JAMES SRODES: A Legacy of Horror and Honor American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day
Coram, Robert
BOOKS IN REVIEW ance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s armed the terrorists that harm us today. A little intellectual curiosity, some critical confrontation of opposing views, would have...
...In a welcome break from this dismal trend, bestselling author Robert Coram’s latest book provides crisp writing and the authority of uncommon research...
...knee, and blind in his right eye...
...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...
...Agency stalwarts defend their claim to arbitrate truth by asserting that they have access to more and better information than thou, which they cannot possibly discuss with the likes of thee, that they are consecrated stewards of “lives,” and that countless secret successes overbalance every public failure...
...But the final chapters of the broader story may still have to be written...
...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...
...A Legacy of Horror and Honor M ILITARY BIOGRAPHY HAS FALLEN into a sad state...
...His biography of Colonel John Boyd, the supreme tactician with the F-15 and F-16s, was a best-seller...
...The 157 Mistys became the Flying Tigers of the Vietnam War, Coram argues, but they also got shot down with frightening area...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Aside from offering a riveting story well told, Coram does the reader an extra service...
...Day climbed back into battle mode in 1995, nearClinton canceled the historic guarantee of military hospital access and prescription drug provision for military retirees—veterans of 20 years or more service...
...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...
...Although it took five years for Congress to SEPTEMBER 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77 was still waxing young hot guns on the range with the Tactical Air Command wing he commanded...
...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...
...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 presents a poignant and ultimately inspiring portrait of Air Force Colonel Bud Day—the most decorated American fighting man alive...
...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...
...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...
...A little intellectual curiosity, some critical confrontation of opposing views, would have disabused Weiner of such things...
...in inclined to forgive through the pasly 20 years out of uniform, when President Bill personnel...
...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...
...He became “that Bud Day” in Air Force legend...
...76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 BOOKS IN REVIEW BCambodia and interdict the arms and supplies being regularity by the tight web of SAM missile sites in the Day woke up with a broken arm, a dislocated war in a formal sense on the Hanoi regime, they were It is hard to take in the full weight of the grisly thirteen days of abuse he endured in the Hanoi Hilton, where he became the leader of the majority of His relationship with roommate is this election season, is worth the price of the book alone...
...He was recaptured at the last second, and his ordeal in hell began in earnest...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW ance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s armed the terrorists that harm us today...
...Day’s life has its happier later pages...
...This is essentially a story about a man who was time out of joint...
...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...
...Yet disrespecting the CIA is the necessary precondition for ceasing to confuse our need for good intelligence with indulging pompous poseurs...
...Indeed, captives were “pirates and criminals” and were to be punished until they made a gesture of repentance and demonstrated a change in attitude...
...So this is no Top Gun-Steve Canyon fighter jock biography...
...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 fighterbomber pilot in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts...
...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 American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day By Robert Coram (LITTLE, BROWN, 400 PAGES, $27.99) Reviewed by James Srodes James Srodes, a Washington author, is currently writing a biography of CIA director William Colby...
...Worse, Washington’s evisceration of our care for “those who shall have borne the battle” has spread to a new generation...
...Coram knows how to write those, of course...
...Consciously passing Soviet disinformation during the Cold War is about as funny as the CIA’s acceptance of Saudi intelligence in our time...
...In all he holds every single medal for valor an Air Force flying officer can earn...
...Day got his on August 26 and that is where the story compresses into a horror show...
...The official posture of the North Vietnamese was that since the United States had not actually declared not obliged to adhere to any of the Geneva Convention rules on the treatment of prisoners...
...Coram states up front he is no military groupie...
...Others faltered and were released early, but that’s another story...
...It was the most heavily defended air space in the world...
...And he has been given additional honors by our government and others...
...Those sage of time the sins of Jane Fonda and the egregious grandstanding of John Kerry will find their anger back on the boil...
...Coram had a task...
...Nevertheless, this book will serve the useful purpose of demystifying the CIA...
...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...
...The damage never ends for them, even when we would prefer they just get on with their lives and leave us alone...
...This book’s readers will likely respond with guffaws...
...and that’s just on the top rows...
...John McCain another complex story that, in The return of the POWs1973, how it almost didn’t happen and what did happen afterwards, is an entirely other part of the story that bears special attention...
...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...
...He was quickly captured by local militia, questioned under appalling torture...
...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 restore health care to our retirees, 2 million of our military careerists were left in limbo all during that time...
...The Mistys, as the unit was called, were more than inspired to competence by Day’s organizational skills and personal example...
...One such is the United States Air Force, which remained at that time the most existentially confused of the services...
...If Day could be treated this way by his own government, what are the prospects for our sons and daughters in uniform today...
...There are more than enough villains to go around in these after-action chapters...
...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...
...UT THE REAL STORY BEGINS in Vietnam in early 1967 when he took command of a new secret unit of F100 two-seaters, which were to fly into the area where the Ho Chi Minh Trail re-entered Vietnam from brought to bear on the struggle in the south...
...Day was steadfastly stymied of his general’s star by desk-dusters at the Pentagon who were not fit to shine his flight boots...
...events that follow in the five years, seven months, and POWs who resisted North Vietnamese pressure to spill classified secrets and participate in propaganda stunts for the cameras...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
