-serving congressman from Texas.
After Vietnam, there had been so much turmoil over the Code of Conduct and what it meant and how it should be followed that a special group of officers was convened to study the code and determine if it needed revising. Bud Day was the senior Air Force representative on that review board. In that capacity, he occasionally traveled to the Pentagon. On one of his visits, he was told that General Dixon wanted to see him. Dixon’s office as TAC commander was at Langley Field in Virginia, but he borrowed a Pentagon office for his session with Day.
Day entered the meeting with a unique aura. By now he had some seventy medals. In fact, there were no more combat medals to give him; he had them all. He was the only man in Air Force history to receive both the AFC and the MOH, a man so venerated in the Air Force that his picture now hung outside the office of the chief of staff.
Nevertheless, Dixon made him cool his heels for three hours. When Day finally was ushered into the office, Dixon was shaking with anger. He chewed Day out for going over his head and telling Jones about the POWs. Then Dixon launched a diatribe about the former POWs and their demands for promotion. “I’m tired of you guys riding that horse,” he fumed.
The comment made Day the angriest he had been since he was in Hanoi. “General, if that’s all,” Day said. He stood up and left the office.
Some thirty years later when Day told this story, he grew visibly furious. “I had to get out of that office,” Day said. “If I had stayed, I would have punched him out. And it would not be good to see headlines about a Medal of Honor recipient punching a general officer.”
BUT Day had more on his mind than battling Dixon. He called an aide to former president Richard Nixon and said, “Would you ask President Nixon if he will reaward my Medal of Honor?”
The aide was a bit nonplussed by the request. Former president Nixon was living in exile in San Clemente, in disgrace after resigning from the presidency. But the aide knew that Nixon was a revered figure to the POWs. And he knew that Bud Day was one of Nixon’s most outspoken supporters.
“Colonel, I’m not sure what you mean by reawarding the medal.”
Day told the aide about the year’s delay in awarding his MOH and how he thought the medal should be above politics, even presidential politics. He reaffirmed his respect for Nixon and told the aide, “I would be honored for President Nixon to be the president who awarded me the Medal of Honor. That would be the one that counts.”
Nixon agreed. So Day and Doris flew to California. At San Clemente, Day and Doris had a private chat with the former president. During the conversation, Nixon told Day, “You know, I wish I had started the last bombing campaign sooner. It would have brought all of you home earlier.”
Day assured him he had done just fine. Then the little group grew formal, and Nixon removed the Medal of Honor from its box. Day stood at attention, shoulders back, eyes straight ahead. And Nixon spoke for a moment of Day’s courage and patriotism and the example he had set for young officers and for all Americans. He hooked the medal around Day’s neck, stepped back, shook hands with Day, and smiled.
IN 1976 a CBS producer asked McCain and Day if they would return to Vietnam with Cronkite and be the featured part of a documentary — two of America’s best-known POWs doing the reconciliation thing. McCain accepted. Day refused. Then one of Cronkite’s staffers called Day, tried to schmooze with him, and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to go back to Vietnam?”
Day paused. He had no respect for the man he still referred to as “Walter Crankcase,” the weak dick who stood up after Tet and said America was losing the war. Then he said, “Yes, I would. Leading a four-shipper of F-100s carrying wall-to-wall nape.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I’m not.”
So McCain went to Vietnam with Cronkite and made the documentary.
This was the first instance of what would become, over the next three decades, a pattern of McCain going one way and Day another. They remained the closest of friends. But each was headstrong and each had his own path to tread.
Indeed, Day was out on the range one day, rolling in for a gun pass, when he caught a 20 mm ricochet on the canopy of his F-4. The bullet hit in front of his face on a trajectory that, had the canopy not been bullet resistant, would have taken his head off. The thought occurred to him that if he was being protected in this fashion, maybe his work on earth was not yet done, maybe there was another mission.
But what could it be?
WHEN Day was passed over for the job of wing commander, word quickly passed through the Air Force. Day’s admirers began working behind the scenes, and soon he had a phone call offering him a job with the Armed Forces Staff College, where he would be in charge of training field-grade officers for higher jobs. He would be occupying a general’s slot; thus it was a job from which he could be promoted to general.
But it was not a job in the operational Air Force. Day had spent his professional Air Force life either in SAC or in TAC and did not want his last assignment to be what he called a “weenie staff job.” He turned down the assignment, knowing that by doing so, he would not retire as a general.
With no reason for staying in the Air Force, Day began making plans for retirement, a procedure that career officers refer to as “going over the side.” It had been twenty-five years since he joined the Air Force. With his time in the Marine Corps and the Army Reserves, he had given more than thirty years of his life to his country. He had been stationed at bases in America, England, Japan, and South Vietnam. But his longest duty station was Hanoi.
Day decided not to go back to Sioux City. He had bought property in Shalimar, a town that abuts Eglin, and another piece near Pensacola. He wanted to build a house and settle down and practice law. When he told Doris he was going to put in his retirement papers, she asked him to delay for a year. She had just been elected president of the Officers’ Wives Club and wanted to serve out her term.
Day could not say no. “She did a lot of waiting around for me,” he said. “I could wait for her for a year.”
His last year in the Air Force was a sad postscript to his career. He could not stay in the wing where he had been passed over for the top job, so he went to General Bill Evans, a fighter pilot friend, and said, “General, I need a job in the legal office for my last year in the Air Force.”
“Go over there and tell them I sent you,” Evans said.
Day never said a word to his bosses in TAC. He simply drove over to the legal office and went to work. When he took a new flight physical, the flight surgeon again reminded Day he should not be flying with his disabilities. This time the doctor added a sobering codicil: “If you continue flying until you retire, you will not be entitled to disability payments.”
That made sense. If a man is fit enough to fly, he cert
ainly is not disabled.
Day was grounded.
He was in such wretched physical condition that he was declared 75 percent disabled, a category that meant he would not have to pay income tax. He refused, saying, “I want to pay taxes. I have to contribute.” His disability was lowered to 60 percent.
America’s greatest living war hero spent his last year in the Air Force doing malpractice work, studying for the Florida bar exam, and shuffling papers.
ON one side of the Days’ property in Shalimar was Choctawhatchee Bay, and on the other side was a bayou. They brought in a dredge and funneled tons of fill dirt onto the property to raise the elevation farther above sea level and then began building a two-story brick house such as they had admired on Country Club Drive back in Sioux City. Two-story brick houses are not the typical waterfront property found in Florida. But that is what Bud and Doris had dreamed of for almost thirty years.
Day took the bar exam in February 1976 and three months later was told he had passed. He bought a building on Beal Parkway in Fort Walton Beach, met a young lawyer named Tim Meade, and set up a two-man law office.
In the fall, Doris asked Bud to again postpone his retirement. She had been elected parliamentarian of the Officers’ Wives Club.
“Doris, they can elect another parliamentarian,” he said.
He wanted to retire on December 10, 1976, which would have been the thirty-fourth anniversary of the day he joined the Marine Corps. But predictably the Air Force would not grant his request, and he retired in February 1977.
When he did so, Day’s friends, including many POWs and a few Mistys, flew in from around the world. Speeches by senior Air Force generals were gracious, as were Day’s responses.
It was an elegant send-off, and Day revealed not the slightest hint of the disappointment in his heart.
16
Good-bye Yellow Dogs
IN 1978 it had been twenty-nine years since Bud Day had graduated from law school, and except for a little collection work in South Dakota and representing a few wayward airmen in courts-martial, he had never practiced law. Now, at fifty-three, he was setting up a law practice in a town where he knew few civilians.
He went about this in the common-sense fashion one would expect from a man of the Midwest. He knew that simply hanging out a shingle would not make him a litigator. So during much of 1977 and part of 1978, he spent hundreds of hours attending various schools. He went to Washington, DC, and took a course on how to try a medical malpractice suit. He went down to Gainesville and took a course sponsored by the Florida Trial Lawyers Association on how to try cases. Every time he came across an area where he felt unsure, he went back to school. Six hours on introduction of evidence. Six hours on examination of witnesses. In every school, not only was he older than the other students but he was older than the high-powered lawyers who taught the courses.
His law practice was in a one-story plain-Jane sort of building on one of Fort Walton Beach’s main north-south roads, a road whose chockablock businesses reveal the city’s lack of restraint on zoning matters. He was not one of those lawyers who thought it necessary to let their offices reflect their affluence to impress potential clients. The parking lot out back was then and remains today a refuge for homeless people, public urinators, and an element that operates on the windy side of the law — a place where visitors must keep a sharp eye. (Day grumbles about the urinators. But the Florida variety, unlike those in Arizona, are fleet of foot.)
Day specialized in personal-injury litigation and in representing young pilots who had run afoul of Air Force bureaucracy. He represented a number of former POWs in their efforts to receive disability payments from the military, including Jim Stockdale, John Flynn, Orson Swindle, and a half dozen others.
Day knew well that the military sometimes eats its young. One such instance was the Marantes case at Hurlburt Field. David Marantes was a young Hispanic officer, highly accomplished and clearly on a fast track. He was kicked out of the Air Force in such a high-handed manner that not only did he lose his benefits but his honor was impugned. The decision, which emanated from senior officers and had elements of racism, received considerable attention in the Air Force Times. Day was ultimately successful in changing the conditions of the officer’s discharge and restoring his benefits.
Another case Day handled was quite important, even though he lost. It began when the widow of an Air Force sergeant came to Day. For years her husband had suffered from serious headaches. Military doctors never gave him a thorough examination. Eventually the doctors decided to test the sergeant for a brain tumor and sent him to the military hospital at Lackland AFB. A tumor was discovered, the sergeant was operated on, and then he was left in his bed, unsupervised and with no instructions. He got out of bed, fell and hit his head, then crawled back into bed, where he lay for twelve days with no one checking on him. He vomited, aspirated the vomit, contracted pneumonia, and died. The sergeant’s widow asked Day to file a malpractice suit against the government.
Day was outraged by the government’s callous indifference toward the sergeant. The facts of the case were clear, and he expected a favorable verdict. But he was steamrolled by government lawyers. He says that he was “outspent and outwitnessed,” that he “did not have the ammo or the gas to fight them.” The U.S. government, Day realized, is a juggernaut that wins suits because it has virtually unlimited resources to hire witnesses and experts.
When Day returned to Fort Walton Beach, he went to a Jacksonville lawyer who had won a $20 million malpractice case against the government and from him learned the subtleties of how to fight the U.S. government in court. After that, it would be years before he lost a case in federal court.
DAY occasionally wondered about that 20 mm ricochet off his canopy. Was his life saved that day on the range because there was yet another job for him? He was a civilian lawyer on the Florida panhandle, not the most obvious place to be if he still had a big job to perform.
As the years went by, and as the honors and speaking invitations continued to pour in from around the world, as his law practice thrived and his portfolio of investment properties grew, the memory of that day on the range began to fade. During those decades, his life followed two distinct paths. The first was connected to the U.S. military. Day was one of the most highly prized speakers in the U.S. military, particularly for Dining Outs. General officers are considered prize catches for these events, but Bud Day was the avatar of all that Air Force officers hoped to be. His speeches were red, white, and blue.
In fact, for a long time Day could not talk of his experiences without weeping. The embarrassment he felt about his tears caused him to consider giving up public speaking. But with Doris’s help, he learned to control himself. “Bud, you’ve got to get through this,” Doris counseled. “It is important for people to know about what you went through. You have to be able to talk about it.”
And as tough as it was, he rarely said no. When the Air Force Reserve unit from Sioux City went on temporary duty to Eglin, someone suggested, “Why don’t we call Colonel Day and see if he will have a drink with us?” Day was delighted. He came out and answered all the questions about the Mistys, his shoot-down, his escape, and his time in Hanoi. He tended to talk in a flat, dispassionate voice about his escape and in a general way about his time in Hanoi, almost as if he were talking of someone else’s experience. But if someone had read his medal citations — and many military people had — they knew his Air Force Cross was awarded for the months of torture he underwent in the summer of 1969. They wanted to know about the torture. (Even now, Day, if pressed, glosses over that time quickly.) He left after an hour or so. When the group from Sioux City asked for the check, they were told that “Colonel Day picked up the bill.”
Day particularly enjoyed attending NAM-POW reunions, a three- or four-day affair. One night is casual: POWs wear a flight suit–like garment called a “party suit” on which are sewn numerous patches. A favorite, and one that these men wear proudly
, says YANKEE AIR PIRATE.
McCain had little time for the reunions. The only time he ever attended was in the mid-1980s, when he flew in for one day and disappeared without telling anyone he was leaving.
For several years, on every August 26, his shoot-down date, Day had what he called an “Oh, Shit! Party” to celebrate. He invited other POWs and showed videotapes of Operation Homecoming. Afterward, there were always nightmares.
IN addition to making speeches to military groups, Day spoke to dozens of service clubs along the panhandle. In most of those speeches, Day came down hard on Communism. Once, he was speaking to a group and, as is his habit, was slamming his hand against the lectern, talking about the “gooks” who had tortured him and who still ran Vietnam. He grew so impassioned that Bill Campbell, a local newspaper columnist, leaned over to the person next to him and whispered, “I hope no one here has an Asian gardener. If they do, they will go home and kill him.”
In much of America, Day’s unrepentant warrior mode and his blunt way of speaking might have caused him to be pigeonholed, even marginalized. But in the Florida panhandle, he was preaching to the choir. From the beginning, people stared and pointed him out in restaurants. It was almost impossible in the mid-1970s, and is even more so today, for him to eat in a local restaurant without someone coming up to him and, with great diffidence and in a voice choked with emotion, saying, “Colonel Day, thank you for what you did for our country.” Or a simple “Thank you, sir.”
The second part of Day’s postretirement career was in politics, though not so much in elective office. (In 1978, he was elected state committeeman for the Republican Party in the First District and would hold the job until 1984, when he decided not to run again. He also lost a race for a county commission seat.) Day’s real political impact was during the 1980s, when he was a driving force in converting the First Congressional District of Florida into a Republican stronghold.