thedrifter
11-10-07, 07:27 AM
Veterans Day in Dallas to be top-flight
Air Force colonel with gripping history as war prisoner will be speaker
12:00 AM CST on Saturday, November 10, 2007
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News
myoung@dallasnews.com
The swept-wing fighter blasted low over the rice paddies and jungle of Vietnam at 540 knots, and below, the North Vietnamese troops raised their AK-47s skyward and fired.
The pilot, U.S. Air Force Maj. George E. "Bud" Day, knew that was an occupational hazard.
"We were out looking for troop movements and equipment coming down the trail. And we were trolling for surface-to-air missiles.
"Just about everyone in North Vietnam had an AK-47, and as you came over, they'd put their guns up and empty the clip at you," said the Air Force veteran, 82, who was later promoted to colonel. "As time went on, they got better at shooting at us. They realized these swept-wing airplanes flew lower than usual."
At least three shots ripped into Col. Day's plane.
"I took the first hit, then a second and got shot down on the third," said Col. Day, who will be the keynote speaker at Dallas' Veterans Day ceremonies today. "The controls reversed and the plane tried to do an outside loop. It was uncontrollable. I had to punch out."
Part of his parachute shredded as he ejected, and Col. Day fell fast and landed hard. He broke his left arm in three places, dislocated a knee and was temporarily blinded in one eye.
The North Vietnamese were waiting for him, he said. "I got captured within three or four minutes."
So began a more than five-year tale of courage and valor that would only end with the war, when Col. Day became the most decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
From the moment of his capture, Col. Day – already in his third war – planned his escape.
"I got shot down on a Saturday, I think. On Tuesday, they hanged me by my feet all day. On Wednesday, a corpsman and some peasant came by and set my broken arm," he said. "I planned on escaping the next day, but we had a really bad storm, a lot of rain."
A day later, he managed to hobble off, determined to reach the nearest U.S. base 50 miles away.
To get there, he'd have to make his way to the North Vietnamese border, cross the Demilitarized Zone and get to South Vietnam.
"It was real tough," Col. Day said. "For one thing, when you only have one good eye, you lose depth perception, and I fell quite a few times.
"I had no shoes, so my feet got shredded. A bomb from a B-52 came pretty close to killing me, and the shrapnel chewed me up."
Days passed before he felt well enough to go on, and he stumbled southward into almost impenetrable jungle.
With his strength fading, he began hallucinating but pushed on.
"I'm not certain how long I was out there. I lost track on the 11th or 12th day, but I made it to about a mile from the Marine base at Con Thien, and I walked right into an ambush."
The North Vietnamese had set up guns along the trail, waiting for a U.S. patrol, Col. Day said. Instead, he appeared behind them.
"One of them popped up and yelled, and I was so punchy it took awhile for me to realize they weren't South Vietnamese," Col. Day said. "But I hadn't come that far to surrender ... so I turned around and ran and they shot me. I got into the jungle, but they finally tracked me down."
A man who began his military career inauspiciously 25 years earlier, Col. Day was plunged into the worst kind of war.
He dropped out of his Iowa high school in 1942 to join the Marines in World War II, boarding a ship for Pearl Harbor and getting himself injured on the way.
"I ended up in the hospital in Pearl," said Col. Day, "and it turns out I was allergic to sulfa, which was the drug of choice then. It took awhile for the doctors to figure that out, and they kept treating me with it. And the more they treated me, the sicker I got."
Eventually, doctors realized the problem, and soon Col. Day was on his way to Johnston Island, a speck of dry land in an endless ocean, with an airfield and refueling station for passing warships.
"I was there for a long time," said Col. Day, of Shalimar, Fla. "I can't remember exactly how long, but it was a hell of a long time."
Long enough, at least, to provide Col. Day four years of college on the GI Bill, which he used to earn a bachelor of science and a law degree. He was a member of the Army Reserve during those post-war years and received his commission as an officer in 1949. Two years later, he was called up to serve in Korea.
He went to the Air Force, trained to fly fighters and did two tours in the skies over Korea.
When the Vietnam War kicked up in earnest, Col. Day said goodbye to his wife and four kids and began flying his low-altitude runs over the North Vietnamese lines.
After his recapture, he was carried back to North Vietnam, bouncing along on a litter carried by five soldiers who never stopped running.
"They trotted all day, for two days and part of an evening, roughly 40 hours," Col. Day said. "It was just remarkable. They never stopped."
He ended up at the exact spot he'd left two weeks before.
"As soon as I got back, they gave me a good pounding," he said, and the brutality rarely stopped.
"They ran me through a mock execution when I first got shot down and hanged me by my feet. Then they hanged me by my arms because I wouldn't answer questions and basically crippled me for the rest of my life," he said.
The hangings so damaged nerves in his arm that his muscles curled up until his right arm was 3 inches shorter than his left.
"I got pounded and whipped and beaten with a fan belt," he said. "It was just barbaric."
He was so battered by the time he reached Hanoi that another officer had to care for him, washing and feeding him. A couple of months later, they got another roommate, a young aviator named John McCain, who became America's best-known POW.
Col. Day spent five years and seven months in captivity. He was part of the third release of American prisoners and headed home in March 1973, almost six years after he'd said goodbye to his young family.
He had been promoted to colonel while a POW and had been awarded every significant combat medal the Air Force has.
"I got the Air Force Cross when I got home," Col. Day said, "and that's the second-highest medal there is. And then I started hearing rumors that I'd been nominated for the Medal of Honor, but there was no way to confirm that.
"Finally, I got a call from a friend, a flight surgeon, and he said, 'Get ready to come to D.C. because Gerald Ford is going to give you the Medal of Honor.' "
Like most men who have been given the nation's highest military honor, Col. Day says that he did nothing exceptional.
"I was just doing what I was supposed to do," he said.
Ellie
Air Force colonel with gripping history as war prisoner will be speaker
12:00 AM CST on Saturday, November 10, 2007
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News
myoung@dallasnews.com
The swept-wing fighter blasted low over the rice paddies and jungle of Vietnam at 540 knots, and below, the North Vietnamese troops raised their AK-47s skyward and fired.
The pilot, U.S. Air Force Maj. George E. "Bud" Day, knew that was an occupational hazard.
"We were out looking for troop movements and equipment coming down the trail. And we were trolling for surface-to-air missiles.
"Just about everyone in North Vietnam had an AK-47, and as you came over, they'd put their guns up and empty the clip at you," said the Air Force veteran, 82, who was later promoted to colonel. "As time went on, they got better at shooting at us. They realized these swept-wing airplanes flew lower than usual."
At least three shots ripped into Col. Day's plane.
"I took the first hit, then a second and got shot down on the third," said Col. Day, who will be the keynote speaker at Dallas' Veterans Day ceremonies today. "The controls reversed and the plane tried to do an outside loop. It was uncontrollable. I had to punch out."
Part of his parachute shredded as he ejected, and Col. Day fell fast and landed hard. He broke his left arm in three places, dislocated a knee and was temporarily blinded in one eye.
The North Vietnamese were waiting for him, he said. "I got captured within three or four minutes."
So began a more than five-year tale of courage and valor that would only end with the war, when Col. Day became the most decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
From the moment of his capture, Col. Day – already in his third war – planned his escape.
"I got shot down on a Saturday, I think. On Tuesday, they hanged me by my feet all day. On Wednesday, a corpsman and some peasant came by and set my broken arm," he said. "I planned on escaping the next day, but we had a really bad storm, a lot of rain."
A day later, he managed to hobble off, determined to reach the nearest U.S. base 50 miles away.
To get there, he'd have to make his way to the North Vietnamese border, cross the Demilitarized Zone and get to South Vietnam.
"It was real tough," Col. Day said. "For one thing, when you only have one good eye, you lose depth perception, and I fell quite a few times.
"I had no shoes, so my feet got shredded. A bomb from a B-52 came pretty close to killing me, and the shrapnel chewed me up."
Days passed before he felt well enough to go on, and he stumbled southward into almost impenetrable jungle.
With his strength fading, he began hallucinating but pushed on.
"I'm not certain how long I was out there. I lost track on the 11th or 12th day, but I made it to about a mile from the Marine base at Con Thien, and I walked right into an ambush."
The North Vietnamese had set up guns along the trail, waiting for a U.S. patrol, Col. Day said. Instead, he appeared behind them.
"One of them popped up and yelled, and I was so punchy it took awhile for me to realize they weren't South Vietnamese," Col. Day said. "But I hadn't come that far to surrender ... so I turned around and ran and they shot me. I got into the jungle, but they finally tracked me down."
A man who began his military career inauspiciously 25 years earlier, Col. Day was plunged into the worst kind of war.
He dropped out of his Iowa high school in 1942 to join the Marines in World War II, boarding a ship for Pearl Harbor and getting himself injured on the way.
"I ended up in the hospital in Pearl," said Col. Day, "and it turns out I was allergic to sulfa, which was the drug of choice then. It took awhile for the doctors to figure that out, and they kept treating me with it. And the more they treated me, the sicker I got."
Eventually, doctors realized the problem, and soon Col. Day was on his way to Johnston Island, a speck of dry land in an endless ocean, with an airfield and refueling station for passing warships.
"I was there for a long time," said Col. Day, of Shalimar, Fla. "I can't remember exactly how long, but it was a hell of a long time."
Long enough, at least, to provide Col. Day four years of college on the GI Bill, which he used to earn a bachelor of science and a law degree. He was a member of the Army Reserve during those post-war years and received his commission as an officer in 1949. Two years later, he was called up to serve in Korea.
He went to the Air Force, trained to fly fighters and did two tours in the skies over Korea.
When the Vietnam War kicked up in earnest, Col. Day said goodbye to his wife and four kids and began flying his low-altitude runs over the North Vietnamese lines.
After his recapture, he was carried back to North Vietnam, bouncing along on a litter carried by five soldiers who never stopped running.
"They trotted all day, for two days and part of an evening, roughly 40 hours," Col. Day said. "It was just remarkable. They never stopped."
He ended up at the exact spot he'd left two weeks before.
"As soon as I got back, they gave me a good pounding," he said, and the brutality rarely stopped.
"They ran me through a mock execution when I first got shot down and hanged me by my feet. Then they hanged me by my arms because I wouldn't answer questions and basically crippled me for the rest of my life," he said.
The hangings so damaged nerves in his arm that his muscles curled up until his right arm was 3 inches shorter than his left.
"I got pounded and whipped and beaten with a fan belt," he said. "It was just barbaric."
He was so battered by the time he reached Hanoi that another officer had to care for him, washing and feeding him. A couple of months later, they got another roommate, a young aviator named John McCain, who became America's best-known POW.
Col. Day spent five years and seven months in captivity. He was part of the third release of American prisoners and headed home in March 1973, almost six years after he'd said goodbye to his young family.
He had been promoted to colonel while a POW and had been awarded every significant combat medal the Air Force has.
"I got the Air Force Cross when I got home," Col. Day said, "and that's the second-highest medal there is. And then I started hearing rumors that I'd been nominated for the Medal of Honor, but there was no way to confirm that.
"Finally, I got a call from a friend, a flight surgeon, and he said, 'Get ready to come to D.C. because Gerald Ford is going to give you the Medal of Honor.' "
Like most men who have been given the nation's highest military honor, Col. Day says that he did nothing exceptional.
"I was just doing what I was supposed to do," he said.
Ellie