by Robert Coram
McCain himself may have best crystallized the differences between the two men. The July 2005 issue of Architectural Digest included a cover story about McCain’s home in Phoenix. At the end of the article he claimed his best friends remain the men he was in prison with. Describing Day, he said, “He is one of those people for whom everything is either black or white. It’s wonderful to go through life like that. I wish I could.”
THE December 13, 2005, newsletter of the VVLF opened with a quote by John Kerry, who recently had appeared on Face the Nation, where he said, “There is no reason that young American soldiers need to be going into homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children.”
Day wrote that Kerry was “still slandering America’s troops” and went on the Sean Hannity Show to add that Kerry was “a thoroughly dishonest witness to how our troops operated during Vietnam, and an equally dishonest critic today.”
SEVERAL years ago, Day was asked to become dean of the South Dakota Law School. He turned down the invitation; Midwestern winters are too cold for him. “I like living in paradise,” he says. But every fall, Day goes back to Siouxland to hunt pheasant. He calls ahead to a hunting lodge near Vermillion, South Dakota, perhaps a forty-five-minute drive from Sioux City, where the manager adds him to a group.
Before he leaves Sioux City, he always has dinner with Frank Work. Paul Jackson has been having health problems, but if he is receiving visitors, he and Day always meet. Jackson has been lobbying Congress for years to promote Day to general.
When Day drives up to Vermillion, he often takes the back ways — the roads he traveled when he was in law school and he and Curly would road hunt. These roads are a maze, some paved, some graveled, some dirt, but Day knows them all. As he drives, Day slows to what is little more than a walking pace and rolls down the windows and takes deep breaths. A smile of pure peace eases across his face.
When he hunts, he can’t walk in the tall grass anymore; he just doesn’t have the energy. So he walks alone in the open flat ground. And even though he is a guest who was added on to a hunting party, he takes charge. “Let’s keep that line straight,” he tells the hunters as they trudge across the big fields. They hustle to obey, delighted they are hunting with Bud Day. In the beginning, they keep an eye on him because he wears a hearing aid in each ear and seems almost frail. But when a pheasant erupts from the grass, Day’s eyes are good and his hands are quick. He rarely misses.
At the end of the hunt the men gather in the lodge and someone says, “Colonel, may we offer you a drink?” That boyish smile comes forth and he says, “The only time I ever refused a drink was when I didn’t understand the question.”
The hunters laugh and they cluster around Day, hoping he will tell them of war and prison and of the patriots he has known.
IN February 2006, Day turned eighty-one. Almost weekly, one of his younger but long-retired comrades will ask, “Bud, why the hell don’t you retire?”
He laughs and shrugs.
Doris says, “What they don’t understand is that work is his therapy. He needs to work.”
Perhaps the best indicator of how well he is doing as an eighty-one-year-old lawyer is that, at the end of 2005, he received such substantial payments from clients that he groused for days about being unable to spread the money out over several years and was going to take a big tax hit.
At an age when most men are long retired and living off investments or Social Security, he worries about tax breaks.
Day travels often and easily, making several dozen speeches every year. If Doris is with him, and if they sit together at a banquet, they hold hands under the table. They reach out often to touch each other on the hand or arm. After almost sixty years of marriage, he is as considerate and courteous toward her as if he were courting her.
When he makes speeches, Day often is asked, “Colonel, what are you most proud of?” He never misses a beat: “My wife. Because she worked tirelessly on behalf of the POWs.”
At a banquet, when Day sits down, he unrolls his napkin and places the fork on the left side of his plate and the knife and spoon on the right, just as his mother taught him. Other habits just won’t break. To the bewilderment of many a hotel waiter, Day insists on having his coffee in a Styrofoam cup, preferably with a lid.
Back in Fort Walton Beach, Day zips down the road in his white Cadillac toward his office, listening to music from the 1940s — the big bands — or the songs of Vera Lynn or Frank Sinatra. He likes the music of a less complicated time — a time when the wars were good wars and when America was always right.
Sometimes, around midafternoon, Day might have what he calls a “sinker.” He becomes so exhausted and so sleepy he closes his door and lies on the floor, his head on a law book, and naps for a half hour.
It can be difficult for him to get out of a chair. He says he is thinking of installing ejection seats on the lawn furniture.
He has a PSA upward of fifteen and almost certainly has prostate cancer. But he is eighty-one and his doctor figures he will die of old age before he dies of prostate cancer, so he does nothing.
Day has the same “nervous stomach” that his father had. Also, like his father, he has his favorite ethnic stereotypes. He is unable to say “North Vietnamese”; for almost forty years, it has been “gooks,” and that is what it will remain.
He is unbending in his scathing criticism of “liberal media,” particularly the New York Times and what he now calls the “Communist Broadcasting System.”
One night Doris and Bud accompanied their pastor and his wife to see The Passion of the Christ. During the scene where Jesus is being flogged, the pastor’s wife leaned over and whispered to Doris, “Is that the way it was when Bud was beaten?” Doris nodded. She could not speak — Bud was squeezing her hand so tightly she was gritting her teeth.
That night, Day’s sleeping pills could not keep the Bug at bay, and the nightmares came. Doris always knows when the Bug is beckoning because Bud begins a low gurgling sound that becomes louder and louder. She curled around him and held him and whispered that all was well.
The next morning he left early for the office, where he shut his door and did not come out until noon.
Once a year Day drives over to Naval Air Station Pensacola, where the POWs go for their annual physical. Because no POWs from earlier wars ever went through what the Vietnam-era POWs endured, the military is studying the long-range effects of traumatic orthopedic injuries. The Navy doctor schedules the men who came home early on days when no other POWs are present. The doctor knows there are some POWs who, if put in the waiting room with an early release, would — at the very least — cause a scene.
Day’s medical problems, most of which originated in Hanoi, worsen with age. After his most recent eye surgery, the doctor told him not to drive for several days. The next morning he was up before Doris and out of the house before she could stop him.
Doris is active in several women’s clubs. If she is attending an evening meeting or has an appointment at the beauty shop, Day grabs dinner on the run and always at the cheapest place he can find. No matter how stringy the meat or how unpalatable the food, Day cleans his plate. “I feel guilty about leaving food,” he says.
For much of the year he wears his old leather flight jacket, the one with the patch of the 4th Allied POW Wing on the left breast. He is perhaps the most recognized person in Fort Walton Beach. When he goes to the courthouse on a legal issue, his mind is often far away. He walks down the hall, bent over, right arm pumping and eyes straight ahead. People see him coming and step aside.
“Colonel,” a few of them murmur.
He smiles and nods. “Hello, pal.”
His old friend Orson Swindle shakes his head when he talks of Bud Day. “If he ever dies, they better nail the coffin shut. Because if they don’t, he will come out at full throttle with afterburner glowing.”
Day says, “I’m not going to die. But if I do, I want to be reincarnated as a twenty-six-year-old capta
in flying the Advanced Tactical Fighter. I want to come back at two thousand miles an hour.”
He pauses and his eyes sparkle. “But before I can be reincarnated, I must die. When that happens, I want to be buried upside down so Dixon and the Bug can kiss my ass.”
Day spends weekends puttering in his rose garden. For him, the best thing about trying to grow roses in Florida is that when he is in the yard, he can hear fighters taking off from Eglin.
Sources
Much of the material in this book came from the following sources. They were interviewed by phone, through e-mail, or in person. A large number of those interviewed were once military officers. Because the events of the book took place when they were young lieutenants or captains, and because they retired at higher ranks, I have omitted all military designations to avoid confusion.
Ambrose, Dr. Michael
Amdor, Steve
Bevivino, Ray
Burchard, Brendan
Butts, Thomas L.
Day, Doris
Day, George E. “Bud”
Day, George E. Jr.
Day, Steven
Doub, Jack
Douglass, Bill
Fellowes, Jack
Geasland, Robert
Greene, Mick
Guarino, Larry
Hansen, Robert
Holzrichter, Phyllis Brodie
Humiston, Lee
Jackson, Paul
Janson, John
Kippenhan, Corwin
Lindler, James
Mack, Jim
Mamlock, Stanley
Mattison, Mark
McCain, John S.
McGrath, Mike
Metzner, Al
Milavic, Anthony
Myhre, Larry
Neel, Charlie
O’Neill, John E.
Overly, Norris
Perot, H. Ross
Raymond, Ted
Reinlie, Robert
Riley, Harry
Risinger, Ed
Risner, Robinson
Robinson, P. K.
Rochester, Stuart
Rudman, Mladen
Rutan, Dick
Samenus, Stephanie
Sandman, John
Shanahan, Jack
Sherwood, Carlton
Summers, Charlie
Swindle, Orson
Thompson, David W.
Van Loan, Jack
Walters, William L.
Whitcomb, Darrel
Will, George
Wilson, G. I.
Work, Frank
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