Bud Day

The program was secret, and every pilot in it was a volunteer.

Their first commander, Major George Bud Day, liked a Johnny Mathis song called Misty, so the call sign became Misty.

Gruters joined the Misties in the fall of 1967.

He was a six-foot-three and 205 pounds, most of it muscle, a judo man at the academy, and by every count as gentle and devout on the ground as he was aggressive in the air.

The eldest of three kids, the son of a Serbian American father, an All-City football player in high school who went on to play two seasons of varsity football at the Air Force Academy.

Six foot two, about two hundred pounds, class of nineteen sixty-five, one year behind Guy Gruters and in the same cadet squadron.

On the night of the eighth of November, nineteen sixty-seven, Sijan was in the backseat of an F-4C Phantom flying out of Da Nang behind a squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong.

Their target was the Ban Lay Boy Ford, a river crossing on the trail where the trucks came down out of the Ban Karai Pass.