Bud Day: A POW’s Incredible Story

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Pushkin

Dusk was falling in the jungles of North Vietnam.

It was late August 1967.

An Air Force colonel, Bud Day, was lying in a muddy pit about the size of a coffin.

He had been there for days.

One of his arms was broken in three places.

His left knee was badly damaged.

and he couldn't see out of his right eye.

Bud Day had been captured in enemy territory.

He was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese Army, but he wasn't in a prison.

This was a little militia camp in the middle of the wilderness.

His guards were a couple of teenage boys with rifles, and like most teenage boys, they were getting bored.

In the short amount of time that Bud had been in the camp, He had already been tortured again and again.

But he followed a code of conduct.

The same code of conduct that the U.S.

military required of every person who becomes a prisoner of war.

Give away no information.

Accept no special favors from the enemy.

And make every effort to escape.

Bud hadn't told his captors anything.

even when they strung him up by his ankles and he could feel the bones in his broken arm stretch further apart.

Special favors certainly didn't seem forthcoming.

Not that he would have accepted any.

His sense of honor would never allow it.

But then there was a part of the code about escape.

That, Bud thought, was something he had to try.

Darkness crept closer.

The two kids who were supposed to be watching him wandered a little further from the pit, chatting and laughing about something.

Using his good hand, Bud worked away at the rope that was wound around his legs.

He had convinced his captors that he was unable to walk, so the rope was only tied in granny knots, easy to get out of, even with one arm.

Bud knew this would be his only chance.

They were planning to move him to a real prison, and that would be impossible to escape.

He quickly untied one knot and then another

and another.

He loosened the ropes around his legs and he listened to the boy's distant laughter.

His mind flashed to his wife, Dory, and four little kids waiting back in Arizona.

He sent a silent, Help me, Father, up to heaven.

And then Bud Day crawled out of the bunker and into the night.

I'm J.R.

Martinez, and this is Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.

Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

This show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

Bud Day would be the only American serviceman ever to escape from a North Vietnamese prison and make it all the way to South Vietnam.

He would stumble for days through the jungle with no shoes, no food, and terrible injuries.

passing within inches of enemy soldiers, knowing all the while that if he were captured again, he would have to fight like hell to stay alive and to keep the code of conduct.

Bud's story is one of toughness and grit and fortitude, the kind of fortitude that can only come from a deep set faith in country and family and in the concept of honor.

While this episode is about that stoic silence in the face of brutal enemy pressure, it's also about the power of speaking out.

Because while Bud stayed mute to protect his fellow aviators, his wife Dory was shouting from the rooftops, using her voice to win freedom for prisoners of war.

As Americans, we take free speech for granted.

How Bud and Dory Day used their voices, frankly, how this whole country used their voices during the Vietnam War proves just how powerful that right really is.

The morning of August 26, 1967 started as usual for Bud Day.

He woke up at the Air Force Base in Phu Cat, just south of the demilitarized zone in South Vietnam.

The day would have been hot and muggy, as always.

He recorded a message to be sent to Dory and the kids.

The couple had two boys and two girls, three of them under the age of five.

At 4 a.m., Bud had breakfast, and then he got ready to fly.

Bud had been flying over North Vietnam for several months, one of the most dangerous and top-secret missions of the entire war.

He was commander of a team of supersonic jet pilots flying over territory dotted with anti-aircraft artillery.

Here he is talking about it.

It was a really hairy mission because probably 60% of the time that you were in the North, you were getting shot at.

And so I lost 42% of my airplanes in the first six months we operated.

He had been born to a poor, hard-scrabble family in Iowa and grown up during the worst of the Great Depression.

He served in World War II, then Korea.

One time, he bailed out of an airplane and his parachute didn't open, but he survived.

He finished seven years of schooling, college, plus a law degree in only four years.

He was just tough and disciplined and driven beyond belief.

So to him, this morning in August was nothing special.

He sized up his aircraft, not his favorite, the harness in the back was wonky.

He settled at the controls in the back of the plane, and a pilot named Kip was at the front.

Bud was older than Kip, but then he was old for Vietnam.

He had volunteered to go at the age of 41.

A farewell tour at the end of a long career.

One more round before he hung up his flight suit for good.

He'd initially been assigned to the 309th Squadron, but loved their motto, return with honor.

But pretty quickly, He'd been given this insanely treacherous top secret mission.

As commander, it was up to Bud to pick the code name.

Other units were called things like Gunsmoke, or Typhoon, or Tiger.

Not Buds.

Our call sign was Misty.

That was a song I liked, and so that was our call sign.

And in case this doesn't ring a bell for you, Misty is a romantic ballad by the crooner Johnny Mathis.

Look at me,

I'm as helpless as a baby

of a tree.

As helpless as a kitten up a tree.

It doesn't quite scream, we're going to shoot you out of the sky, does it?

But it totally works.

Maybe it's because Bud was an older guy, a classic.

Or because he missed his wife.

Or maybe it just goes to prove when you're as famously tough as Bud Day,

you can call your unit anything you want.

Soon, Kip and Bud were ripping through the sky over North Vietnam at almost 500 miles per hour.

But when they were about a mile away from their planned target, explosions ripped through the air.

Bud couldn't remember when he'd seen so much anti-aircraft artillery.

It was like the sky was on fire.

They made it through the barrage somehow without being hit.

Bud told Kip to take another pass over the target, so they flew over it one more time.

Their plane was hammered with explosions again and again.

Still, it looked like they were gonna make it out.

And then Bud saw the missile.

He knew what was coming.

The aircraft took a direct hit.

Every warning light on the instrument panel lit up, and Bud yelled, eject!

Eject!

Eject!

They parachuted down.

They were deep in enemy territory, falling into the jungle.

Bud blacked out during the fall, but he came to with a jolt of searing pain.

My arm was fractured, damaged my knee, and

my oxygen mask didn't separate right and hit me in the eye and damaged my eye so I wound up on the ground.

Bud broke his arm in three places.

A bone was sticking through his skin.

He had dislocated his knee and he couldn't see out of his right eye.

I just cut my radio up and got a call off and told him I was on the ground alive and young Vietnamese popped through the brush and captured me.

His message had gotten through just in time.

Help was on the way.

But he was surrounded by teenage boys with rifles, and they pulled him further into the jungle, further away from where his parachute was left, further away from Kip, whom they hadn't spotted.

A few minutes later, as they were moving a lot, a helicopter came in and tried to rescue us, and I was gone.

The chopper got so close that he could see Kip in its doorway.

But the boys had their rifles trained on Bud.

He couldn't go anywhere.

He watched as the helicopter dipped, then lifted away.

The teens were euphoric.

They had their prize.

Bud was heartsick.

He had been paraded into a village that had been destroyed by American bombardments.

From there, into the makeshift militia camp that you met him in, he could see rice patties and just beyond, a dense expanse of jungle.

He was pushed into a muddy bunker, just a hole in the ground, really, barely larger than his wiry, five-foot, nine-inch frame.

His captors tied him up with a rope, and Bud started coming up with that escape plan almost immediately.

So I decided that because it was obvious my eye was all bloodshot, I was blind,

and my knee was pretty big, And of course my arm was busted.

And

so they concluded I was no threat.

And when they tried to get me to move around or do anything, I faked that I couldn't move at all.

And they began to buy that.

A doctor arrived and set his arm in a makeshift cast, but Bud could tell the bones weren't properly aligned.

Things got progressively worse from there.

The soldiers wanted him to talk, to give them intel.

They beat him with rifle butts.

They staged a mock execution, holding a gun to his head.

They hung him from his ankles for hours.

To them, he wasn't an enemy combatant protected by the rules of war.

The Vietnamese never recognized the Geneva Convention, so their position was that you were a criminal.

They could do anything to you they wanted to do.

Bud knew the torture would get worse when the real soldiers arrived.

And they were coming soon.

One of his jailers had drawn a jeep in the mud and said a word that Bud understood.

Hanoi, the capital city of North Vietnam.

So he decided he had to run that night, loosening the rope on his leg, waiting for his teenage guards to look the other way.

First time both of them were facing a different direction.

I slipped out of this hole and over the rice paddy.

He was dressed in only his undershorts.

He had no shoes, and he was weak from hunger.

He ran towards the jungle, his bare feet sliding on the mud.

My foot hit the bottom of that silt, it was just like stepping on a banana peel.

My feet went out from under me and I landed right on the busted dorm.

And I'd almost bit my tongue off to keep him screaming when I hit the deck.

I couldn't believe they didn't hear it.

Waited about a minute, minute and a half, and nothing.

So at that, I got up and headed south.

He would have to travel roughly 30 miles to get to South Vietnam and safety.

He was just beginning to pick his way through the jungle when a shrieking sound cut the air.

American B-52s were soaring overhead, not to look for Bud, but to drop bombs on the enemy encampments.

One landed 100 yards from Bud.

He was hit with shrapnel.

Now, his bare feet were lacerated and bleeding.

The next day brought another bomb.

and his eardrums were ruptured.

Still, he pressed on.

I survived basically on water because there was no food.

The best I could do was capture a couple of these frogs.

I ate them and that's not a good deal.

After several days in the jungle, he made it to the river that separated North and South Vietnam.

He crept down the bank and lowered himself into the water.

fighting the current to make it to the other side.

His fingers touched the far bank.

Unbelievably, he had reached South Vietnam.

By then, he was so starving that he was delusional.

I lost track of time.

I'd lost my ability to sort things out.

He saw two Marine Corps helicopters in the sky, not too far away.

They were replenishing supplies.

It could only mean one thing.

A base was nearby.

He could get there.

He knew it.

He got closer and closer, hobbling and stumbling.

I was within about a mile of Marine Corps base at Cotien when some enemies popped out of the brush.

At this point, Bud Day could barely walk.

But he was also Bud Day.

I just said to myself, I come this far to surrender to these bastards, so I took off running.

He ran as best as he could, but the NVA fired at him.

Bud took a bullet in the left thigh and the left hand, and he collapsed.

His escape was over.

He was going back to North Vietnam.

He had been close to freedom.

He wouldn't be that close again for five and a half years.

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It was 1969.

Two years since Bud's capture.

He had been moved from prison camp to prison camp, beaten and starved, his broken arm purposely re-broken, and time and time again

interrogated.

He refused to give any information other than what the code of conduct stipulated.

His name, his rank, his date of birth, and his serial number.

They really tortured me, hung me by the arms and crippled me pretty badly.

Both my hands were curled up.

I couldn't feed myself.

I couldn't do anything.

He told himself he had to keep the faith.

He couldn't break.

It was better to die than to say something, even the name of his unit, Misty, that might harm the aviators that were still flying over Vietnam.

He remembered the motto of his first squadron, return with honor.

He was determined to do just that.

Every night he prayed for strength and he prayed for Dory and the kids.

He hoped they knew he was still alive.

Bud spent most of his time in a prison in Hanoi, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.

It housed hundreds of POWs and it was miserable.

It was just absolute filth, you know, with lats all over the place and

and rat droppings and so everybody had dysentery and diarrhea.

We were at about 700 calories calories a day.

So you're all emaciated and big stomachs and big sunken eyes, and your health was very precarious.

So the living conditions were just really at the bottom.

The prison was a series of long, interconnected brick buildings.

The windows were covered with batting, so light barely crept in.

The air was trapped and stale.

The heat was unbearable.

Bud spent months in solitary confinement as punishment for not talking.

And those cells were as small as six by six feet.

When he wasn't in solitary, he shared his cell with the young John McCain.

Bud and another pilot had nursed McCain back to health when he first arrived in prison, broken and close to death.

That was one of the ways prisoners resisted their terrible situation.

They took care of each other.

Another way was by being organized.

The prison guards forbade organization of any kind.

But the men in the Hanoi Hilton were military pilots.

Hierarchy gave them a sense of normalcy.

And because of his rank, Bud was a commander within the prison.

This meant he was dealt even harsher punishments.

The first to feel the wrath of the guards.

Second problem, to get organized.

You have to be able to communicate.

But the POWs weren't allowed to talk between cells.

And to disobey meant torture.

So they developed a tap code.

It's kind of like a Morse code.

Each letter of the alphabet except K was given a short set of two taps.

They would spell out words letter by painstaking letter.

It was life's blood for the POWs.

So, despite where they might have you, unless they had you so wrapped up in irons that you absolutely could not move, well, you could communicate, you could tap.

And so you always knew what was going on.

Every Sunday morning, Bud as commander of his prison unit used his knuckles to tap out CC,

which stood for church call.

That same tap would be sent down the whole line of cells in his section.

Then the men stood in their cells, said the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord's Prayer, and prayed for the safety of their fellow POWs.

Bud and his men had to keep the faith somehow.

At the Hanoi Hilton, there was a total lack of contact with the outside world.

They had no way of knowing what was happening in the war or how close they might be to freedom.

I believed that the country was going to come and get me.

I never, ever came to the conclusion that my country was just going to dump me like some used ammo.

The only news in prison came from a steady stream of propaganda piped in over a loudspeaker.

The POWs called it CBS,

short for, you ready for this?

Camp Bullshit System.

There was no way for the prisoners to sort fact from fiction.

CBS reported on devastating natural disasters in America and on implausible triumphs in the North Vietnamese Army.

And it reported that back in the U.S., while Bud was keeping his mouth shut and being tortured for it, countless others were speaking out against the war.

Bud thought it was lies.

Just one more thing the prison guards made up in order to torment the POWs.

As we started hearing about the hippies and the anti-war demonstrations, all that stuff, I basically discounted all of that.

What else could the communists tell you that would hurt you more or would be more demoralizing than for you to think that back on the home front, no one's supporting you?

That, of course, was far from the truth.

But because more and more Americans were starting to question the war, the government was trying to keep the plight of the POWs a secret.

They worried it would add more fuel to the anti-war fire.

And so the military ordered the wives of POWs to observe a code of conduct similar to Bud's.

Keep to yourself.

Don't speak to the press.

Don't ask too many questions about where your husband was or what was being done to rescue him.

They called it the Keep Quiet Policy.

So back in Arizona, Dory was living in a kind of a nightmarish limbo.

She knew Bud had been shot down.

She knew he had survived his initial crash, but that's it.

Because North Vietnam refused to officially acknowledge holding any POWs,

it was impossible to know for certain if Bud was still alive or where he was.

Dory and Bud had been together at that point for decades.

They had met as teenagers in Iowa.

She was the little sister of one of his friends.

Her family was Norwegian, so Bud nicknamed her the Viking.

The two had started writing letters back when he had gone off to World War II.

Dory told him she was waiting for him and praying for him to be safe.

Now she couldn't write to Bud.

She couldn't do anything but keep praying.

Just wait and hope.

Exactly what Bud was doing.

I didn't intend to die in that crummy place if I could avoid it.

But the prison guards didn't make survival easy.

In the summer of 69, the torture got worse.

They introduced something called the fan belt, a four-foot-long rubber strip cut from a tire.

I had some absolutely brutal torture sessions, and two or three times, frankly, I would have preferred to die.

I was in leg irons, and they were beating me with a fan belt.

And I can remember counting until 300th stroke.

And I just said,

Why am I wasting my time counting here?

They're going to kill me, you know, and I hope they do.

Here's what Bud Day didn't just tell you.

That intensive beating lasted more than six days.

By the end, he was close to death.

Bud believed that if he managed to live, his physical suffering would stop eventually.

But his mental anguish would never end if he gave up even a scrap of important information to his tormentors.

That was Bud.

Back in the States, Dory had reached a totally different conclusion.

The Viking decided she had to start talking.

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T-Mobile knows all about that.

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Dory was through with keeping quiet.

She wanted to feel like she was maybe making a difference.

She began to fight.

by speaking out.

Her friend, Mike Newhouse, remembers how hard the Viking fought for her husband.

I thought Monday was the bravest, toughest, most determined SOV I'd ever met until I met Doris.

We've been calling her Dory,

but her name was Doris,

as in Doris Day.

Not that Doris Day, the famous actress, which is why the Viking went by Dory.

She was an absolute tiger.

You know, the State Department, after her continued and persistent pleas, pretty much told her to go home, do your knitting, and kind of stay out of our hair.

And she

wasn't about to accept that.

She banded together with other POW and missing in action wives to form the National League of Families.

The public believed that any prisoners of war were being treated according to the Geneva Convention.

But the wives had learned the truth about the torture, so they defied the keep-quiet policy and the hopes of putting pressure on Washington.

They spoke to the press and gave speeches, sometimes being heckled by people who hated this war and believed, as the NVA prison guards did, that these men weren't POWs.

but criminals.

Around the country, wives pleaded on behalf of their husbands, asking for the world to pay attention.

Their activism worked.

For the first time, the United States publicly listed the number of men it believed to be held prisoner.

Millions across the nation, including many who opposed the war, bought metal bracelets with the names of American prisoners as a show of support.

President Nixon promised the WISE that he would hold North Vietnam accountable for the POW's treatment, regardless of what was happening in the conflict itself.

What I have assured these very courageous women is this government will do everything that it possibly can to separate out the prisoner issue and have it handled, as it should be, as a separate issue on...

a humane basis.

Doria was working non-stop, writing letters to the North Vietnamese government, speaking passionately to the press.

She had the governor of Arizona on speed dial.

She bought a plane ticket to the Paris peace talks to confront the North Vietnamese diplomatic mission.

She colored everybody, ours, theirs, anybody associated with the talks, and just said, damn it, bring my husband home.

She and other wives brought thousands of letters to give to the North Vietnamese delegation, all from citizens pleading for the humane treatment and return of the POWs.

The public pressure embarrassed the North Vietnamese, and all the way over in Hanoi, Bud could feel something starting to shift.

Some of the worst torture abated, and after years of no contact at all, Dory was able to send a package of photographs to Bud.

He poured over the pictures of his children, growing up without him.

Their oldest, Stephen, was a teenager, not a kid anymore.

Bud's hands still didn't work.

The whippings had left him stooped, barely able to walk.

But he remained unbroken.

He hadn't said a word to his captors that he was ashamed of.

By 1970, three years into his captivity, captivity, Bud was moved to room 7.

It held the prisoners considered to be the hardest cases, the ones who were the most defiant.

James Stockdale was there.

You might remember him as Ross Perot's running mate during his 1992 presidential campaign.

And a pilot named Robbie Reisner, who had been a POW since 1965.

And John McCain, of course.

Where you live with somebody for as long as we did, you build up a kind of a relationship that is just undescribable.

I know more about John than his mother, his father, and his wives

in total.

One day in February of 71, Robbie Reisner decided he was going to give a church service for the men in that room.

The guards forbade it.

But it's hard to forbid something to men who've got little to lose.

They were midway through the service when the guards came storming in.

They seized Reisner and led him off to a torture session.

Bud jumped on one of the concrete bunks, he waved his hands in the air and started singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

The other men in the room turned to look at him, and at first they were stunned, silent.

And then they joined in.

They sang at the top of their lungs.

The melody traveled through the dank, filthy building, and soon all of the POWs, hundreds of them, were singing.

They sang every song they knew, one after the other.

The guards were stymied.

They couldn't punish all of them.

Eventually, they lined them up at the point of bayonets.

It made an impression on John McCain.

Witness him sing the National Anthem in response to having a rifle pointed at his face.

Well,

that was something to behold.

By now, Bud was 46.

He had been a prisoner for four and a half years.

But his defiance and his silence stayed true, not just for himself, but for his men in even worse shape than he was, like McCain.

They bathed me, fed me, nursed me, encouraged me, and ordered me back to life.

But more than that, Bud showed me how to stick my self-respect and my honor.

That is a debt I can never repay.

Dory, meanwhile, was telling her story in even wider circles.

After Paris, she went to Switzerland to speak to the Red Cross and Sweden to the North Vietnamese embassy.

And she kept Bud alive for her kids, playing home movies, telling stories, making sure they believed, really believed, that someday he could make it home.

By Christmas of 72, Five and a half years after Bud had been captured, that homecoming felt within reach.

The prisoners at the Hilton heard bombs screaming close, then closer.

American B-52s were bombing Hanoi.

Suddenly, at 9 o'clock at night, literally hundreds of bombers over Hanoi dropping bombs, and it was just the earth was vibrating.

The ground began to shake.

Debris started to fall off the ceiling, but Bud was elated.

But that was a wonderful sound of freedom.

My people were just really ecstatic.

Everybody knew we were free.

We started getting released in February of 1973.

Bud and John McCain were together on the plane to Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

Bud had been in prison for five and a half years.

He had just turned 48 years old.

His teeth were broken.

He was deaf in one ear.

His arm was permanently bent.

but he left the medical facility at Clark with his uniform pressed and his back straight.

He was returning with honor.

A plane took him to California.

He was told that as the most senior officer in the group, he would need to give a speech.

Bud stood in the doorway of the airplane, scanning the crowd for the faces of his family.

He walked down the steps, saluted the officers waiting there, and stepped to the microphone.

He started by thanking God, his country, and President Nixon.

And then he heard the click of heels racing across the tarmac.

It was the Viking.

There's a photo of what happened next.

I can't show it to you.

But I swear, if you want to know what pure elation looks like, you should look it up.

It was like an orchestra was was playing that only they could hear.

Just like Bud's favorite song, with its beautiful, super romantic lyrics.

When I see the photo, even I get misty.

Dory rushing forward, arms out, Bud in a crouch, railed thin, stretching out his hands to catch her.

A wide-eyed, radiant years and the making smile on his face.

I get misty

the moment you're near.

When Bud and Dory got back home to Arizona, they renewed their wedding vows.

They had been married for 24 years.

Bud worked tirelessly on behalf of the men who had been POWs along with him, writing them up for medals, helping them get back to work, to a somewhat normal life.

He spoke about his experiences.

Mostly, he just wanted to fly again.

Soon, he was the vice commander of a fighter wing.

That's where he was when he learned he would receive the Medal of Honor.

He was awarded it in 1976 from President Gerald Ford.

I felt quite humbled.

I had seen enough combat to know there were certainly a lot of acts of courage that probably far exceeded what you

saw yourself doing.

He retired in early 77 and went to work as a lawyer, representing pilots that had bumped up against Air Force bureaucracy.

He helped POWs, including his old roommate, James Stockdale, receive disability payments.

He was in and out of the hospital himself.

Some of his pain faded, though his sense of defiance did not.

After the Hanoi Hilton was torn down, Bud got his hands on some of the bricks.

He mounted them in his garage.

I thought that's kind of the ultimate triumph, you know.

They got no jail and I got the bricks.

In the summer of 1995, Bud saw a news story that made him, for lack of a better word, furious.

It said that the U.S.

government was no longer allowing military retirees over the age of 65 into military hospitals.

They would have to rely on Medicare, which meant that they would have to pay for part of their health care.

Bud was 70 years old.

He was disabled.

And when he signed up for the military back in in 1942, he had been told that if he served 20 years, he'd have free lifetime medical benefits.

He'd kept the code of conduct, but had the government kept up with their end of the bargain?

He didn't think so.

He loved his country.

He loved it.

But this was wrong.

And as an American, he had the right to speak out, to fight for what he believed.

So Bud Day decided to sue the government.

That battle would take five years.

He appeared in courthouse after courthouse.

He stood on the Capitol steps in the rain.

He got John McCain, by that point a senator from Arizona, and a future presidential candidate involved.

He wouldn't let it go.

And finally, In 2000, his advocacy paid off with the passage of the TRICARE for life bill.

Military veterans would be able to use military and civilian hospitals for their care and have access to low-cost prescriptions for as long as they lived.

Bud and his persistence made it happen.

He took care of his squad once again.

Over his military career, Bud Day received 70 medals for his service.

But until the end of his life, when asked what he was proudest of, Bud invariably answered, my wife.

Bud died at the age of 88.

Dory lived to 95.

She passed earlier this year.

Theirs was a marriage of equals, the Viking and the Commander.

They were strong together and just as strong apart because they shared a core belief in duty to others and honor.

They were tireless and defiant.

No wonder they made such a difference.

And no wonder they were so much in love.

I'm too lifty

and too much in love.

Look

at

me.

Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallarto.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

Original music by Eric Phillips.

Production support by Suzanne Gabber.

Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the Brigadier General, Bud and Doris Day Interpretive Center in South Sioux City, Nebraska.

And the film, The Keep Quiet Policy, How Vietnam POW Wives Were Silenced by the American Story.

If you want to learn more about this story, take a look at our show notes, where we have some of the resources we use to put together this episode.

We want to hear from you.

Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery.

You might hear your stories on future episodes of Medal of Honor or see them on our social channels.

Just email us at medalofhonor at pushkin.fm.

I'm your host, J.R.

Martinez.

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