Captain Parvin was serving in South Korea when I met him. He hoped soon to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. He told me all about the Misty FACs in Vietnam. He showed me a coin that he always carried in his pocket, commemorating the Mistys, with Bud Day’s name inscribed on it. It was a tradition in his squadron that the youngest and oldest members always carried the coin on their person. Whenever there is a reunion of Misty warriors from Vietnam, held usually in the Florida Panhandle—where Day now lives—the pilots of Parvin’s A-10 squadron, two generations removed, send a representative.
Bud Day’s memoir is riveting. But it is also a raw manuscript in need of an editor. His tirades against the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the “ding-bat traitor” Jane Fonda get tiresome. To be sure, Day’s address to the Navy flyers the morning I met him was laced with colorful profanities. But it was his very rage and aggression against communism, against the Democratic Party of the era, against those whom he considered weak soldiers in America’s own ranks, against many things, that allowed him to survive more than half a decade of sustained torture.
Among the persons he dedicates his book to is “President Richard M. Nixon,” for ordering “Linebacker I and Linebacker II,” the 1972 bombings of North Vietnam (the latter known as the Christmas bombings), and for giving the go-ahead to the Son Tay Raiders, the Green Berets out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who in November 1970 stormed the Son Tay prison west of Hanoi, where POWs were believed to have been held.
Because the prisoners had been moved from Son Tay nearly four months earlier, the raid was harshly criticized by major newspapers and some Democratic senators, notably William Fulbright, who questioned the “real purpose” of the mission, beyond freeing the prisoners. A New York Times editorial said the raid was “likely to widen the home-front credibility gap.” Yet as Day recounts, the raid—along with the bombing campaigns that followed—constituted enormous morale boosts for the prisoners and led to improved treatment for them. Today among Green Berets, the Son Tay Raiders are looked upon as though mythical heroes from a bygone age.
What Bud Day and other POWs specifically admired about Nixon was his willingness to strike back in a way that Johnson hadn’t. Johnson’s bombing halt in 1968 was seen as a betrayal by POWs, and caused disappointment and anger even throughout the U.S. military. Remember that these POWs were often combat pilots—professional warriors and volunteers, that is, not citizen soldiers who were drafted. Professional warriors are not fatalists. In their minds, there is no such thing as defeat so long as they are still fighting, even from prison. That belief is why true soldiers have an affinity for seemingly lost causes.
In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day’s cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner’s legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III, of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain’s rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day’s. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain, Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. “Character,” writes the younger McCain, quoting the nineteenth-century evangelist Dwight Moody, “is what you are in the dark,” when nobody’s looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.
In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for “preserving my honor.” The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day’s memoir. The senator writes: “I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness.”
The term “professional warrior” is explicitly used by Navy Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale of Abingdon, Illinois, to describe himself, in A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection (Hoover Institution Press, 1984). I learned in depth about Vice Admiral Stockdale’s writings in this and a second book, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (Hoover, 1995), from midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where I teach. One “mid” told me that the moral lessons Stockdale provides helped inspire him to go to the academy.
Stockdale himself is a symbol of a civilian-military divide. The very way you recall him upon hearing his name shows on what side of the divide you fall. Most civilians remember Stockdale as H. Ross Perot’s seemingly dazed vice presidential candidate, who in the 1992 debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle asked aloud, “Who am I? Why am I here?” and later requested that a question be repeated, since he had not turned on his hearing aid. In fact, Stockdale, a lifelong student of philosophy, had meant his questions to be rhetorical, a restatement of the most ancient and essential of questions. Because of television’s ability to ruin people’s lives by catching them in an embarrassing moment in time, too few are aware that Stockdale’s vice presidential bid was insignificant compared with almost everything else he did.
Those on the other side of the divide remember him as among the most selfless and self-reflecting heroes the armed services have ever produced. In September 1965, then–Navy Commander Stockdale (the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel) was forced to eject from his A-4 Skyraider over North Vietnam. He spent the next seven years in prison, undergoing the usual barbaric treatment that the North Vietnamese communists meted out to Americans who did not provide information. Told that he was going to be shown to foreign journalists, Stockdale, a Medal of Honor winner, slashed his scalp with a razor and beat himself in the face with a wooden stool to prevent being used for propaganda purposes. “When George McGovern said he would go to Hanoi on his knees, we prisoners…were humiliated,” Stockdale writes. “We did not go anywhere on our knees, least of all home….Most of us would be there now rather than knuckle under,” he writes in 1984.
Unlike in World War II, when the Japanese and Germans considered POWs to be liabilities and a drain on resources, the North Vietnamese considered captured American pilots as prime political assets. For POWs, not allowing themselves to be used as such meant being able to withstand years of torture. Rather than victims, men like Day, McCain, and Stockdale, once incarcerated, continued to see themselves as warriors, fighting on the most difficult of fronts.
Moral philosophy, in particular the Stoics, helped Stockdale survive. As he puts it, after he ejected from his plane, “I left my world of technology and entered the world of Epictetus.” Epictetus was a Greek-born philosopher in first-century Rome, whose Stoic beliefs arose from his brutal treatment as a slave. Stockdale explains, “Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty….” When Stockdale writes about Epictetus, Socrates, Homer, Cervantes, Calvin, and other writers and philosophers, their work achieves a soaring reality because he relates them to his own, extraordinary experiences as a prisoner in one of the twentieth century’s most barbaric penal programs. Stockdale reminds us about something that much scholarship, with its obsession for textual subtleties, obscures: The real purpose of reading the classics is to develop courage and leadership.
Stockdale explains—drawing on Napoleon, Clausewitz, and other military strategists—that “the word moral” bears an “unmistakably manly, heroic connotation.” (Virtue, or virtu in Machiavelli’s Italian, derives ultimately from vir, Latin for “man.”) He says that while we think of immorality in terms of categories like sexual abandon and fiscal irresponsibility, such vices, as serious as they may seem to civilians, are not in the sa
me category as failure of nerve (his italics) in war. For a professional warrior, “doing your duty” is not to be confused with “following orders.” The latter implies routine and mechanistic repetition, the former an act of potentially painful and devastating consequences, in which serving a larger good may mean something worse than death even.
The implications of “doing your duty” are spelled out further in Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Ballantine, 2006), by Rick Newman, a journalist at U.S. News & World Report, and Don Shepperd, a former Misty. They write that in November 1967, in order to rescue Captain Lance Sijan of Milwaukee, a smoke screen of cluster bombs was dropped near North Vietnamese antiaircraft guns so that the guns could be taken out by low-flying F-4 Phantoms, throwing enemy air defenses into enough chaos to allow a helicopter to pick up the downed pilot. The operation failed. Captain Sijan, injured worse than Bud Day during ejection, evaded the North Vietnamese for six weeks. After he was captured, he escaped again, then was recaptured, and died of torture and pneumonia. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.
This occurred while the pilots were operating under extremely restrictive ROEs (rules of engagement). Stockdale describes bombing runs over Hanoi in which each plane had to follow the other in exactly the same path, with almost no unscheduled maneuvering permitted—significantly increasing the chance of a plane being shot down—in order to reduce the chances of errant bombs hitting civilians. He and other pilots rage over how restrictive rather than wanton were the so-called Christmas bombings (which, incidentally, were called off on Christmas Day). Few other air campaigns in history were fought under such limited ROEs and yet achieved such an immediate and desired political impact: the return of the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, the release of the POWs, and the end of America’s military involvement in the war. The equivalent would have been if the pinprick bombings ordered by President Bill Clinton on Iraq in 1998 had led to a regime change in Baghdad, or a change of heart by Saddam Hussein that opened the country unambiguously to United Nations weapons inspections.
Bury Us Upside Down documents the lives of men who, like Bud Day, served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—a fact that inspires envy among professional warriors I know. “If I had the choice I would have been born before the Great Depression,” Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Mark Lopez of Yuba City, California, told me recently. “That way I could have enlisted at eighteen and fought in World War II and Korea, and still be young enough to have seen action in Vietnam.”
Yet my favorite story in Bury Us Upside Down is about a different sort of serviceman: Air Force flight surgeon Dean Echenberg of San Francisco—a former hippie who helped start a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury, did drugs, went to the great rock concerts, and then volunteered for service in Vietnam, more or less out of sheer adventure. He ended up with the Mistys, billeted among men whom Bud Day had trained. If anyone lived the American experience of the 1960s in its totality, it was Echenberg. One day in 1968, his medical unit was near Phu Cat, just as it was attacked by Viet Cong. “The dispensary quickly filled with blood and body parts,” write the authors. “Parents and family members staggered around in a daze, desperate for their children to be saved.” Echenberg worked almost the entire night with a pretty American nurse. Near dawn, emotionally overwrought, the two lay down to rest near the end of the runway on the American base and “made love in the grass while artillery boomed in the distance.”
“Echenberg struggled to understand how anybody could be so savage as to murder children.” The authors continue:
The young doctor had been ambivalent about the war when he first showed up in Vietnam. But he could no longer humor the anti-war protestors he knew. Yes, combat was inhumane, and atrocities happened on both sides, especially during the heat of battle. But he didn’t see the communists as “freedom fighters” or “revolutionaries” like the crowd back in San Francisco. To him the communists were savages who terrorized civilians….
It was another young A-10 pilot, Air Force Captain Brandon Kelly of Cairo, Georgia, a forward air controller on the ground in Iraq, one of the most dangerous jobs there, who told me about Bury Us Upside Down, which was not reviewed prominently. Captain Kelly told me that to fully understand what motivated people like him, I had to read this book.
“Protests against the war spawned ideologies…everything about Vietnam had to be rejected. The result was a shunning of this excellent book. Fashionable journals declined to review it,” writes former defense secretary James Schlesinger in the preface to a reissue of Bing West’s The Village (1972). While the battle in Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (1999) lasted a day, and the one in Harold Moore and Joe Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (1992) lasted three days, The Village is about a Marine squad that fought in the same place for 495 days. Half of them died, seven out of fifteen.
All of them had volunteered to go to “the village,” a job they knew would likely get them killed. Their reason? As the commanding sergeant tells the author: “you have a sense of independence down here. There’s no…paperwork. You’re always in contact with the Viet Cong. You know you have a job to do. You go out at night and you do it.” And so, these Marines left their base camp, with its “canvas cots, solid bunkers…ice cream and endless guard rosters, and went to live with some Vietnamese….”
In West’s story there is no sense of defeat and doom and perversion as in classic Hollywood movies about Vietnam; no beautiful, ingeniously constructed, and introspective narration about soldiers and their vulnerabilities, beset with moral complexities, as in a work like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), a favorite of high school and college literature courses. West has not written a better book than O’Brien, himself a twice-wounded veteran of the war. But he has written a very different, equally worthy kind that, outside of the members of the military who have regularly recommended it to me over the years, is still relatively little known.
The Village is a story of interminable, deadly, monotonous life-and-death nighttime patrols, dryly and technically narrated, as though extracted from the pages of a hundred strung-together after-action briefs. To wit: “He had fired twenty bullets in one excited burst, yet missed because he had used a magazine which contained no tracers. Unable to see his fire, he had failed to lead properly when the scout ducked around the corner of the house.” The book is as absent of style as it is of negativity. Like any good field manual, it has no time for that. As I said, warriors are not fatalists. The Village deals with what works in a counterinsurgency struggle and what doesn’t. It is a story meant for war colleges that the public, too, desperately needs to know. For the redeeming side of the Vietnam War it reflects was not an aberration.
The Marines of Bing West’s story constituted a CAP (Combined Action Platoon), which moved into Binh Nghia in early 1966, a village terrorized by the Viet Cong, and over eighteen bloody months pacified it, taking unabashed pride in their work. “Many of the Marines,” West writes, “let months go by without writing a letter or reading a newspaper. The radius of their world was two miles.” The following passage helps explain why many Vietnam veterans I meet in the course of my reporting have not altogether negative memories of that war.
The Americans liked the village. They liked the freedom to drink beer and wear oddball clothes and joke with girls. They liked having the respect of tough PFs [Popular Forces government militia]…who could not bring themselves to challenge the Viet Cong alone. They were pleased that the villagers were impressed because they hunted the Viet Cong as the Viet Cong had for years hunted the PFs….The Americans did not know what the villagers said of them…but they observed that the children, who did hear their parents, did not run or avoid them….The Marines had accepted too many invitations to too many meals in too many homes to believe they were not liked by many and tolerated by most. For perhaps the only time in the lives of those…Americans, seven of whom had
not graduated from high school, they were providing at the obvious risk of death a service of protection. This had won them open admiration…within the Vietnamese village society in which they were working and where ultimately most of them would die.
West, a former Marine in Vietnam who made periodic visits to the platoon, ends his story thus: “In July of 1967, Binh Nghia was no longer the scene of nightly battles…the enemy had accepted the persistence of the unit [the CAP], whereas his own determination to defend Binh Nghia had waned.” That victory was won by Marines who never accepted that “the village” was lost, even when the platoon was surrounded by three hundred Viet Cong. The Marines had done too many nighttime stakeouts, lying immovable for too many hours in filthy puddles, with rain pouring down as though out of a shower faucet, to simply retreat.
The Village demonstrates that the military has memories that the public doesn’t. To many who grew up in the 1960s, Vietnam was a cause. But to those who fought it, Vietnam was foremost a war, in all its gray shades: with its tactical successes and tactical failures, with its Marine CAPS and Green Beret infiltrations that worked, and its Big Army ones that didn’t; with its Army generals who succeeded like Creighton Abrams, and its Army generals who failed like William Westmoreland; with its moments of glory like Hue, and its moments of disgrace like My Lai; and, above all, with its heroes, like the Son Tay Raiders and the Misty forward air controllers.
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