A Legacy of Horror and Honor - A poignant and inspiring portrait of Air Force Colonel Bud Day -- the most decorated American fighting man alive.

A Legacy of Horror and Honor - A poignant and inspiring portrait of Air Force Colonel Bud Day -- the most decorated American fighting man alive

Since 10/12/07

James Widener <flywide@yahoo.com> wrote:

You can read this story in its entirety on the web at:
http://www.Spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12144

A Legacy of Horror and Honor
By James Srodes
A poignant and inspiring portrait of Air Force Colonel Bud Day -- the most decorated American fighting man alive.

This review appeared in the September 2007 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.

American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day
By Robert Coram
(Little, Brown, 400 pages, $27.99)

Military biography has fallen into a sad state. Servings either are hagiographies that would make John Wayne blush, or, more often, smug debunkings that, for example, consider General MacArthur's Filipina mistress of more interest than his Pacific islands campaign strategy.

In a welcome break from this dismal trend, best-selling author Robert Coram's latest book provides crisp writing and the authority of uncommon research. He presents a poignant and ultimately inspiring portrait of Air Force Colonel Bud Day -- the most decorated American fighting man alive. He also gives us an uncomfortable yet unimpeachable look at what really happened to our POWs who were tortured by the North Vietnamese both during and after their ordeals. Day was the leader of the resisters in the Hanoi Hilton and paid a stunningly awful price for his heroism -- again, both during and afterwards.

Aside from offering a riveting story well told, Coram does the reader an extra service. He reminds us of the truth that when our military brothers and sisters undergo incredible stress, loss, isolation, fear, and unendurable pain from fiendish torture, their ordeal does not evaporate once they are rescued and restored to the best health possible. The damage never ends for them, even when we would prefer they just get on with their lives and leave us alone. This is essentially a story about a man who was time out of joint. Bud Day during most of his Air Force career was smarter and better educated than most of his superior officers, and far more forward thinking. At the same time, he was a bit of a roughneck, a child of the Depression Midwest, a man as quick with his fists as his jet fighters, withal a deeply religious man whose lifelong love affair with his childhood sweetheart wife would sustain him during his time in hell.

Coram had a task. Day's military service tale is so wide, varied, fraught with drama and jaw-dropping episodes that a simple recitation risks glossing over challenges, any one of which would have left you and me (especially) a whimpering mass of jelly on the ground.

In order then: Day, now an-82-year-old Pensacola attorney, was a Marine enlisted man in World War II, then an Army reservist, and an Air Force fighter-bomber pilot in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. He holds the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Air Force Cross (that service's highest honor), the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, with clusters, the Air Medal with nine clusters, and twelve campaign battle stars; and that's just on the top rows. In all he holds every single medal for valor an Air Force flying officer can earn. And he has been given additional honors by our government and others. While Day is proud of every medal, perhaps the one that has brought a sense of personal validation is the Marine Corps good conduct medal, which came 30 years after that service and which helps ease what had been a fairly unpromising beginning to his career.

Coram states up front he is no military groupie. So this is no Top Gun-Steve Canyon fighter jock biography. Coram knows how to write those, of course. His biography of Colonel John Boyd, the supreme tactician with the F-15 and F-16s, was a best-seller. Nonetheless, part of the excitement of the book is the undisputed evidence that Bud Day was the most remarkable combat jet pilot of any air force, anywhere, and he did so in Korea, peacetime Europe, Vietnam, and in peacetime again. He reigned supreme from 1951 when he started with the T-33 trainer (which tended to catch fire on takeoff), through the F-86 Saberjet, through to 1977, when he was still waxing young hot guns on the range with the Tactical Air Command wing he commanded.

He became "that Bud Day" in Air Force legend. He cured the T-33 fire problems (go faster), he survived bailing out of another plane when his parachute failed to deploy, and while in recovery from that incident he rewrote tactical manuals.

BUT THE REAL STORY BEGINS in Vietnam in early 1967 when he took command of a new secret unit of F-100 two-seaters, which were to fly into the area where the Ho Chi Minh Trail re-entered Vietnam from Cambodia and interdict the arms and supplies being brought to bear on the struggle in the south. It was the most heavily defended air space in the world.

The Mistys, as the unit was called, were more than inspired to competence by Day's organizational skills and personal example. They were moved into a special warrior zone that made them not only incredibly effective, but viewed with awe by both American and NVN military analysts alike. The 157 Mistys became the Flying Tigers of the Vietnam War, Coram argues, but they also got shot down with frightening regularity by the tight web of SAM missile sites in the area. Day got his on August 26 and that is where the story compresses into a horror show.

Day woke up with a broken arm, a dislocated knee, and blind in his right eye. He was quickly captured by local militia, questioned under appalling torture. He managed a heart-stopping escape journey without any food and little water, crawling through heavy ordinance fire from his own side, and actually getting within sight of American lines in a two-week ordeal that was never equaled by any other POW. He was recaptured at the last second, and his ordeal in hell began in earnest.

The official posture of the North Vietnamese was that since the United States had not actually declared war in a formal sense on the Hanoi regime, they were not obliged to adhere to any of the Geneva Convention rules on the treatment of prisoners. Indeed, captives were "pirates and criminals" and were to be punished until they made a gesture of repentance and demonstrated a change in attitude.

It is hard to take in the full weight of the grisly events that follow in the five years, seven months, and thirteen days of abuse he endured in the Hanoi Hilton, where he became the leader of the majority of POWs who resisted North Vietnamese pressure to spill classified secrets and participate in propaganda stunts for the cameras. Others faltered and were released early, but that's another story. His relationship with roommate John McCain is another complex story that, in this election season, is worth the price of the book alone.

The return of the POWs in 1973, how it almost didn't happen and what did happen afterwards, is an entirely other part of the story that bears special attention. Those inclined to forgive through the passage of time the sins of Jane Fonda and the egregious grandstanding of John Kerry will find their anger back on the boil.

THERE ARE MORE THAN ENOUGH villains to go around in these after-action chapters. One such is the United States Air Force, which remained at that time the most existentially confused of the services. Air Force top brass were frankly embarrassed by the return of Day and the POWs, and it was hard for those who recovered enough to stay on active duty to find suitable employment -- five years out of the career loop was a long time. Day was steadfastly stymied of his general's star by desk-dusters at the Pentagon who were not fit to shine his flight boots.

Day's life has its happier later pages. But the final chapters of the broader story may still have to be written. Day climbed back into battle mode in 1995, nearly 20 years out of uniform, when President Bill Clinton canceled the historic guarantee of military hospital access and prescription drug provision for military retirees -- veterans of 20 years or more service. Day became the lead attorney in an ultimately unsatisfactory legal challenge to the Clinton administration's craven argument that military recruiting officers dating back to the 19th century could not obligate the government to perpetual care for its career personnel. Although it took five years for Congress to restore health care to our retirees, 2 million of our military careerists were left in limbo all during that time. Worse, Washington's evisceration of our care for "those who shall have borne the battle" has spread to a new generation.

With the Bush administration still cheating on medical care for current wounded and disabled veterans, it is important these days to read the story of Colonel Bud Day and what he endured and triumphed over to become our most honored warrior. If Day could be treated this way by his own government, what are the prospects for our sons and daughters in uniform today?

James Srodes, a Washington author, is writing a biography of CIA director William Colby. This review appeared in the 2007 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to the monthly print edition, click here.