Bud Day: Vietnam War POW Hero

By Richard C. Barrett | Vietnam  | 9 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Day again refused to answer the questions, and the beatings resumed. He remembers his brain telling him to talk in order to end the pain and humiliation. He tried a new tactic: “I began to stall. Goldie would ask me a question, and I would nod that I would answer. He would have to untie the gag, remove the cloth from my mouth, and I would give him an obtuse answer, or stall by feigning I did not understand the question.”

The torture continued for the next four days. Beaten and questioned throughout the day, he was forced to kneel all night. Bloody holes developed in his Achilles tendons. Bone began to show through holes that had been bored into his knees by the relentless kneeling on concrete. Day estimated that 300 blows fell on his unprotected body during that five-day period. Smashed in the face, with several teeth chipped and broken and his left eardrum ruptured, Day remembers that death at that point began to have a genuine appeal.
By the sixth day his body was a wreck. “My buttocks were now so swollen that the upper part of my thigh through the middle of my back was a single stiff, semi-solid mass of scabs and bruises…my lower legs had swollen to the size of cedar fence posts….The skin and meat around the ankle and foot were rock-hard to the touch. The toes resembled massive summer sausages extending at odd angles from my unrecognizable, swollen, bloody feet.”

In the end, after being awake for 56 hours at one stretch, Day yielded false information. Taken back to his cell, Day agonized over whether his bogus information would somehow endanger his fellow prisoners. The next morning he told Goldie he had lied. In response, he was beaten on the uninjured area of his upper leg, but the maniacal fury of the past several days’ beatings was missing. Day said it was an “easy beating.” The tough guy had outlasted the bad guys.

Although Day survived that stretch of unrelenting torture without yielding compromising information, some prisoners did break and confess to anything the North Vietnamese wanted. The captors made tapes that were played over the North Vietnamese state radio system and used by antiwar activists in the United States and Europe. Day and the other senior prisoners quietly removed the weak links from any authority in the POW chain of command.

The prisoners’ struggle was not only for physical survival but also for recognition of the fact that they were being treated worse than animals. Those POWs whom the North Vietnamese had released for propaganda purposes had, for the most part, suffered little or no torture. Some had cooperated with their captors, and when asked about conditions in the camps, their replies were not factual.
Day’s wife, whom he nicknamed “the Viking” because of her Norwegian ancestry, was among the foremost campaigners on behalf of the POWs. The Department of Defense at first told the POW families not to cause an uproar that might jeopardize any release negotiations. That strategy failed, and when the truth started to come out about the primitive and barbaric treatment of the American airmen, some of the wives went on the offensive.

Several of the prisoners’ wives and family members traveled at their own expense to the Paris Peace Conference to argue their case with the diplomats. One wife even hid in a closet and leapt out to grab a Communist negotiator by the leg and yell complaints about the POWs’ treatment. Doris, the Arizona coordinator of the National League of Families, also traveled widely to prick the consciences of the American people about the POWs’ plight. “I wasn’t brave at first, I was petrified,” Doris said, “but I got the nerve, got up, and went on.”

The several hundred Americans who passed through the Hanoi system of prisons included many whose names are now well-known—Norris Overly, Robert Sawhill, James Stockdale (who died in early July 2005), Robert Shumaker and Robinson Risner. There was also an American POW whom the North Vietnamese called “the Prince.” Day recalls hearing a story floating around that someone important had been shot down over Hanoi. The story gained credibility when the Vietnamese started taunting Day, telling him that he would not be so valuable anymore when that man arrived. “Today we shot down the Prince,” they said, “now you are small potatoes. Nobody cares about you.”

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Tags: Historical Figures, Vietnam War

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