The Seventh Annual Hugh J. Clausen Lecture on Leadership

• Author: Colonel George E. 'bud' Day
• Pages: 04

2001] HUGH J. CLAUSEN LECTURE ON LEADERSHIP 141

THE SEVENTH ANNUAL HUGH J. CLAUSEN LECTURE ON LEADERSHIP1

COLONEL GEORGE E. "BUD" DAY2

Thank you. Good morning. General and Mrs. Clausen, Colonel Lederer, distinguished guests, fellow lawyers. It's a pleasure to be here and I

want to start out by telling you, I appreciate, as all Americans do, your service. I know, and our country knows, you all have other choices. And I'd just like to see a hand out there. How many lifers are in this group? Way to go! It's been a chilling experience here. I went out to walk this morning, and it was freezing. I hadn't felt temperatures like this since Korea. And leaving Fort Walton Beach was maybe not the greatest idea in the world, because it was about fifty-five degrees when I left down there and getting better.

I wanted to talk in kind of general terms about some of my experiences, and before I get into that, I wanted to talk about the importance of role models. Most of you are older than many of the groups that I have talked to, but I think one of the most significant things that we can do as citizens, is to sort out what kind of a person we're going to be and what kind of a track we're going to follow. And many times, we get to where we get to because of our imitation, hopefully, of a good role model. Certainly, these gentlemen down here in the front are that kind of a model for you. And in my case, I had a lot of problems sorting out who my role model was going to be as a young guy.

I had a great affection, as a young boy, for Charlie Lindbergh, because I can remember, very early in my years, Charlie had just flown the Atlantic. And he was a hero of a dimension we have not seen, probably since that time. The country was absolutely gaga over Lindbergh, a fact that drove him absolutely into seclusion. They worshiped him so much until he got to the point he couldn't stand all that company, which was a pity, because he was an incredible man. As I got a little older, one of my heroes was Franklin Roosevelt, who back during the Depression, came up with some socialistic schemes that kept the country afloat, and got us prepared for World War II. And following him, of course, was Harry Truman. A man who, in his time, was highly maligned. I remember how they desecrated Harry as a shoe clerk and clothing salesman from Kansas City and as a spokesman for the Pendergass gang. Truly, Harry was one of the better men of our times. Winston Churchill is another man for whom I had a fervent admiration. Back during the Battle of Britain and when times were very, very tough, Winnie was famous for saying, "Never, never, never give up." And that was so important in those days, because had anyone fallen during the course of the war, it would have been absolutely different.

As time went by, I learned to admire another great American named Jimmy Doolittle. Perhaps the strangest-named man in all of history, Jimmy was a little guy, smaller than me, probably about five foot, four

inches, an absolutely fantastic aviator. Learned by a Ph.D. in Aeronautics, a brilliant man and a great hero. It was Jimmy that turned the tide in World War II with the launch off the carriers of the B-25s that bombed Tokyo, which turned the morale of the country totally around. He was a marvelous man, and very modest. One of the things that I always admired about him was that he was absolutely candid. He never told any mistruths and he was very careful about how he said things; he was always truthful. And that, as a matter of fact, cost him a fourth star. Jimmy never got to be a four-star until either just before he died or right after he died-I don't recall which-when someone finally said, "It's time to promote this wonderful guy to four-stars."

All of those people have kind of a message, a thread in their life, that's useful for us to adopt. And with that kind of a background, I went to Vietnam in 1967, a very senior aviator. At that time I had about 4500 hours of jet time-fighter time-which was more than any commander in World War II. Talk with any of those famous air leaders and so forth; none of them had that kind of a background. I was, hands down, far more experienced as a major than any of those people had been, going off to war. And that was because of the wonderful training and turnaround in our combat proficiency that had occurred after Korea. And the beautiful part of that was, that when I got to Vietnam, I was ready to go. All I had to do was crank the engine up and check the bomb load and go. And interestingly enough, I dropped a few bombs for the Big Red One while I was in Vietnam. And in fact, I had a poster of a soldier. They gave you a huge poster with a soldier-grunt personified on it. Somehow or another, it was lost in my travels, so I still don't have my "Big Red One," but I remember him well.

When I got there, it was kind of an astonishing experience. The war was going absolutely nowhere. It was as if we transported all our forces over there and said, "go get 'em," but you never got to go get them. And if you would imagine Vietnam as being a peninsula like Florida and put some mountains on the west side, your area of activity was really quite narrow as maybe fifteen or twenty miles wide as you got up in the central part of North Vietnam, and then it widened out as you got up near Hanoi. But down in those southern areas going over into Laos, you had this really narrow operating area. And amazingly, we were fighting their war. They were indigenous, so they were out there milling around in the villages and in the jungle at night. And instead of fighting the war as we had fought World War II in the name of "terminate, do it quick," as you saw in the Gulf

War, there never was the political commitment to get busy and win the war. And as a result, unfortunately, we lost it.

The bottom line was that the soldiers and the marines, and the sailors and the Air Force won their part of the war, but the political part of the war was lost. And, of course, today they are occupied by this Communist apparatus. Well, on August 26, 1967, I had moved up to another job. I had been asked to set up a fast-FAC [Forward Air Controller] operation into North Vietnam. And what that meant was we were supposed to go up and look for lucrative targets and then have some fighter bombers meet us from the fleet or from the bases in Thailand or South Vietnam to go hammer these targets. And basically, what I had available were any of the airplanes off the ships or the F-105's, F-4's, and occasionally some F-100's from South Vietnam and Thailand. I was really skeptical about this business of FACing with a jet because I'd been in the fighter business over in Europe and back in the mid-fifties through about the mid-sixties, and we had literally hundreds of fighters available that had a nuke bomb hung on them. And these were pretty good-sized nukes. Up to about ten mega-ton nukes, which would have dwarfed what happened at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And in those days, because of the limitation of radar, we low-leveled all the time. So I had literally...