Super Sabre Society Review, December 2013
December 14, 2013 by R. Medley Greenwood
Editor/author Bruce Cowee, a Vietnam War veteran himself, USAF Class of 1968-69, had three driving reasons for putting together this book over a period of some 45 years: 1) to honor Vietnam veterans, in particularly, the Vietnam service of men he had the honor to know and work with, after that service, as a pilot for Western Airlines; 2) to provide a vehicle for several authors to tell their stories for the first time, and 3) to dispel the negative stereotypes of Vietnam veterans as portrayed in many post-war books and by Hollywood movies. Through his leadership, tedious research and patience, Mr. Cowee has achieved all three of these special purposes…in spades!
As the subtitle (An Oral History of the Air War) implies, this collected works of 33 pilots and other contributors focuses on the service experiences of men engaged in aerial warfare. These recollections are representative of warriors from four of the five uniformed services and even include one “black operations” pilot. The aircraft they flew ranged from WWII vintage crates to workhorse transports, conventional bombers, sophisticated gunships, and modern jet fighters. This formidable array of hardware was used to perform simple to complex missions ranging from supply “milk runs,” to airborne command and control, psychological ops, close air support, interdiction, combat air patrol, electronic warfare support, carpet bombing, forward air control, search and rescue, and “…a hundred things you have not dreamed of”—quoting a line from John Gillespie McGee Jr.’s poem “High Flight.”
From this matrix of services, aircraft and missions, Mr. Cowee has succeeded in weaving a tapestry that provides intimate insights into the lives and wartime experience of a select group of men, all volunteers, as they served their country during the trying times of the Vietnam War. This non-fiction work is perhaps unique in that, rather than a coherent story line that neatly ties things together, it is the post war Western Airlines connections that provide the cohesion between the separate but chronologically arranged recollections of the several authors. Cowee has done a superb job of tying disparate time and place events together so they can be read sequentially or separately at the choice of the reader.
Good layout and readability notwithstanding, it is the content of the independently written stories “from the heart” that I appreciated the most. Each chapter’s author is introduced in italicized text at the beginning of “his” chapter by the editor so as to prepare the reader for nuances that will come within the author’s own words. Sometimes the editor ends a chapter with further italicized remarks pertinent to the author’s story. These editorial remarks are helpful for the reader to appreciate the context of the author’s personal story and its place in the overall conduct of the long air war.
Although each chapter/story can stand alone, there are three chapters that cover the same event but from distinctly different viewpoints. The event was a harrowing shootdown and subsequent successful rescue of a USAF F-100 fighter pilot who tells his story as the primary actor in a potentially deadly situation. In a second chapter, his lone wingman picks up the story from his airborne position, having switched from an attacker role to a defender role trying desperately to locate and protect his downed leader and close friend until US Army helicopters come to his aid and perform a successful extraction and drop-off at a friendly Special Forces camp with a tiny landing strip clawed out of the jungle. The third chapter was written by the pilot of a search and rescue C-130P who miraculously managed to land that large aircraft on the short jungle strip, pick up the F-100 pilot, and deliver him to his home base, whereupon the C-130P pressed on to continue its mission over the Gulf of Tonkin. This trilogy of separate recollections had a happy ending that day.
But at the opposite end of the success spectrum is a story about one of the most deadly events of the Air War. This tragic event was the horrific collision of two B-52 bombers in which both aircraft were lost and only seven of the 13 total aircrew members involved survived. (Of historical note, one of the six dead or missing was SAC Major General William J. Crumm, at the time 3rd Air Division Commander who was aboard one of the two aircraft as an observer. He was the first USAF general to die in the Vietnam War.) The first chapter of this story was written by the copilot of the Number 1 aircraft that was hit by the Number Two aircraft during a change-of-lead maneuver. It’s a riveting story of things going dreadfully wrong is a very short time, the details of which are corroborated by the author of the following chapter who was the aircraft commander in the Number 3 B-52 in the formation…and he saw it all!
Falling between these two sets of emotional stories are some 32 other chapters that tell first person accounts of the Air War ranging from routine to truly heroic. As a Vietnam War veteran myself (two tours: 1967-68 flying fighters and Airborne Command and Control missions; 1974-75 flying A-7D search and rescue missions), I read the chapters out of sequence, according to my interests offered by the chapter titles. But I eventually read them all…and I thoroughly enjoyed every one of them. There were lots of emotions evoked in the total read, including fear, pride, pathos, humor, tight stomach knot anxiousness, grateful relief, and many other pairs of feelings. But most of all was the satisfaction of knowing that my personal experiences were not unique and would have fit in nicely with the chapters of this book. Its portraits of life on the frontiers of freedom in Southeast Asia are accurate, compelling, and a good read for both those of us who were “there,” and a must read for those others who were not, but would like to know what being there was really like. ◘
I am honored to have been asked to review and recommend this well-thought-out labor-of-love that Mr. Cowee has achieved. His motivation was on the mark, and the result is world-class non-fiction reporting.
R. Medley Gatewood, Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.), Founding Member of the Super Sabre Society (www.supersabresociety.com), Editor & Publisher of the Society’s Journal, “The Intake.”