Transcript
Speaker: I looked for men had what I call a moral component. I wanted to write about guys who came to a fork in the road, the right thing and paid the price. That was Robert Coram.
Speaker: Coram spent much of his writing life studying hard, gifted, often difficult men. In Boyd, he followed fighter pilot John Boyd from the cockpit to energy maneuverability theory, fighter design, and a new way of thinking about conflict.
Speaker: In American Patriot, he wrote about Bud Day, pilot, prisoner of war, Medal of Honor recipient, and advocate for military retirees and veterans. Brute tells the life of Marine General Victor Krulak, and Double Ace examines Robert Lee Scott Jr., a genuinely accomplished pilot who could make the boundary between memory and legend almost impossible to see.
Speaker: These books ask what extraordinary people actually did, what their institutions rewarded or punished, and what their public stories conceal, and who carried the private cost.
Speaker: This episode is about how Robert Coram measured courage, legend, and cost, and what happened when he turned the same scrutiny toward his own life.
Speaker: Before Robert Coram tried to understand pilots and generals, he had spent much of his life trying to understand the standards he grew up under. Coram grew up in Edison, a farming town in southwest Georgia.
Speaker: The title of his memoir, Gully Dirt, begins on his uncle Felix's farm. A deep gully had opened in the land and his uncle explained that rain had carried the good soil into a creek, then toward the Chattahoochee River and eventually the sea.
Speaker: What remained at the bottom was pale, sandy dust, gully dirt, that was no good for growing anything. In Robert's childhood, that image took on another meaning.
Speaker: Sorry as gully dirt became one of his father's harshest judgments of his oldest son. Jennings' Brian Coram, or JB, had spent about three decades in the Army.
Speaker: In Coram's memoirs, he is not just one simple thing. JB works as a telephone lineman, provides for his family, leads Boy Scouts, serves his community, and is remembered as an affectionate husband.
Speaker: He also brings the standards and discipline of military life into his own home. Robert remembers a childhood in which praise was rare, weakness could be ridiculed, and punishment sometimes became physical.
Speaker: That is not the whole of JB though. However, it is part of the father Robert spent much of his life trying to understand. Books offered Robert other ways of measuring what a life might become.
Speaker: Edgar Allan Poe, for example, first showed Robert that words could possess the imagination. Decades later, in his second memoir, Inc., Robert Coram writes that a therapist asked him where he had ever felt safe as a child.
Speaker: The only place he could name was a remote family farm where he had spent a summer. That house on that farm held only two books, a Bible and Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow.
Speaker: At the Edison Library, Robert discovered that Yerby was a black novelist from Georgia who had built a successful life through books, despite the racial boundaries of the South.
Speaker: If that life had been possible for Yerby, perhaps, Robert thought, the word writer might someday come to describe him too. A teacher named Myrlene Tye took Robert's own writing seriously and treated it as something worth encouraging.
Speaker: Then, in 1954, 16-year-old Robert argued with JB. In the days that followed, doctors diagnosed his father with a slight stroke on Monday.
Speaker: On Tuesday came a massive stroke, followed by a coma, and then death early the following Sunday. Nothing in the account Coram gives us establishes that the argument caused his father's strokes, but the 16-year-old boy interpreted the sequence differently.
Speaker: For decades, Robert carried the conviction that he had killed his own father. At the same time, another voice was entering the Coram household each morning on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution, a voice that had repeatedly infuriated J.B.
Speaker: throughout Robert's childhood. That voice belonged to Ralph McGill. I came into journalism sort of through a back door because every morning as a kid, I was awakened by my father screaming at the newspaper, reading the front page. And he everything Ralph McGill, this wonderful man, a great publisher, wrote just upset my dad. And he would throw the paper down and scream and rant.
Speaker: And I thought, that can get my old man so angry, i want to learn how to do that. So I had a teacher from seventh grade who told me I had a modicum of talent as a writer, and maybe I should become a writer. So I went into journalism as a way to make my old man angry. He was long dead by then, but his shadow loomed large.
Speaker: So I sort of came into it through the back door. Gully Dirt ends in 1955 when Coram arrives at North Georgia College. The school is affordable, it gets him out of Edison, and it is the military school his father had wanted him to attend.
Speaker: His later memoir, Inc., shows that McGill became more than a man whose columns irritated J.B. Once Coram reached the Atlanta Journal, investigative reporter John Pennington arranged for Robert to meet the editor he had admired from so far away and for so long.
Speaker: And when they finally met, Robert recalls that McGill already knew some of his work talked with him about politics and civil rights, and inscribed a copy of his own book, The South and the Southerner, with hopes for Robert's career.
Speaker: McGill also gave Coram some advice. He should learn compression and clarity at a newspaper, learn longer narrative in magazines, and then go on to write books.
Speaker: Robert would take decades to complete that climb. My name is Robert Coram. I'm from a town deep in southwest Georgia. Went to North Georgia College and flunked out and went the Air Force.
Speaker: Came back, went back school. My journalism teacher was a copy editor the Atlanta Journal, and I was writing for the college a newspaper at the time, did a column.
Speaker: And several times she complimented me on my columns, and one night she asked me to stay after class, and she said, we have an opening on the paper, an interlevel job for a reporter. Would you be interested?
Speaker: My God, this is where I'd hope to be there 20 years from now. So, yes, I would be interested. So as a sophomore in college, I was hired by the Atlanta Journal and I was there for eight or 10 years, covered the civil rights movement, environmental movement.
Speaker: I left and now spent some time in Atlanta Magazine, lived on Cumberland Island, the barrier island off the Georgia coast for a couple of years.
Speaker: I came back and went to work for the Constitution. Those were the best years of my newspaper career, the late 70s, early 80s at the Atlanta Constitution.
Speaker: And then left and began writing books. I wrote five before I published one. I was slow getting into the game. I guess was merciful to the reading public.
Speaker: Those five books never saw the light of day. Before asking us to trust Coram's judgments as a biographer, it helps to hear him work as a reporter.
Speaker: His narcotics beat began with aviation. In 1976, Coram's younger brother told him about small aircraft arriving in Florida from the Bahamas without flight plans.
Speaker: As a private pilot himself, Coram saw the story and built sources in local police departments, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, U.S. Customs, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Speaker: Regional work led to a 1978 Esquire article and in 1979 a return to the Atlanta Constitution with unusual freedom to follow smuggling stories.
Speaker: By then, Robert Coram had years of aviation knowledge, law enforcement access, and reporting on the machinery behind the drug trade. This is what leads us to the newspaper story he chose when I asked what still stayed with him.
Speaker: Is there a story from your newspaper work that still sticks in your head? hey My favorite newspaper for smuggling story, I was a private pilot, and I had some sources inside the DEA told me that the Turks and Caicos were taken over by drug smokers. Everybody there was mixed up in smuggling.
Speaker: So I flew down there and on the flight, There's a radio frequency that pilots monitor when they're out over the open ocean. There was 600 miles in Fort Lauderdale to South Caicos. There was lot of open water.
Speaker: And this guy gets on the radio and just starts saying, somebody please talk to me, talk to meop me, talk me. I thought, who taught this guy radio procedure? What's he doing? And finally I said, identified myself with an airplane number.
Speaker: And he said, I'm on a plane with three passengers. They're all past Iowa. We were in Miami last night drinking. I'm flying down to South Caicos, and I can't stay awake.
Speaker: Would you talk to me and help me stay awake if we get there? I said, sure. He said, where are you going? I said, South Caicos. He said, what hotel are you in? I said, Admiral's Arms.
Speaker: He said, I'm staying in the same hotel in the same place. So we became sort of instant buddies, and we chatted and just He was in a faster airplane and got there early and he said, I'll wait for you on the ramp.
Speaker: You saved my life. Really appreciate it. So we got there, he took me around and he assumed that we were headed down to Colombia to pick up a load of dope. That's what people do.
Speaker: And he introduced me to everybody. I said, no, the customs, emig immigration, the tower official. And... Turned out he was the chief pilot for the biggest group of smugglers on South Caicos.
Speaker: And having him introduce me was a... I thought, I'm flying into an island where I've never been. I've got to get a story about drug smuggling. This guy gave me everything in the space of a couple hours.
Speaker: I got where hope to get in about 10 days. I was only there one afternoon. The next day I flew over to Grand Turk where the governor was and I asked him if he knew about the smuggling. He said, yeah. He said, there's a bloody great wart on the end of our nose.
Speaker: That was on the headline of the story. Anyway, I got a front page story in the Sunday paper. That's when the AJC had 600,000 circulation on Sunday.
Speaker: And I got it. just talking to this guy on radio. Got a Pulitzer nomination out of too. How did your career move from journalism and novels into eventually military biography?
Speaker: It was very choppy and chaotic and unplanned. And, uh, If I had it all to do over again, I'd try to apply some thought to it because was chaotic with five novels and then the nonfiction books, none of which were connected each other. And after I'd written 10 books, fortuitously, i for a while I'd been the military affairs writer for the Atlanta Constitution and in that capacity met a brilliant young Pentagon analyst
Speaker: named Chuck Spinney, who leaned on me for years to write a book about John Boyd. And finally, I had run out of steam on the other books, and my career was slowing down. And out of desperation, I went to Washington and met Boyd's friends. He had died by then.
Speaker: And it took me just a few days to realize it was probably the best story I had ever run across. And I I wrote a 46-page proposal that I sent to my agent.
Speaker: He read it over the weekend, farmed out to a number of publishers on Monday morning, and had an offer from Little Brown before noon. So it really took off when I started writing military books. And they gave me a contract to do two more books. And the contract stipulated the two books would be well-researched military biographies, which is what I gave them.
Speaker: They all did well. The Boyd Project showed what he could carry from a newsroom into biography. He could cultivate sources, master the record, find what an institution has missed, and keep asking after the first real answer.
Speaker: Research did more than give Coram facts. Sometimes it delivered the scene that taught a reader how to see an entire life. The next example begins at Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio, Texas.
Speaker: When I finished the Bud Day book, I didn't have a prologue, and I try with these books. Most people outside the military don't know who they are, so I tried to do a prologue with each one to let the casual reader to know who this guy is and why you should be interested, why you might like to read it.
Speaker: I didn't have a prologue for the Bud Day book, and I was really concerned about it. And Bud told me he was flying out to... Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas to make a speech.
Speaker: He wasn't taking his wife. He was just out one day and back the next. He said, you might want to come out there. I've heard his speech dozens of times. And it would involve flying to San Antonio, driving all the way across Texas, getting in the tux and going to this fancy dinner and going to bed and getting up and driving back across Texas. I almost didn't go, but I have a friend I call the book angel.
Speaker: She tells me where to go on some of these books. And she said, go to Del Rio. And I shrugged it off because I could see no practical reason to go there to hear something I'd heard a dozen times before.
Speaker: And I kept hearing, go to Del Rio. I went. And if you read the Bud Day book, read the prologue, that was that night in Del Rio that I almost didn't go to.
Speaker: Victor Brute Krulak spent a career preparing the Marine Corps for wars its own bureaucracy did not always expect. He pressed the usefulness of land and craft before the Second World War, helped make helicopters practical instruments of marine warfare, and fought for the Corps' institutional survival after the war.
Speaker: Vietnam presented a different argument, though. The dominant American strategy emphasized search and destroy operations and attrition. But Krulak believed the decisive contest at the time was in reality the battle for the allegiance and security of South Vietnam's villages.
Speaker: Marines, in his view, should protect the population, separate insurgents from their support, and use large unit firepower when it served that larger purpose. By late 1965, Krulak had put the case into a strategic appraisal and spent months carrying it through the military and civilian chain of command with supposedly little success.
Speaker: Apparently, on August 1, 1966, he took it unannounced to President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. Of the men you wrote about, is there one that best illustrates the career price or consequences of giving unwelcome counsel?
Speaker: I Think Brute Krulak the best example. when i Picking a subject for a book was the hardest part of what I do. And Brute Krulak is great example of that because he was in Vietnam, he was a three-star general, and he was the only senior officer in the U.S. military who on his own, not summoned by the White House, but on his own, went to the White House and told LBJ, unless you change the way you're running the war, you're going to lose the war and the next election.
Speaker: LBJ stood up and put his hand in General Krulak's back and literally pushed him out of the Oval Office. and Because of that great example of moral integrity, fortitude, whatever,
Speaker: He did not get his fourth star, and he was not appointed commandant. Before he died, we and I had a long talk. He said his one regret was that he had not made commandant, and he knew he didn't make commandant because of confronting LBJ.
Speaker: I think it's one of the greatest examples of moral courage I've ever seen. And the real question is, why weren't there some other senior officers who did the same thing? And when you do the right thing, there's often a price to pay.
Speaker: Brute Krulak's a great example of that. It's a great tragedy about it, but at the same time, he's remembered as one of the giants of the Marine Corps. Krulak about 5 feet four and weighed 130 pounds. So he's the smallest, lightest man ever to graduate from the Naval Academy and be appointed to the Marine Corps, a guy in Vietnam, this big gunnery sergeant, saw him at Khe Sanh running around under fire.
Speaker: He said, that's the biggest little man I've ever seen. Krulak was, when he walked in the room, you knew it. There was just a power about him, and there was a magnetism, and i think it was comes from his great moral courage and that unbending corps that he had that could not be shaken or bent or twisted.
Speaker: George E. Budd Day grew up poor in Sioux City. He enlisted in the Marine Corps during the Second World War, later served in the Iowa Army National Guard, became an Air Force fighter pilot and a lawyer, and in 1967 took command of the new Misty Fast Forward Air Control Unit in Vietnam.
Speaker: Misty pilots flew low and fast over heavily defended territory, searching for targets and directing other aircraft onto them. On August 26th, 1967, ground fire brought down Day's aircraft over North Vietnam.
Speaker: His right arm was broken in three places and his knee was badly injured. He was captured and tortured, escaped and moved south toward friendly forces, crossed the Ben Hai River and was eventually recaptured with earshot of American forces after being shot again.
Speaker: He remained prisoner until March 14, 1973, totaling 67 months in captivity. His wife, Doris, or Dorie, Day, was not simply waiting at home.
Speaker: She kept the family functioning, preserved information, challenged the policy of public silence imposed on POW families, and helped turn those families into a public force.
Speaker: In Coram's book, she is fortunately not simply scenery around Bud Day's courage. She is impressively one of the people actually carrying the story forward. When I asked Coram how reporting shaped these biographies, he did not begin with a document.
Speaker: He began with the man he had met. I like to do research. Plus, Bud Day is Captain America. I love the man. one of the kindest, most gentle, well, he was almost Victorian in his manners. He was so courteous and soft-spoken, and you would never guess that he had stood up to the most brutal torture for several months in the summer of 1969. When he told me about he had never told his wife about the details.
Speaker: She was in the room when we Bud and I were talking, and she started of crying, and then Bud was weeping, and I started crying. The man just, he could not see a something that was a fault and not try to right it. And he did not like the way his fellow POWs were being treated. And he became the SRO, the senior ranking officer of the building he was in And everyone I talked to just shook their head when the greatest compliment one POW could have for another one was to say he was a tough resistor.
Speaker: every Everyone agreed that Bud Day was a tough resistor. Robert, I'm really curious in all of the time that you spent with Bud and Dorie Day, were there things that you observed about their marriage that stuck with you?
Speaker: Bud deferred to her everything. I traveled with them for couple of years and When i parachute him into somebody's family like that, they're very much aware of it for a month or two months or so, and then I become part of the furniture and they just say everything.
Speaker: With Bud, nothing ever changed. He was the same two years after I met him as he was when I met him. He did not have a public persona, if you will.
Speaker: and When Doris would tell him what to do, he always did it. I said, Bud, are you henpecked? said, no, but Doris, Dorie, called her, had stood by him for those six years he was in jail. and He said, anything she wants is good by me.
Speaker: and the
Speaker: it was an amazing thing to watch. I went with him and his wife to Washington for a reunion of the Medal of Honor recipients. And we were all on a boat going up the Potomac, and there was a big round table, about eight or 10 at a table, and we were jammed up together.
Speaker: I'm as close to the woman sitting at the next table. I'm sitting between Bud and Dorie. I'm as close to her as I am to Bud. And the master of ceremony said, okay, I'm going to play the songs.
Speaker: from each branch of the service, and I want to play the song for your branch. I want you to stand up and be recognized. So they played the Army song, The Caissons Go Rolling Along.
Speaker: Bud had been in the Army during college, sorry he stood up waved. Everybody applauded. And then they played the Wild Blue Yonder, an Air Force song, and Bud spent 24 years in the Air Force.
Speaker: So he stood and waved. And I noticed the woman behind was nudging her dinner partner. Then they played the Marine song, and Bud loves the Marine Corps. He was in the Air Force 24 years, but he told me that everything he ever learned that was important, he learned as an enlisted Marine in World War II.
Speaker: So when they played from the altar, Montezuma, Bud stood and just spun around. The woman behind me punched her part and said, That poor man, he can't remember what branch of the military he was They came home in 1973 as a colonel, having been promoted twice during captivity.
Speaker: Three years later, he received the Medal of Honor. But neither the homecoming nor the recognition could restore the body that returned. One arm had healed in abode position and damage to his leg, hands, hearing, and teeth remained for the rest of his life.
Speaker: Other damage returned at night. Dorie remained beside him through both the public honors and the nights when captivity returned to his mind. In Coram's account, Dorie would curl her body around Bud during his nightmares and wait for him to come back to the room.
Speaker: However different their fates, Day carried all of the names of those he knew that had been lost as part of the war's cost in his mind. As captivity followed day home in his thoughts, so did his obligation to the men who did not.
Speaker: He had nightmares every night. He had to take heavy sleeping pills and his wife told me that he would wake up. There was one guard they called the bug. and he would wake up screaming about the bug two or three nights a week. He never got over that. Many of the POWs never got over it.
Speaker: There were some POWs who died during the interrogations, and some were driven insane by the torture.
Speaker: I went with Bud to Washington once, and we went to the the wall, He looked for the names of the people who had been in his room at the Hanoi Hilton and saluted each one, and the men who had died in captivity.
Speaker: was very somber experience for him. is They had died under horrible circumstances. Robert Lee Scott Jr. had spent years preparing to become a combat pilot.
Speaker: By early 1942, he was a West Point graduate, an intensely practiced aviator, and a career officer nearing 34, old enough to fear that the war might pass him by.
Speaker: Task Force Aquila appeared to be his last chance, It was a secret plan to base B-17 bombers in China for attacks against Japan. Unfortunately for Scott, that plan collapsed.
Speaker: Scott was then sent instead to the Assam Burma China Ferry Command, helping move supplies over the Himalayas in C-47s. In his mind, ferry duty was the end of his fighter pilot ambitions.
Speaker: And then he noticed four fighter planes that were sitting largely unused. How did the assignment that Scott saw as a dead end end up becoming a real opening for him?
Speaker: When he flew a B-17 to India, it was part of Operation Aquila, which was to be the other side of the Doolittle raid. They were supposed to load up in China and come in the back door to Japan, but that fell apart.
Speaker: And Scott thought his life had ended. He was 32 years old, a West Point graduate, a full colonel, too old to be a fighter pilot. And part of or the Assam Burma China Ferry Command.
Speaker: He was one of the first guys to fly the hump, flying over the roof of the world and in the C-47, which is not the greatest airplane in the world if come to work.
Speaker: and there was a The squadron had several P-40s that nobody was flying. He was the only fighter pilot there, so and he was a colonel, so he said, okay, I'll fly these.
Speaker: Scott turned that opening into real combat achievement. His solo attacks were against Japanese targets in Burma, and he later flew nine guest missions alongside pilots of the American volunteer group, the original Flying Tigers.
Speaker: In early July 1942, the AVG disbanded and the regular Army Air Force's 23rd Fighter Group assumed its mission. Only five AVG pilots joined the new Army organization and Scott became the 23rd's first commander.
Speaker: He was closely associated with the Flying Tigers and helped carry their methods and image forward. Even the victory total demonstrates the problem that Coram inherited.
Speaker: The Air Force Historical Research agency Agency's standardized list records 10 aerial victories. Another official Air Force biography says 13. Scott later claimed 22. The precise number is contested, but the essential fact is not.
Speaker: Even at the lowest official figure, Scott was a double ace. In Scott, the authentic achievement and an enlarging legend share the same cockpit.
Speaker: He came back and he wrote a book called God is My Copilot. That's the most audacious, arrogant, incredible title I've ever heard it. But can you imagine somebody sitting there saying, God is My Copilot is going to be the title.
Speaker: And his superiors in the Air Force called him God's personal pilot. And that was not a compliment. And he dictated the book in about three days. And it became...
Speaker: a bestseller and one of the greatest World War II books ever. It still sells today. And most of it is just nonsense. Scott, when he was at West Point, he was called a bugler because he says, yeah, talk all the time, quoting portrait at the top of his lungs. And it's hard for them to know when the truth ended and the...
Speaker: stories began, but he was a Southerner and he believes that telling a story, even it's not true, it becomes true in the telling. So he thought that all these things were true.
Speaker: At West Point, Scott's classmates called his incessant claims and talking bugling. Robert uses that word for a gift that could entertain a room, persuade a superior, inspire a unit, and also protect Scott whenever the facts were inconvenient.
Speaker: Scott dictated the first manuscript of God is My Copilot in just three days, of course, after which transcription and substantial editing were necessary.
Speaker: The book and its film adaptation helped make the flying tiger image part of American popular memory, and repetition of Scott's stories then did something more. The printed story, the film, the speeches, and Scott's own memory began to reinforce one another.
Speaker: For a biographer, the question was no longer simply whether Scott ever lied. It was how to recover the real man from a heroic exaggeration that Scott himself may have come to remember as fact.
Speaker: With General Scott, I honestly it did not know when he was telling me the truth and when he was just talking because I For instance, I asked him where the title for God is My Co-Pilot, did he come from?
Speaker: And he told me this story about being shot by a Japanese pilot and the bullets came into the metal plate in the back of his seat and sprung some rivets loose and they went into his back And when he landed, he was taken to a cave and operated on without anesthesia by candlelight.
Speaker: And by the light of the candles in the cave, he saw these words spelled out, God is my co-pilot. That was a horse manure. I don't know where came. just popped into his head, I guess. But I could ask him the same questions over and over and over and get different answers every time.
Speaker: With someone like Scott, how do you decide what you eventually believe is true? Some of the things I wrote that he said in retrospect, I don't believe they're true.
Speaker: ah Like the vision in the cave, but it was such a great story, I had to use it. mean He told me, I didn't have any way to check it. But in retrospect, as I got to know him better, I just don't think that was true. Because there was no sign of his being injured. He didn't have a purple heart.
Speaker: He was very metal-hungry guy. If he had been injured, he would have gotten a purple R. I'm convinced that story was not true. oh was a great great storyteller.
Speaker: There's a movie called though The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Toward the end of the movie, the senator from Shinbone, this little town, comes into town, and he tells the newspaper editor the truth about a pivotal event in the city.
Speaker: It's so contrary to what people thought they knew. And he got through, and the editor tore up the notes, and the senator said, Mr. Editor, aren't you using the story? And he said, Senator, of this is the West, and out of here, when the truth is in conflict with the legend, we print the legend.
Speaker: And with General Scott, he left the print for legend. Coram did not choose fact or legend and discard the other. He kept the achievement, printed the claim, showed the contradiction, and told the reader what the surviving evidence could not support.
Speaker: Official records can tell us who held command, what aircraft flew, which memorandum circulated, and which medal was awarded. They are less likely to show who typed the work at a kitchen table, absorbed the rage after a professional defeat, raised the children through an absence, or watched a public hero become someone different at home.
Speaker: John Boyd died before Coram began his biography. Robert could interview the pilots, engineers, Pentagon reformers, and Marines who carried Boyd's ideas forward.
Speaker: But to understand the life outside that public circle, he went to Boyd's widow, Mary. Boyd was a there a case by himself. He died before I started doing the book. Otherwise, i never would have written the book because his family was so secretive about their family life. He would never talk about his family and things at home.
Speaker: Oddly enough, when I interviewed his widow, she would had a lot of anger about how she had been treated as a wife. They lived in shabby little apartment for about 23 years. And she told me things in the first interview that i was i would have been surprised to get on the fifth or sixth or tenth interview.
Speaker: She just unloaded on John Board and told me lot of deeply personal things that he never would have talked about. She had a lot of resentment toward him. pattern is different in each family.
Speaker: Dorie Day became an organizer, strategist, keeper of evidence, and lifelong caregiver. Krulak's wife, Amy, sustained his demanding career while she and their sons lived under standards that hurt them emotionally and psychologically.
Speaker: And Scott's wife, Catherine, and daughter, Robin, remembered the waiting, betrayal, and emotional absence behind his constant motion. None of that erases the public accomplishments, though.
Speaker: At the fighter weapons school, for example, Boyd famously bet that starting from a position of disadvantage, he could reverse positions and be on any challenger's tail within 40 seconds.
Speaker: And reportedly, he did just that every time he was challenged. His analysis of aerial combat produced the aerial attack study, and later he developed energy maneuverability theory, which changed how aircraft performance could be compared and helped shape the development of the F-15 and F-16.
Speaker: His later work expanded into the decision cycle now associated with the OODA loop, which stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. Krulak helped make helicopters practical instruments of marine warfare and helped defend the Corps' institutional future.
Speaker: Scott's real combat record still makes him a double ace, no matter what the numbers say, and Day's courage and leadership remain matters of fact. But accomplishment, of course, does not erase the experiences of those around them.
Speaker: Coram's strongest biographies appreciate both accounts, what the public man gave the world and the costs carried by those around them who did not receive those medals. What did writing these biographies change in you?
Speaker: Writing those books changed my life. It had a profound effect on me. It might sound naive, but seeing the example, especially of Bud Day, that one chapter where he was tortured so much, that really affected me because it brought to my mind all the things that are noble and good about the military.
Speaker: And I came out of that i resolved, I want to be a better person because in my younger years, was now I left a lot of debris in my wake.
Speaker: I decided whatever happens, I want to do my best to do the right thing every time. I'm not sure I have every time, but ah at least it gives me a something to strive for.
Speaker: So in a very real profound sense, writing about these men changed my life and I hope made me a better person The books also changed how Coram understood the first military man in his life.
Speaker: They did not rewrite the childhood he recorded in Gully Dirt, but they did help him distinguish the values J.B. hoped to teach him from the ways he sometimes tried to teach them.
Speaker: My father was a career a military man. He spent 30 years in the Army. He was a sergeant, and he was a son a bitch. He, um... The only way he knew how to discipline me was the way he disciplined recruits in the army. know his One form of discipline was just beating the hell out of me every time he had a chance and the trying to force a lot of military things on me. Some of them I could do, like shine my shoes, turn off the light when I leave the room, say sir to ain anybody five minutes older than I was.
Speaker: The intangible things, like... a Ethos of the military and patriots is, I mean, the subjective, really important thing I didn't get. and on for a lot of years, I didn't get them. And then, I guess, 50 years later, whenever I wrote the Bud Day book, and there was that that one chapter on torture that did it.
Speaker: I realized that the things that Bud Day manifested during that torture session were the things that my dad had tried to teach me and I had rejected. And um ah I had an Pauline conversion. had this epiphany.
Speaker: So this was what he wanted. This was a great gift my father tried to give me. I rejected it. oh because of Bud Day, I embraced it.
Speaker: embraced the military with a fervor I never had before. So the books have had a profound effect on me. In the preface to American Patriot, Coram shows how personal that recognition became.
Speaker: He writes that his companionship with Bud Day became a surrogate for the paternal affection he had missed as a child. Ink returns to that connection with Coram saying JB had helped make him who he became in a, quote, odd and twisted way.
Speaker: That recognition did not rewrite the childhood recorded in Gully Dirt, but it did change what Coram believed he had inherited from it. Understanding that inheritance was one thing.
Speaker: Writing it was another. In Gully Dirt, Coram made himself the subject of the same scrutiny he had applied to other people. I wrote that at a very painful time in my life. I was going through a divorce, and I didn't have a contract when I wrote that book, and I just...
Speaker: I was an investigative reporter for a long time, and I was pretty rough on people. I thought if I was rough on other people, I'd need to be rough on myself. So I resolved that I would dig as deeply as I could and be as honest as I could.
Speaker: there are times when I look back at that book, and I wonder if I dug too deeply, and I was perhaps too honest. That uncertainty may be the clearest expression of Coram's method. In biography and memoir, he resists reducing a life to a single label.
Speaker: Achievement remains visible, but so do contradiction, private cost, and the testimony of people who experienced public accomplishment from close range. The result is not a clean verdict on Coram or the men he wrote about, but it is a fuller account, what they accomplished, the stories that formed around them, what their choices cost themselves and others, and what the surviving evidence cannot settle.
Speaker: Truthful narration cannot resolve every contradiction, but it can present achievement, failure, cost, and uncertainty together without allowing any one of them to erase the others.
Speaker: Robert, thank you for joining me today. Well, again, I'm flattered to be invited. I hope these aren't coming substantive. Most definitely.
Speaker: Robert Coram is the author of Boyd, American Patriot, Brute, Double Ace, Gully Dirt, Inc., and other works. Links to his books, along with the sources and fact-checking notes for this episode, are in the show notes.
Speaker: I'm Eric Pratum, and this is the Unfolding Thought Podcast.
