The float was a few bamboo logs, and the man clinging to it had a right arm broken in three places, bare feet cut to ribbons and branches heaped over him for cover. He was crossing the Ben Hai, the river that divided North from South Vietnam. A sentry glanced at the drifting tangle and, as Air Force Magazine later told it, took it for driftwood.

On the far bank lay the southern half of the Demilitarized Zone and, beyond it, US Marines. Bud Day had broken out of a North Vietnamese camp days earlier and had been living on berries and raw frogs ever since. He would come within about two miles of the Marine base at Con Thien.

Day was Misty 01, the founding commander of the two-seat F-100F Super Sabre Fast FACs that hunted supply convoys and missile sites over North Vietnam. His escape was nearly over. His captivity had barely begun, and it would last 67 months.

Misty: Fast FACs in a Two-Seat Super Sabre

By 1967 the forward air controllers who found targets for the fighter-bombers were losing the race against North Vietnam’s guns. Slow propeller FACs flying Cessna O-1 Bird Dogs y O-2 Skymasters were being shot down in Route Package 1, the panhandle just north of the DMZ, and over southern Laos. Seventh Air Force’s answer was a secret experiment code-named Commando Sabre: put the FAC in a jet.

Detachment 1 of the 416th Tactical Fighter Squadron stood up at Phu Cat Air Base in June 1967 with 16 pilots and four F-100Fs. Command went to Day, a 42-year-old major with more than 5,000 flying hours, 4,500 of them in fighters. The F-100F beat the Fantasma F-4 for the job, he said, “mainly because it was cheaper, had longer legs, and a better view of the ground.” The unit’s radio call sign came from his favorite song: Misty.

A Misty jet carried two big drop tanks, two 20mm cannon and two pods of seven 2.75-inch white phosphorus rockets, the “Willie Pete” that marked a target in smoke for the bombers. The front-seater flew. The back-seater worked the radios, the maps and a hand-held camera with a telephoto lens. A sortie ran four to six hours, broken by trips out to a KC-135 tanker.

The rules were short and unforgiving. Fly at 400 to 450 knots. Jink every five to seven seconds, the time of flight of a 37mm round. Stay at 4,500 feet or higher unless marking a target, covering a rescue or taking a close look. The Mistys’ own history blames the 37mm gun for the great majority of their losses.

Gen. Ronald Fogleman, Misty 86 and later Air Force chief of staff, recalls the 416th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the Misty mission and flying the F-100 Super Sabre in a September 2017 interview.

Those rules bought time, not safety. Of the roughly 155 pilots who flew as Mistys before Commando Sabre ended in May 1970, 34 were shot down, two of them twice. The roster also produced two Air Force chiefs of staff, Merrill McPeak and Ronald Fogleman, and Dick Rutan, later chief pilot of the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world.

Day led from the cockpit. On 22 July 1967 he made repeated marking passes through automatic-weapons fire that let strike aircraft destroy a sampan convoy and two truck parks, a day that earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Years later he summed up those first months without varnish.

26 August 1967: Misty Goes Down

On the afternoon of 26 August, Day strapped into the back seat of F-100F 56-3954 to check out a new Misty, Capt. Corwin “Kipp” Kippenhan, a former O-1 FAC. Their target was an SA-2 missile site about 20 miles north of the DMZ. Low cloud had kept the fighter-bombers from finding it, and Day’s Silver Star citation describes repeated passes through heavy, accurate flak to pin it down for them.

On the last pass a 37mm round hit the rear of the jet. The hydraulics failed, the stick locked and both pilots ejected. Day’s right arm was broken in three places, and he also hurt his knee and one eye.

The Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s Living History film on George “Bud” Day.

An HH-3E Jolly Green Giant helicopter picked up Kippenhan. Day’s survival radio raised no one, and local militia, some of them boys, reached him first and took his boots and his watch. It was not the first time a jet had nearly killed him.

About a decade earlier, while based at RAF Wethersfield in England, he had bailed out of a burning jet fighter at about 300 feet, too low for his parachute to open, and fallen into trees. Vietnam magazine later called him the first jet pilot to survive a chuteless fall. He had quit high school in Sioux City, Iowa, to join the Marines at 17 in 1942, served with a 5-inch gun battery on Johnston Island, then earned a law degree and flew F-84s on two Far East tours during the Korean War.

Five Nights, Then South

His captors hung him upside down by his feet and marched him from village to village. They doubted a man with a shattered arm and no boots could get far, and Day made his injuries look worse than they were. On his fifth night, with his guard distracted, he untied himself and headed south.

He moved barefoot through rocks and undergrowth, mostly at night. Early in the run an American bomb or rocket landed close enough to rupture an eardrum and drive fragments into his leg. He lived on berries, a little fruit and frogs eaten raw, slipped past enemy patrols and reached the Ben Hai, where US artillery was falling.

Rescue kept slipping past. Once he heard helicopters and dragged himself toward them, only to reach the landing zone after the Marines had lifted off. He kept going south.

The end came as he tried to wave down an O-1 overhead, Air Force Magazine recounted. A Viet Cong patrol saw him instead, and when he ran, they shot him in the left thigh and left hand. He had been free for about two weeks and was roughly two miles from Con Thien. The Air Force credits him as the only prisoner to actually escape from North Vietnam.

The Hanoi Hilton and a Bamboo Splint

The Viet Cong carried him north in a sling between bamboo poles. Back at the camp he had fled, guards beat him for escaping, and at Vinh, Air Force Magazine reported, a guard twisted his arm in its cast until the wrist broke. Then came Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, the “Hanoi Hilton”, and its torture rooms for new arrivals.

His weight fell to about 100 pounds, and he could not care for himself. In December 1967, at a camp called the Plantation, he shared a cell with Air Force Maj. Norris Overly and a badly injured Navy flier shot down on 26 October: Lt. Cmdr. John McCain. Overly nursed them both. After Overly was released in early 1968, McCain bound Day’s arm in bamboo and rags and squeezed the bones together. About a month later they knitted.

American doctors later joked that McCain deserved a degree in orthopedic surgery. Day, meanwhile, became one of the “hard resisters”, and he paid for it. His Air Force Cross covers three months of 1969 when guards tortured him for escape plans, the senior American officer’s orders and the prisoners’ communication methods, and got nothing of value. “I was beaten with a car fan belt three times a day for three months straight,” he said of that year. More than three years of his captivity were spent in solitary confinement.

After the Son Tay raid in November 1970, the prisoners were crowded into Hoa Lo, and when guards broke up a church service and hauled out Lt. Col. Robinson Risner and others, Day jumped onto his bed and began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner”. The room joined in. McCain would later remember watching Day “sing the national anthem in response to having a rifle pointed at his face.”

Return With Honor

Day was released on 14 March 1973 and flew out of Hanoi on a C-141 bound for the Philippines. He had been promoted twice in captivity, to colonel. “I was just living day to day. One bad cold and I would have been dead,” he told the Associated Press in 2008.

A year of rehabilitation and 13 medical waivers put him back on flying status; he requalified in the F-4 and became vice commander of the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Eglin. On 4 March 1976, in the East Room of the White House, President Gerald Ford presented him the Medal of Honor alongside Rear Adm. James Stockdale and Lt. Thomas Norris, with Capt. Lance Sijan honored posthumously. The medal recognized his escape and resistance, not the mission; the mission itself had earned a Silver Star.

Military Times’ Hall of Valor lists him as the only man to earn both the Medal of Honor and the Air Force Cross. The National Museum of the US Air Force calls him one of the most highly decorated airmen in the service’s history and notes that he is often cited as the most decorated US service member since Douglas MacArthur, with some 70 decorations, most of them for combat.

Then he went back to the law. Admitted to the Florida Bar in 1977, he was turned away from care at Eglin in 1995 because he was over 65, and in 1996 he sued the government on behalf of military retirees who had been promised lifetime medical care. He won in federal court in 2001 and lost on appeal in 2002, but the fight helped shape TRICARE for Life, the coverage Congress created for retirees over 65.

Day told his own story in the memoir Return With Honor. On 14 March 1997, 24 years to the day after his release, the Air Force named the new survival school building at Fairchild Air Force Base after him; Air Force Magazine noted that his escape was the longest survival by any of the school’s graduates.

He died at his home in Shalimar, Florida, on 27 July 2013, aged 88. In 2018 the Air Force advanced him posthumously to brigadier general, the star he had been passed over for in life; Gen. David Goldfein handed his widow, Doris, stars he had once worn himself. McCain, his old cellmate, had already said it best.

He had crossed the Ben Hai on a float of bamboo logs. The rest of the way home took five and a half more years and a peace agreement signed in Paris.

Sources: Wikipedia, Bud Day and Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone; National Museum of the US Air Force, “Col. George ‘Bud’ Day: Misty 01” and “Misty FACs” fact sheets; US Air Force, Medal of Honor citation and release of 11 June 2018; Air Force Magazine, John T. Correll, 1 December 2005, and John L. Frisbee, 1 February 1984; Aviation History via HistoryNet, Lawrence Spinetta, July 2009; Vietnam magazine via HistoryNet, Richard C. Barrett, June 2007; USA Today, 28 July 2013; The American Presidency Project, Gerald R. Ford remarks, 4 March 1976; Military Times Hall of Valor; Misty FACs association, unofficial history and roster; VeteranTributes.org; Air Force Historical Foundation