Strategic Coach Resources

Moving beyond the past.

For Bud Bruton — husband, father, entrepreneur, cancer survivor, and Vietnam veteran — healing and peace came at a surprisingly inexpensive price. It started, quite simply, with the cost of a plane ticket.

The Vietnam War was a long and drawn-out battle that resulted in casualties estimated to be in the millions. In 1950, the United States would begin its involvement in the fight against communism in Vietnam and would remain there until 1973. Bud was a 25-year-old United States Army pilot when he was sent to Vietnam for a one-year tour of duty in 1968. He flew an aircraft called a Bird Dog over enemy territory, flying at tree level and directing air strikes, artillery, and naval gunfire. Despite being a part of so much destruction, Bud is extremely pragmatic about his tour in Vietnam: “I don’t feel any guilt about what I was asked to do,” he says, adding, “We did it extremely well.”

Bud was fortunate to have left Vietnam unscathed, and was grateful he never had to go back after his tour, unlike many of his comrades. But despite the relief of surviving the war, coming home brought a whole new set of challenges for the veterans. They found themselves isolated, with no one understanding what they had been through. “The problem with the Vietnam vet was that there was no one to talk to, and no one wanted to talk to them,” Bud says. Because of this, as well as the mental, physical, and emotional trauma so many of the veterans had experienced, many never recovered. Bud, however, was one of the luckier ones: He found support in a group of pilots who continued flying after the war — his “band of brothers” as he calls them.

Most veterans, as Bud tells it, could never fathom returning to Vietnam, regardless of how much time passed. But Bud began to feel a strange longing to go back, an urge he said he tried to put out of his mind initially, only to finally realize he couldn’t ignore any longer. He was unsure about what to do until one day when the simple act of throwing out mail gave him the sign he had been looking for.

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