[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 114 (Friday, August 2, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H5379-H5383]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      HONORING THE LIFE AND SERVICE OF COLONEL GEORGE ``BUD'' DAY

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, and this time here 
today, I've switched to a topic.
  But first I want to address that I've been very, very supportive of 
Congressman Wolf's initiative for a select committee and bringing these 
witnesses in under subpoena so that we can get to the bottom of this, 
because America's legacy and America's history is at stake.
  And when I think about America's legacy and America's history, this 
day I come to the floor with my eyes and my memory and my heart full of 
the last 2 days of saying goodbye to America's greatest living hero, up 
until the time of his death, Colonel Bud Day.
  Colonel Bud Day, this is one image I would point out, Mr. Speaker, of 
the Bud Day that I knew, the man that I had the privilege to call a 
friend, the man that I admired.
  In our time, a living American hero, Colonel Bud Day was, up until 
the time of his death, the most decorated living American hero. I 
believe we had to go back to General MacArthur to find someone who was 
more decorated than Bud Day.
  To put this in a short capsule, Mr. Speaker, Colonel Bud Day served 
in three wars. He volunteered as a high school senior when he heard 
that there was going to be a draft. He abhorred the thought of having 
to draft people to serve our country in a time of war, and he 
immediately went down to the courthouse to see the Marine recruiter.
  He served in World War II, he served in the Korean War, he served in 
the Vietnam War, he became a prisoner of war, and was repatriated and 
brought back to the United States and to his family in 1973.
  Bud Day received the Medal of Honor, he received 70-some other 
medals. Every available combat medal that was available to him in the 
theaters that he fought in in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam had been 
awarded to Bud Day.
  Bud Day was the one who, in the Hanoi Hilton--his and one other POW's 
cell is where they brought John McCain when John McCain was in a body 
cast, and, as has been expressed, was rattling around inside a body 
cast, weighing about 75 pounds. They brought John McCain in and threw 
him on Bud Day's bunk. And the two individuals began to heal John 
McCain back to health.
  This life of this man is full of service, service in three wars, and 
he served our country through, as I add them up, through the decade of 
the forties, in World War II, the decade of the fifties, in the Korean 
War, the decade of the sixties and the early seventies, in the Vietnam 
War.
  He came back and continued to serve his country up until nearly the 
eighties in the service, and then went back, went into service in 
practicing law in Florida. So that would be through the nineties.
  And as recently as just a few days ago, he won another case shortly 
before he died.
  Bud Day was a fighter. He was a scrapper. He was an American patriot.
  And, Mr. Speaker, I come here to the floor today to tell a more 
thorough narrative of Colonel Bud Day. And I want to point out first 
that much of that narrative is in one of two books that are of and 
about Bud. This one is by him. And when you read it, it's ``Duty, 
Honor, Country: Colonel George Bud Day, Warrior, Lawyer.''
  And when you read ``Duty, Honor, Country,'' you hear the flavor and 
the thread of his conversation. You know, you'll see and read books 
that are written by ghost writers, and they'll go in and interview the 
extraordinary person and put that into a narrative form. And you can 
read the book, and when you read that you don't always get the feel and 
the favor of the character.
  In this one I see the language that Bud Day used constantly coming 
up. And it's flowery language. It's actually almost always very 
tasteful language. But he saw images that were, I'll say captured in 
his mind's eye that he kept in his memory for years, and he expressed 
them in this book.
  Going back to read it a second time upon the occasion of his death, 
the personality of Bud Day emerges in this book, Mr. Speaker.
  And so I'd like to go down through the history and the life of 
Colonel Bud Day. And I was able to, as I said, call him a friend. We 
were hunting buddies. We spent a lot of time out in the fields of Iowa 
together with a shotgun, stopping to rest, talking politics, talking 
history, talking the history of war, re-fighting some wars while we 
were at it.
  But the beginning of his life was February 24, 1925. Colonel Day was 
then, of course, George Bud Day, born in Riverside, Iowa, which is a 
suburb of Sioux City. And he went to Central High School in Sioux City.
  When he learned that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he saw 
that in 1942--remember that was December 7, 1941. In 1942, when he 
heard there was going to be a draft, Bud Day decided that he would go 
down and sign up. And he saw the Marine recruiter and became a Marine.
  And then from that point, he served 2\1/2\ years in the South 
Pacific. And he came back home in 1945 and went to college at 
Morningside College there in Sioux City. And shortly after that, went 
up to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, South Dakota, and 
received his law degree up there.
  By 1949, Marine Bud Day had an undergraduate degree at Morningside 
College and a juris doctorate law degree from the University of South 
Dakota, where he thought he would go and practice law.
  But he also served in the Iowa National Guard from 1950, then he 
attended flight school because he wanted to fly. So therefore, in 1951, 
the Air Force called Bud Day to active duty, and he was a fighter pilot 
in the Korean War.

                              {time}  1315

  He served two tours as a fighter pilot in the Korean war. That 
experience growing up in Sioux City anchored him to the 185th Air Guard 
that is based today in Sioux City. He maintained his relationships with 
the airmen that served out of the 185th in Sioux City. Sioux City was 
always his home. He kept his contacts there; but he transferred his 
family down to the area of Pensacola, Florida, because there's a lot of 
military down there and it's a great place to live. I came back from 
there last night, having joined in the funeral and the procession to 
the cemetery for Colonel Bud Day.
  After his Korean war experience, where he served two tours, he 
decided to make the Air Force a career. One of the things he did was be 
deployed to a base at Niagara, New York, which he euphemistically 
called ``Nigeria.'' But they loved it up there and he built good, 
strong bonds with people. He took his flying hours up. With those 
flying hours that he had, he became one of the most experienced pilots 
to be deployed to Vietnam.
  He anticipated that he would retire in 1968; but then-Major Day 
volunteered for a tour in Vietnam and was assigned to the 31st Tactical 
Fighter

[[Page H5380]]

Wing at Tuy Hoa Air Base. That was in April of 1967. There, he 
commanded the wing called the Misty Wing. That was because Bud Day 
named them so. ``Misty'' was his favorite song. They flew missions over 
North and South Vietnam. The most dangerous missions, by far, were over 
North Vietnam.
  On a mission over North Vietnam in an F-100, they were spotting and 
locating Russian surface-to-air missiles that had freshly been placed 
there that had the capability of taking down B-52s. As they located the 
Russian surface-to-air missile site, they were hit by enemy fire. Some 
say it was an enemy missile. In Bud's book, he says he thinks he took a 
direct hit from a 37-millimeter antiaircraft weapon.
  In any case, it hit the fuselage of the F-100 and took their flight 
down. And he had to, as he said, ``punch out.'' There, he was 
imprisoned. He was immediately captured by the North Vietnamese and was 
imprisoned for 5 years and 7 months. He became the highest ranking 
officer in that prison. He commanded people like John McCain during 
that period of time.
  Throughout that long ordeal that our American prisoners of war served 
in what they used to euphemistically call the Hanoi Hilton, Bud 
maintained his spirit and strength. He gave encouragement to the others 
who were there. He defied his captors in a way that I think amazed the 
people that served there with him.
  When he was released on March 14, 1973, he was reunited with his 
wife, Dorie, and their four children, Steven, George, Jr., Sandra, and 
Sonja. Then he was presented the Medal of Honor by President Ford in 
1976. In all, as I said, he received over 70 medals. He had a combat 
medal from each field that he served in, each war, each theatre, and he 
was the only person to be awarded both the Medal of Honor and the Air 
Force Cross.
  Bud Day then retired from active duty in 1977 and resumed practicing 
law in Florida. One of the issues that he took on was TRICARE. In the 
nineties, he saw that the Clinton administration was starting to back 
away from the commitment that if you served 20 years in the Armed 
Forces, you would receive half your pay as your pension for life and 
medical care for life. That was the deal. That was the agreement, and 
he was appalled that the Federal Government was starting to move away 
from that agreement.
  So Bud Day, ever the fighter, ever the scrapper, ever the lawyer, 
went to court and put together a class action lawsuit to force the 
Federal Government to keep their word with our warriors. Most of that 
was designed to benefit America's Greatest Generation, the World War II 
veterans. We've lost so many of them since that period of time.
  But Bud Day drove that lawsuit and worked his way up through the 
courts. He got all the way to the Supreme Court, where they refused to 
hear the case. They refused to grant cert, as the ruling was. So the 
indomitable Colonel Bud Day, Medal of Honor recipient, decided, Okay, 
if we can't get what's right done in the courts, I'll go to Congress. 
So he took this argument to Congress. And if I have my dates right, it 
was in 2002 that Congress passed TRICARE. We've had a good number of 
debates on TRICARE since then. I don't believe we would have TRICARE at 
all if it weren't for Colonel Bud Day.
  Yesterday, I parted with his wife, Dorie, whom he affectionately 
called ``the Viking.'' I read in his book when he talked about her ice 
blue eyes. I saw them sad yesterday, but they're still bright and 
they're still ice blue and there's still a sparkle behind the tears. 
The family is strongly together, with Steve, George, Jr., Sandra, 
Sonja, and fourteen grandchildren. It was a ceremony and a service like 
no other for a man that there will never be another like Colonel Bud 
Day.
  I've looked through a number of articles, and recognizing, Mr. 
Speaker, that I probably can't be the best author to commemorate the 
life of a great iconic man that has captured this country, but I will 
take you down through a bit of a narrative from his story.
  Here's one of the things that Bud Day did. I'll just take you through 
the narrative of the way he treated death multiple times.
  Remember, this is a man that signed up for the Marine Corps in 1942, 
Mr. Speaker, and was able to come back from 2\1/2\ years of being 
deployed in the South Pacific and get his college under-grad degree and 
his law degree. He went into the Iowa Guard because he wanted to fly. 
He did fly. He volunteered to go to Korea. There, he served two tours 
flying a bomber over Korea. Then, while he was flying training 
missions, he was deployed different places like Georgia, for example, 
and at a base in England. And here are the number of times that Bud Day 
cheated death.
  The first one that I recall is when he was flying out of a base in 
Georgia. The fighter aircraft had the fuel doors open, and he had a 
leak. There was a plane that was flying next to him that said, You've 
got a leak. It looked like it was a fatal mechanical error. He didn't 
have enough altitude to bail out, and he didn't have enough power to 
land. He wasn't going to be able to sustain his power to land.
  And I'll give you an example of what he was going to be able to do 
for a lifetime and, that is, quick thinking. It's the kind of thing 
that pilots would likely be trained on this after they found out what 
Bud Day had done. He did the only thing he could do that would save his 
life. He put the nose of that plane down, knowing that if he could get 
to 170 knots, those ``sucker doors'' would close. And if they closed, 
it would shut off the risk of the fire.
  So he put that nose down in a courageous way; and right before he got 
to the treetops, he was able to reach 170 knots. In doing so, the 
sucker doors closed, and he was able to stabilize the aircraft and land 
it safely.
  That was the first time that's recorded that Colonel Bud Day cheated 
death.
  Not very long after that, he was flying out of a base in England. The 
name of the base, I think, is a pretty important one. The name of the 
base was Wethersfield Station in England. The uniqueness of that was 
pretty interesting.
  As Bud Day flew out of England, he had another situation where he had 
an engine fire at low altitude. There was no ability to set the plane 
down. He got it on a course where it would be away from a populated 
area. As he was at a lower altitude--around 500 or so feet--the only 
choice he really had was to eject.

  So he ejected. And he looked up and he said, Where's the chute? There 
was no chute, no opening, no orange blossom. He joked that fighter 
pilots or plane pilots will often argue if your shoot doesn't work, 
just take it back. And here is a man in a no-chute bailout of a jet 
aircraft, trailing down through skies with the chute not opening, with 
no blossom, and just trailing down. He went through the pine timber in 
England.
  If any of us, Mr. Speaker, remember when Rambo jumped out of the 
helicopter and went through the trees and survived that fall, I don't 
know where the inspiration came from that scene in Rambo, but I think 
of this happening to Colonel Bud Day, and this man survived a no-chute 
bailout. As the chute wouldn't open and as it strung down through the 
skies, he went into the pine trees and bounced off the branches. And as 
those branches began to break his fall, some of the cords slowed down a 
little bit on the branches and he hit the ground hard. He broke his 
ankle. He was injured in other places. But he was alive.
  He was the first person to survive a no-chute bailout of a jet 
aircraft. He did so in England in 1957. It was the second time he 
cheated death.
  The third time he cheated death was in a zero-zero landing. It was 
only 5 months after he had gone through his no-chute bailout. Remember, 
this is a man that had the presence of mind to put the nose down in a 
fighter aircraft and head toward the ground, knowing that if he didn't 
reach that speed--170 knots--he was not going to be able to survive 
that flight. And he had to pull it up right above the trees and have 
the air speed that he needed to get the sucker doors closed to 
stabilize the aircraft and to land it.
  And then here we are, not that much later, flying in England, and 
having to bail out of a burning aircraft and go through not having your 
chute open. And what did he say? Well, he expressed that it was an old 
Royal Air Force expression. He said:

       I thought I bought the farm. What a lousy way to go.


[[Page H5381]]


  But he went through the trees. And he said that flyers have an old, 
bad joke about parachutes. If it doesn't open, take it back. There are 
not many members of that take-it-back club. Colonel Bud Day was one of 
those members.
  The ejection was from an F-84. It was the first in Air Force history 
that anyone survived. Colonel Bud Day said, God must be saving me for 
something. In fact, his wife said, God must be saving you for 
something.
  It was less than 6 months later that he was flying out of 
Wethersfield Royal Air Force Station in England. They took off to go 
get some parts. The weather cleared. It was supposed to open up and 
stay open across Europe at the alternate landing forces they had. 
Instead, the fog socked in. The visibility went down to zero. The 
ceiling went to zero. Bud Day said the weather was so bad, not even the 
birds flew. But they flew that F-80C and were hoping the weather would 
reverse itself. His copilot was Bill Moore, known affectionately as 
Billy Moore.
  So they had a choice. With everything socked in, they decided to go 
back to the Wethersfield air strip because that's the one they knew the 
best. That's the one that didn't have a lot of urban areas or housing 
around it. They had pretty much clear approach to landing. And if they 
didn't make it, it was less likely that they would kill other people 
other than themselves.
  So they turned and went back to Wethersfield. Bud Day is thinking, I 
don't want to bail out of this plane again. My ankle is just healing up 
from the last time my chute didn't open. I want to come in and land 
this, and Billy Moore agreed that it was the best choice that they 
could make.
  So they approached the landing strip. This is a complete instrument 
landing, with zero visibility and zero ceiling. It was black as it 
could be. On the first approach, Bud said to his copilot, Billy Moore, 
You take the controls, I'll watch. And if I can see the runway, I'll 
take the controls from you the instant right before we land, and I'll 
land it. Because Bud, sitting in the front, was the one that can see 
the runway.
  And so as they made that first approach, right before touch down on 
impact was unknown, right before they touch down, Bud Day saw they were 
off the side of the runway. He saw a light on the side of the runway 
and said, Pull it back up. So they pulled it back up and they went back 
around again and they adjusted their radar again. As they approached, 
it was a complete instrument landing, zero ceiling, zero visibility. 
Right before impact, right before they touched, Bud said to Billy 
Moore, Pull it back up. That instant he realized they were lined up and 
within just an instant of making contact with the runway, Bud Day took 
the controls and set that plane down. And it was the first zero-zero 
landing that they had survived.
  He said to Bill Moore, his copilot:

       Good show, pal. That was about as scary as it's going to 
     get. I think we owe the radar controllers a beer.

  That tells you something about the spirit of this man.

                              {time}  1330

  He said: I didn't want to bail out again; my leg and back are still 
sore from the last bailout. And you know, Bill, we may be the only 
pilots living today that have made a zero visibility, zero ceiling 
landing.
  And I think that turned out to be true.
  Later on, Bud Day volunteered then for combat duty in Vietnam, where 
we went on to command the squadron there. As they were flying over that 
SAM site--that service-to-air missile site--his captain was Corwin 
Kippenharn of Amana, Iowa--two Iowans together in that flight as they 
were hit and shot down on that date. They punched out, but Day was 
taken prisoner immediately.
  That was the third time he cheated death, when they took a direct hit 
on the fuselage of that plane. As he bailed out, this time his chute 
did open, but when it opened, it settled him down in the location where 
he was immediately taken captive.
  His copilot--Kip, as he was known--was rescued right away. And as Bud 
Day is on the ground looking up, there was an American helicopter that 
was hovering off at a close distance. They were looking for him. He was 
in the trees and they couldn't see him, but Bud could see the 
helicopter. And standing in the side of that helicopter door was his 
copilot with a rifle in his hand. They were looking to go get Bud Day. 
If they would have seen him, they would have been able to recover him. 
But of course that didn't happen, and he was put into captivity.
  So three times he cheated death. As they beat him and as they 
tortured him, as they put him in a hole, he had his arm broken in three 
places. He had other injuries from the bailout. He had hit the side of 
the plane on the way out and suffered those injuries. But they drove 
him and marched him through the villages in what they would liked to 
have called a ``march of shame.''
  But he was put under guard by a young Vietnamese teenager whom Bud 
Day feigned that he was--he was hurt badly and it was hard for him to 
walk; his knee was bad; his arm was broken three places. But he feigned 
that he was worse than he was. He noticed that his captor would go off 
and talk to another guard because he believed that Bud could not move, 
could not get out of the hole that he was in, and that he wouldn't be 
able to travel. So he was a relaxed kind of a guard that wasn't really 
paying attention. Bud recognized that, he exploited that, and he 
feigned his injuries to be--it was bad, but he feigned them to be worse 
than they were. As he did so, the guard got more and more relaxed. And 
after several days, Bud saw his opportunity.
  They were going to move him then on up to North Vietnam to the Hanoi 
Hilton is what it sounded like. There was some expression; the guard 
had drawn a picture into the dirt of a jeep, and that said that they 
were going to transport him. So they went in and tied his legs together 
with a cord and they left him there. Bud Day knew that within hours, or 
a day or so, they were going to come and get him. And once he went to 
the next stage of his captivity, each day that goes by gets harder and 
harder to escape.
  So as the guard went over to talk to his friend and had his back 
turned, Bud Day was able to untie the cords that tied his legs 
together, even though he only had one arm to do it and the other one 
broken in three places. When he did that, he had to pick a time that he 
thought the guard was as relaxed as possible. He got out of that hole, 
and he headed out through the jungle to try to get down to the DMZ--the 
demilitarized zone--and to try to get, then, across the DMZ, cross a 
river, swim across a river, and then try to get into American hands. 
That looked like it was going to be a long trip, and it was.
  Bud Day had a canteen. He had some water in it. He was able to refill 
that sometimes from water that was captured from rainwater and banana 
leaves when he would stop and refill his canteen. He went for days 
without eating, days without thinking about eating. He was so focused 
on avoiding ``the V,'' as he called them, the North Vietnamese 
military, but also the Viet Cong.
  As he's traveling through North Vietnam, traveling through enemy 
territory, he had to be ever alert to maintain hiding and travel at 
night part of the time for the first couple, three days of his trip 
because that was the only way it would be safe. But to try to navigate 
at night through the canopy of the jungle and try to follow trails that 
you don't know where they go is a very, very difficult task.
  To keep his mind on task as he got weaker and weaker was a struggle. 
That is something that is so impressive to see that he was able to hold 
it together. And he wouldn't have said that he held it together. He 
went up and down through delirium. He would discipline his mind back to 
focusing on staying alive because he remembered his beloved wife, 
Dorie. He remembered his children. He remembered the people that he 
flew with--the Misty pilots and the Misty team that was out there.
  He prayed to God to come and save him. The 23rd Psalm was his 
favorite Psalm. When he didn't know what else to pray, he prayed the 
23rd Psalm. It happens to also be my mother's and mine.
  As he worked his way down south and was able to build himself the 
equivalent of a little bamboo raft and go into that river--and the 
river that he said was equivalent to--and Bud Day grew up on the 
Missouri River and played out there on the Missouri River, where

[[Page H5382]]

I've spent a fair amount of time, outside of Sioux City. But he said 
the river was equivalent to the Missouri River at St. Louis. It had a 
lot of water. It was flowing fast when he put into it. He thought that 
it would be slower than it was. It was flowing more than 7 or 8 miles 
an hour. That's about what the river flows around up in Sioux City, 
Iowa, today.
  It took him downstream fast, but he was able to get across the other 
side with arm broken in three places and all. As he emerged from the 
river, he had to struggle his way through the jungle, starving, hungry, 
weak from hunger. He found a cache of U.S. military--we would call them 
today MREs. He thought: I found the mother lode of food; now I can 
reenergize myself. I can store up with food. I can get my energy back, 
and I'll be able to go on.
  But each can that he picked up had been bayonetted because it was 
likely U.S. Marines who couldn't carry all of the food with them; they 
ate their fill. And in that jungle, if you poke a hole in a can, it 
only takes a little while and that food is spoiled. So it was all 
spoiled. But he was glad to see that the marines were following the due 
diligence in their combat training that they'd had.
  Throughout this, you will hear his voice kind of go up in despair, 
and then he would check himself and say: What are you complaining 
about, Bud? It's a great day. The sun came up in a bright way this 
morning. You had good weather to travel with.
  He found a way to find a blessing in thing after thing. He was 
shelled and escaped death then. U.S. bombs were dropping around him at 
a close area. He escaped death then. He had to go barefoot across the 
craters of a bomb field where some of the sand turns into glass. It cut 
his feet. His feet were swollen. He was wounded from some of that. And 
of course an arm broken in three places.
  Ten to 12 days he wandered across the desert, always renavigating, 
always resetting himself, always disciplining himself to stay on task: 
Stay on task. God is saving you for something.
  Throughout those days, those days of courage, he was faced multiple 
times with North Vietnamese military that, at any slipup--if he hid in 
the wrong place, if they looked in the wrong place, if he made a 
motion, he would have been captured.
  Outside of Khe Sanh, which was a marine base about 2 kilometers or 
perhaps 2 miles from there, Bud Day's luck ran out. He was encountered 
by a couple of young North Vietnamese who were either preparing to 
assault Khe Sanh or trying to assault any supply chains that would be 
coming to it. They discovered Bud Day, who then, when he realized he 
was discovered--now, remember, he lost about 25 pounds. He went into 
this weighing about 150. Maybe at this time it's less than 125 pounds. 
He's weak from hunger. He's eaten frogs and drank some water and a 
little bit of pulp from a banana tree that he took apart, and that's 
about it. So you can imagine how weak he must have been, how wounded he 
was, with a bad knee and an arm broken in three places, but he got up 
to run.
  As he ran--he made it a ways. He got through the jungles a ways, but 
as they shot at him, he took a bullet through the thigh and a bullet 
through the hand. He continued to run to evade his captors, who nearly 
didn't find him, but at the last minute, as they happened to find 
themselves standing next to him, not realizing it, they captured him. 
They captured him and they pressed him back again and sent him back to 
Hanoi to the Hanoi Hilton, where all of these days of disciplining his 
mind and himself, the resolve that was there went away, because he lost 
all of those days and went back into the Hanoi Hilton.
  This is the man whose spirit held together. And when they began to 
torture him in an even more sophisticated and even more relentless 
fashion--they would hang him by his feet for hours. They would beat him 
with fan belts. He said that--here's an expression from the 15th 
chapter of his autobiography. This chapter is titled, ``Crucifixion.'' 
He vividly details the most violent and barbaric tortures he endured. 
He called them ``rope tricks.'' That gives you a sense of Bud Day's 
sense of humor.

       There were ``rope tricks'' that literally dislocated 
     shoulders and tore muscles, flesh-piercing leg irons, torture 
     cuffs, and kneeling on sharp objects for days on end until 
     the knees became raw, bloody stumps.

  They beat him with fan belts. And he would pray, ``Yea, though I walk 
through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.''
  This is something that I think needs to go into the Record verbatim, 
Mr. Speaker. Bud Day, ever the warrior, prayed:

       Jesus, if I survive this nightmare, I will have divine 
     understanding. I am your brother, in blood and deed. I am 
     being crucified! I know Satan. I have seen the deepest rings 
     of hell. I am in the pit, Lord, and I am fading. My strength 
     is waning. Give me strength, Dear God, strength. I cannot 
     bear the thought of my wife or children hearing that I am a 
     traitor. I cannot live in disgrace with my fellow prisoners.

  Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, the spirit of a man who feared he would 
disgrace his fellow prisoners? He couldn't bear the thought of becoming 
a traitor. He couldn't bear the thought of not seeing his beloved wife, 
Dorie, and the kids again. This was Colonel Bud Day. This is the spirit 
of the man who gave courage and inspiration to all of those in the 
Hanoi Hilton.
  I recall the day we commemorated the statue of Bud Day at the airport 
in Sioux City, where we got together and named the airstrip after 
Colonel Bud Day. There's a statue there of Bud Day--it's a bronze 
statue that I'll describe in a moment, Mr. Speaker.
  Bud Day's defiance to his captors--they would point a rifle at his 
head and threaten to execute him, and Bud Day would stand there and 
sing the national anthem. There was another prisoner of war who was 
first blamed for organizing a prayer session. A number of them took the 
oath, essentially an oath that they would hold their ground and insist 
that they were going to do prayer sessions. As the Vietnamese marched 
them off, the first one to be marched off was beaten and bloodied and 
being hauled off, and what does Bud Day do? Stood up on his bunk and 
sang the national anthem at the top of his lungs. That voice of him 
singing the national anthem echoed across these cellblocks. They 
couldn't all see each other, Mr. Speaker, but they could hear. They 
echoed it across the cellblocks. They all stood up and sang the 
national anthem at the top of their lungs.
  They asked that prisoner, What did that make you feel like? And he 
said, It made me feel like I was 9 feet tall, ready to hunt bear with a 
switch. And the statue of Bud Day that commemorates the Bud Day 
Airstrip in Sioux City is a bronze statue, 9 feet tall.
  I remember the day that his twin daughters unveiled that statue from 
the roof of the airport building, where they pulled the tarp off and 
showed us the statue of Colonel Bud Day, the man who cheated death time 
after time after time, the man whom a lot of us wouldn't have believed 
that his life would end, even that he could cheat nature. I thought he 
might have been able to do that.
  I listened to the remarks made by John McCain on the floor of the 
Senate this Monday, and I was impressed by that delivery, by the 
poignant moments that John McCain captured. I will just hit some of 
those highlights because I think it's so important and I was so 
impressed with his presentation. I think it's very close to the 
delivery that he gave yesterday at the service.
  He said that Bud's lifetime ``could have supplied enough experiences, 
excitement, and satisfaction for 10 lifetimes.''
  ``He knew terror and suffering. He knew joy and deliverance. He knew 
solidarity, self-respect, and dignity.''
  This is John McCain still:
  ``We met in 1967 when the Vietnamese left me to die in the prison 
cell Bud shared with Major Norris Overly. Bud and Norris wouldn't let 
me die. They bathed me, fed me, nursed me, encouraged me, and ordered 
me back to life.''
  Norris did much of the work because Bud had healing of his own to do, 
to paraphrase. But to continue the quote:
  ``Bud showed me how to save my self-respect and my honor, and that is 
a debt I can never repay.'' From John McCain.
  Continuing to quote:
  ``Bud was a fierce--and I mean really fierce--resister. He could not 
be broken in spirit no matter how broken he was in body.''
  ``He defied men who had the power of life and death over us. To 
witness him

[[Page H5383]]

sing the national anthem in response to having a rifle pointed at his 
face--well, that was something to behold.''
  ``In 1967, then-Major Bud Day commanded a squadron of F-100s that 
served as forward air controllers over North Vietnam and Laos. They 
were called the Mistys, named for Bud's favorite song.'' On August 26, 
1967, Bud Day was one of the casualties over Vietnam.

                              {time}  1345

  Continuing the quote of Senator McCain:

       Bud was the bravest man I ever knew, and I have known more 
     than a few. He was great company too and made it possible to 
     actually have fun in prison once in a while.

  An extraordinary statement to make, knowing the pain, the agony, and 
the torture that they all went through there in Hanoi Hilton, in that 
prisoner of war camp.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to relate, though, the Bud Day that I knew. We 
see him here, the Bud Day of his later years--the happy face, the 
sparkle in his eyes, that look, that smile. Anybody that knew Bud Day 
understood this man by looking at this picture. It captured him. It 
literally actually captured the real man that was there. This is the 
Bud Day that I knew.
  He loved to hunt and fish; he loved the outdoors. As busy as he was 
and as active in his law practice up until the last day's of his life, 
he still made time to go out to the field. He made time to come back to 
Iowa and South Dakota, that area that he grew up in that he knew so 
well and loved so much. He always kept his home connections with his 
home territory.
  As we went out in the field year after year and hunted pheasants 
together primarily--South Dakota and Iowa--I will tell a little 
narrative. Now, think of this fighter pilot who has been through so 
much, who could fly up through that Valley of Death and tell you the 
narrative of all the anti-aircraft that was being fired at them and the 
surface-to-air missiles that were fired at them and, of course, small 
arms fire that they would fire at them constantly. Here is how Bud Day 
would explain it: It was really exciting. Can you imagine a man with 
the kind of courage that would be facing death by expressing, It was 
really exciting?
  This is a man that loved the outdoors, he loved to hunt, he loved to 
shoot. We would put together hunts--and we'll do another one this 
fall--it's going to be the ``Bud Day Pheasant Hunt.''
  But this is the sparkle in his eye--he always wore the sunglasses out 
there--but I know this sparkle in his eye. That smile on his face 
anybody would know. The people that knew Bud Day would smile.
  If you hold your hand like this and you stretch it out, you know 
that's the action of him stretching the tendons in his injured hand 
that he did constantly at rest. That hand would always be stretching 
those tendons back out.
  In that ceremony yesterday, there was eulogy after eulogy by other 
true American heroes, other Medal of Honor recipients, others that flew 
and fought with him, or part of the Misty Squadron, and the families, 
the military wives that were there, the people in that room, the four 
stars on shoulders time after time. And as I looked around that room 
and I saw all that brass, I thought: there are at least enough stars 
here for a constellation at this funeral, probably enough for a galaxy 
if you look at all the people whose lives he touched. And in the four 
legs of my journey down there, in three of them someone approached me 
and said: Did you know Bud Day? Are you on your way to the funeral, are 
you from the funeral? Here is how he touched my life.
  In the last leg of the journey, a young man across the aisle from me 
asked me if I was on my way back from the funeral. I said yes, and we 
talked a little bit. I don't know that he knew I'm a Member of 
Congress. I asked him what he did. He said, I'm an aviator. A little 
bit later he pulled up a picture of some of the pilots standing there 
together with Colonel Day in the middle taken recently, within the last 
couple of years, with a great big beaming smile on the face of Bud Day 
and those proud pilots all standing in a row.
  We exchanged cards as we stepped off the plane. I put it in my 
pocket, my front pocket, so I would look at it later, because without 
my glasses it's better to shake hands and smile and read it later. When 
I got home last night, I pulled it out. This man is a Blue Angels 
pilot, proud and honored to have his picture taken with Colonel Bud 
Day. I'm proud and honored to have had the privilege of knowing him, 
admiring him, stepping up to do some work to honor him.
  The honor that they gave him yesterday as we went on a 48.1-mile 
processional from the funeral service to the cemetery in Pensacola, 
every mile had mourners standing out there. For the first 15 or so 
miles it was almost shoulder to shoulder. I have never, Mr. Speaker, 
seen so many flags and umbrellas in the same place in my life. You 
would see families, full families, standing there holding flags, waving 
them, hands over their hearts. You might see someone in shorts and a T-
shirt standing at full salute as the processional went by--hundreds of 
cars on the way to the cemetery.
  When we entered the cemetery, there stood airmen in full salute for 
the first leg down through the cemetery, perhaps a half of mile of 
airmen stretched out. That is something that grabs your heart. When we 
turned the corner, we turned the corner and then it was marines in full 
dress saluting all the way down to the burial ceremony. It was 
something that puts your heart up in your throat and moved people to 
tears and to emotions that they had not seen all day by that great, 
great level of love, appreciation, and respect for America, up until 
the moment of his death, America's greatest living hero, Colonel Bud 
Day.
  As I've said, I've had the privilege to walk the Iowa--and South 
Dakota--Iowa cornfields with Bud Day and to hunt and to shoot and to 
stop and rest and talk philosophy and history and politics and what we 
need to do.
  I would like to put into the Record, Mr. Speaker, that the rallies 
that we did here to battle ObamaCare were inspired by Bud Day, on top 
of one of the bluffs up in Plymouth County, Iowa, where he said: Call 
everybody into the Capitol, surround the place, jam the place, don't 
let anybody in, don't let anybody out. If you just get so many people 
there that say: Keep your hands off my health care, they will have to 
give up. That was Bud Day. That brought tens of thousands of people 
here.
  But in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I want to put John McCain's 
description of heaven into the Record, because I see it the same way. 
I'm glad he said it, and I'm glad he wrote it. He said, speaking of Bud 
Day, Colonel Bud Day:

       But he's gone now to a heaven I expect he imagined would 
     look like an Iowa cornfield in early winter filled with 
     pheasants.

  This, Mr. Speaker, is a shot, I believe, of the last hunt in Iowa as 
Colonel Bud Day walked off the field, taken by my youngest son, Jeff, 
who did so because he wanted to commemorate that moment fearing that it 
might be the last time. As I look at this picture of Colonel Bud Day, 
America's greatest hero, Medal of Honor recipient, 70-some other 
medals, every combat medal available to him in three wars, serving our 
country, giving us TRICARE, giving us inspiration to battle ObamaCare, 
with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye and a sense of humor 
and a way to express that extraordinary life that he lived, John McCain 
said, as I do:

       I will hunt the field with him again. God bless his life.

  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________