DAY, GEORGE EVERETT RIP July 27, 2013

DAY, GEORGE EVERETT

RIP July 27, 2013

Name: George Everett Day Rank/Branch: O4/United States Air Force Unit: 37th TFW Misty FAC (Commando Sabre Super FACs) Date of Birth: 24 February 1925 Home City of Record: Niagra Falls NY Date of Loss: 26 August 1967 Country of Loss: North Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 170100N 1065800 E Status (in 1973): Returnee Category: Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F-100F, #3954 Missions: 139 PFC/Corp in WWII – 30 months South and Central Pacific April 42 – Nov 45 2 Tours Air Defense F-84’s – Radar tracking missions vs. Soviet radar Vladivostok Bay and Soviet Coast.Incident No: 0814

Other Personnel in Incident: Capt. Corwin Kippenham, escaped, evaded, rescued, pilot

Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK 09 March 1997 from one or more of the
following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with
POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews, quotes from “And Brave Men,
Too” by Timothy Lowry.  2023

REMARKS: 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV

SYNOPSIS:

Day was the forward Air Control Pilot in the F-100F on a strike mission over
a missile site near the DMZ when he was hit. B-52s were bombing along the
southern edge of the DMZ. He started a pass coming in from the southeast to
the northwest. He was doing about five hundred and was full of fuel when the
plane was hit in the aft section.

The GIB (guy in front) was on his first mission. The sequence for ejection
was that the back seat had to go first. Day fired the canopy and punched
out. The GIB followed almost immediately and landed about a mile and half
away, a little south, between twenty-five and forty miles north of the DMZ.
A rescue helicopter picked him up as the Vietcong got to Day. By the time
the helicopter attempted Day’s rescue, the the Vietcong had stripped Day and
had moved about a quarter mile.

In the ejection, Day’s left arm was broken in three places, twice in the
forearm and once in the upper arm. He was blinded in the left eye for a long
time due to a blood clot or a bruise. His left knee was dislocated, as he
hit the ground unconscious.

The militia group that captured Day were undisciplined, untrained “kids”
between sixteen and twenty years old. That did not prevent them from
establishing a brutal torture regimen. Day recalls, “They would tie up my
feet with about twenty-five feet of a cotton clothesline rope. It was one of
the funniest things you ever saw. They would wrap it around my legs about
twenty times and then tie up to sixty granny knots in the rope. Damndest
exercise I had ever seen. It was really kind of funny. After they stopped
tying my hand to the ceiling, I started practicing and after a while I could
untie the whole strand of rope around my feet in twenty or thirty minutes –
it was a piece of cake.”

Early in his captivity he was able to escape. At the time, Major Day was
about forty miles north of the DMZ, and from visual sightings during
previous flights, he believed that the region consisted entirely of rice
paddies all the way down to the DMZ. However, four or five miles south of
the camp, the paddies changed to hard, cleared land. After traversing the
rice paddies, Day continued for about ten miles until he hit an area of
light forestation at dawn. After making about twenty miles that first night,
he stopped to rest near a North Vietnamese artillery position that was
firing.

After staying awake more than 24 hours, Day lost all reference to the sky in
a cloudy mist. He slid under some bushes and went to sleep. After it stopped
raining, “something landed very close to me, and I took a hit in the leg.
The concussion picked me up off the ground and then crunch back down. My
sinuses and eardrums were ruptured and I was really nauseated. I barfed and
barfed and barfed and barfed until I thought I’d barfed my kidneys out. I
lost my equilibrium and couldn’t even stand up. I was bleeding out of the
nose and some of the vomit was bloody. A couple days later when I felt
better I took off and was walking fairly well although my leg began to swell
because of the shrapnel I’d taken in it. That day I lost about a mile
because I started walking in circles. Somewhere about the tenth day I
started running out of control. I began to hallucinate and talk out loud. I
didn’t realize what happens after you starve yourself. It would frighten me
to hear myself talking out loud and the hallucinations were just wild.”

The hallucinations drove Day right into the path of the Vietcong. He tried
to take off running, but after the fourth or fifth step, they started
firing. He was hit in the leg and hand, but he continued down the trail for
about thirty feet before veering off and passing out. He was unconscious
somewhere between eleven and fifteen days. They took him back to the same
camp he had escaped from, with the trip lasting thirty-seven hours.

That October he had the first interrogator who spoke English. Day could
barely understand him – but the brutality from him was loud and clear. The
arm that had partly healed, was broken again.

“They had hung me up from the ceiling and paralyzed this [left] hand for
about a year and a half. I could barely move my right hand. My wrist curled
up and my fingers were curling. I could just barely move my [right] thumb
and forefinger.”

“In some of the torture sessions, they were trying to make you surrender.
The name of the game was to take as much brutality as you could until you
got to the point that you could hardly control yourself and then surrender.
The next day they’d start all over again.”

“I knew what he was – he was obviously Cuban and had either been raised at
or near the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo. He knew every piece of American
slang and every bit of American vulgarity, and he knew how to use them
perfectly. He knew Americans and understood Americans. He was the only one
in Hanoi who did.

“I had gotten to the Zoo on April 30, 1968, and he had already pounded Earl
Cobiel out of his senses. No one knows exactly what happened. A young gook,
whose name escapes me, and two other beaters beat him all night. They
brought him out after a fourteen or fifteen-hour session, and he obviously
didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. He was totally bewildered and he
never came unbewildered.

“The gooks kept thinking he was putting on, so they would keep torturing
him. The crowning blow came when one of the guards some people called Goose
struck him across the face with a fan belt under his eye, and the eyeball
popped out.

“The guy never flinched, and that was the first time the gooks finally got
the picture that maybe they’d scrambled his brains.

“It sounds so savage you have trouble picturing it.”

—————-

George “Bud” Day retired from the United States Air Force as a Colonel in
1977. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and is the most decorated officer
since MacArthur. Reflecting on his time in captivity, Day says, “Freedom has
a special taste!

Day and his wife Doris have been married 48 years . They reside in Florida,
where he is a practicing attorney. He is involved with litigation protecting
Veterans Health Care Benefits. In his spare time he enjoys hunting. “Bud”
and Doris have 4 children and 10 grandchildren.