When Thunder Rolled and Palace Cobra: I read them over the last week. They're like stepping into a time machine; while the authorial voice is the guy you knew from his blog -- and should be, he wrote the first one not all that long before starting it -- it's still, somehow, a much younger guy talking, from an earlier time.
The two books recount his two tours in Southeast Asia (some years apart), flying sorties over North Vietnam; and they're about dealing with fear, dealing with the addictive exhilaration of doing the job, day after day, and making it back. They are memoirs, not novels; some threads start and are never returned to. They capture the scene with compelling clarity.
Fighter pilots are a specialized breed and these two books give you a view of them you'd never get in real life unless you were one. Highly recommended. Available as both book-type books and for the Kindle. Get them via the Amazon link at Tam's.
" Fighter pilots are a specialized breed and these two books give you a view of them you'd never get in real life unless you were one."
ReplyDeleteIn that same vein allow me to recommend "Chickenhawk" by Robert Mason. Hands down the best book I have ever read about Viet Nam and also the best aviation related book. It is a first person account of a helicopter pilot's life in combat. Unforgetable.
Yep, and he's 'lucky' he survived those tours... Those who have been there and come home understand the underlying story...
ReplyDeleteCool, the library has 3 of 'em -- on my list of stuff there.
ReplyDeleteIn this vein, I'm a fan of stuff like Dale Brown's Flight of the Old Dog, and Stephen Coonts' Flight of the Intruder. Some years ago I read a very good story of F-105 operations over N. Vietnam, not Thud Ridge, written by a pilot, which might have been When Thunder Rolled, but Rasimus' name doesn't ring a bell. I remember developing a whole new distaste for LBJ as I read it.