Good military/aviation books

[POKESC17]

I'm not sure if this book was posted yet, but Flying Through Midnight by John Halliday is a good one. It's about an AF pilot flying C-123s for Air America. Not only does it talk about his experiences but also all about shoe clerks, bad leadership, rules etc. It was somewhat of a relief to see that the same ridiculousness was occurring in the 60s and 70s too.

Just finished Chickenhawk. Good book mentioned here a lot.

edit: Looks like this book was posted already. Good book either way.

+2 on "Flying Through Midnight" if you can handle the flash backs and flash forwards, and a few things that he claims are a little hard to believe; but overall a pretty good book

[NHbound]

+2 on "Flying Through Midnight" if you can handle the flash backs and flash fowards, and a few things that he claims are a little hard to believe but over all a pretty good book

Fourth on this... one of the best Vietnam era books i have read. I found parts of it had an almost "apocalypse-now" feel... curious if anyone else got that impression. I also thought the part of him describing how he learned to "dance" with triple A fire was amazing. I ended up getting so into it that I read it in just a few days, definitely worth checking out.

[brickhistory]

Fourth on this... one of the best Vietnam era books i have read. I found parts of it had an almost "apocalypse-now" feel... curious if anyone else got that impression. I also thought the part of him describing how he learned to "dance" with triple A fire was amazing. I ended up getting so into it that I read it in just a few days, definitely worth checking out.

Just finished it. Agree on the "Apocalypse Now" feel. And I didn't like that movie either - some great lines in it, "Charlie don't surf!" "Napalm in the morning smells like.......victory" et al, but while I enjoyed "Flying Through Midnight's" authenticity, I just had trouble with the stream of consciouness (sp?) style of writing.

Simple mind, I guess..............

[ChkHandleDn]

Officers in Flight Suits by John Darrel Sherwood. A book about American fighter and bomber pilots in Korea.

[ChkHandleDn]

Because They Hate by Brigitte Gabriel. A real eye opening book about radical Islam and how if we continue on w/ our ignorance and apathy we may lose everything we value.

[mhc257]

Just started reading The Paths of Heaven edited by Col Phillip S. Meilinger. Anyone got any thoughts or other recommendations on Air Power Theory?

[Guest ATB]

None on Air Power Theory but....

I can't believe no one on this thread has suggested reading the -1 to the T-6, T-37/8, T-1?! - kidding.

Good book on management and motivation that I'm reading is "It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy" by Capt D. Michael Abrashoff. I know, I know, it's the Navy. Still has useful info on leadership and managing people.

[brickhistory]

"Palace Cobra" by Ed Rasimus.

Follow on to his first book, "When Thunder Rolled," which is also a great book. In that one, he describes being an FNG in the F-105 during 1966 and losing 2 out of 3 F-105 pilots during his year tour.

Palace Cobra describes his second Vietnam combat tour flying F-4Es. In this one, he's more cynical and more reflective, but it's still a good read of aerial combat, stupid ROE frustrations, and careerists vs. warriors.

Edited December 4, 2007 by brickhistory

[Murph]

Just finished it. Agree on the "Apocalypse Now" feel. And I didn't like that movie either - some great lines in it, "Charlie don't surf!" "Napalm in the morning smells like.......victory" et al, but while I enjoyed "Flying Through Midnight's" authenticity, I just had trouble with the stream of consciouness (sp?) style of writing.

Simple mind, I guess..............

Too flowerly and I too have a hard time believing some of his stories. I've talked to a couple people who've been in and out of the field he mentions at the end and each has said it wasn't nearly as difficult to find and land on as he leads the reader to believe.

[busdriver]

The point of Flying Through Midnight wasn't to tell you a "true" story. Think Tim O'Brien and "How to Tell a True War Story" the point is to make you feel the way he felt as he was going through his war. Long Tien (if that's the place) was a forward operating location for Raven FACs and AF Rescue, so of course it's not like no one else went there. But from those guy's stories a normal AF type would look at the civilian dressed "locals" with suspicion. But if you've been deployed, you can't read his stories about going to the BX and reading labels on cans, or watching bubbles in six pack rings burst without laughing. I loved his remark about the acolytes of the church of the Air Force. I probably would not have liked it as much as I did had I not read a lot of Tim O'Brien in college and got used to the "fictional true story."

[pawnman]

The Boyd book is awesome, took me a while to find a copy in a store. I also enjoyed Not a Good Day To Die and I recently finished Blackhawk Down. There's some interesting tales in there, from the ground-pounder's perspective.

I just started We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, about the beginnings of Air Cavalry in early Vietnam. It was a pretty good movie, haven't read enough of the book to tell you how it compares.

A good fictional one is God's Children, about a platoon of US peacekeepers in a Bosnia-like setting. It had some very interesting conflict between a a 1Lt just months from Captain who tags along just for the ride, and the brand-new, West Point 2Lt who is officially the platoon CO. The major lesson to learn here, don't be a douchebag, swallow your pride, and ask questions of people more experienced than you are.

Most of my other reads haven't been related to flying or the military.

[PaddyPilot]

I thought that Chuck Yeager's autobiography was pretty tight. Just all the stuff he did that would have gotten him (nowadays) busted down to scraping bird crap off some obscure airstrip is amazing. Plus it was some pretty original stuff, I'm not sure if this one was, but he threw a handfull of .50 cal ammo into the pot belly stove of his squadron. Then again, everyone here has probably already read it.

Black Hawk Down was another good book, it put a really personal twist on the story from a grunt's perspective. I'm not sure if the book I'm refering to is the same as the one pawnman is talking about, but the whole thing was just a big collection of personal accounts.

Edited December 19, 2007 by PaddyPilot

[brickhistory]

"Rampant Raider" by Stephan Gray, US Naval Institute Press

Not a particularly innovative story, but good nonetheless.

Tells of his enlisting in the Navy, getting flight school, very detailed about the trials/tribulations there, then on to 1967-era Vietnam flying A-4s.

Very good look at squadron flying and life.

[Guest bravodelta79]

I picked up John McCain's "Faith of My Fathers" and the first few chapters are pretty cool. He talks about his father and grandfather who were both big Navy guys and I'm sure it'll go into his tale later in the book.

I'm looking forward to finishing it and will report back when I'm done. Good through chapter five though!

[Gas Man]

http://www.bookfinder.com/dir/i/POWs_Story...noi/0449000990/

Larry Guarino's book. It was hard for me to read this book because it is pretty depressing to imagine what they had to go through. (similar to "Into the Mouth of the Cat").

http://www.amazon.com/First-Heroes-Extraor...2869&sr=1-1

The first heros. It's about Doolittle's raiders. Another sad book, but a ton of history I had no idea about much of the stuff that went down.

http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Biography/...ct_info/754230/

"Shooter" is another great read. You can find this one much cheaper than the link if you try though.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031...okstorenow99-20

Finally "Lone Survivor" for my #1 top pick of the current books I've read. What a stud. Here is a little clip to sum up Marcus Luttrell.

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=1774

or a few more:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_quer..._type=&aq=0

[Bdc866]

"Lone Survivor" was amazing. I had read it a while back and had no clue he did interviews and that stuff until I just saw those videos.

Those guys are real heroes. At the end of the Today Show interview it made me want to puke when he was talking about their decision because he was worried about being prosecuted in the US.

...and the political apathy rolls on

[OregonHerc]

I don't know if anyone posted this already in this thread, but "Once an Eagle" is a very good book. The paperback version is long though (somewhere in the neighborhood of 800pgs IIRC).

[brickhistory]

I don't know if anyone posted this already in this thread, but "Once an Eagle" is a very good book. The paperback version is long though (somewhere in the neighborhood of 800pgs IIRC).

2.

It is my favorite book. Ever.

[FourFans]

A sampling from my bookshelf:

Runway Visions -- David Vaughan (tell me this dude ain't the quintessential tac air pilot!)

Flying Through Midnight -- John Halliday (a little bit painful to read at times, but a GREAT story)

Blind Bat: C-130 Night Forward Air Controller HO CHI MINH TRAIL -- Frederick Nyc

Boyd -- (as briefed)

War Dogs -- Michael Lemish (currently reading it. not a bad little bit of history if you're a dog lover and a history buff)

Lord of the Rings -- great storytelling

and if you want a painfully technical but relevent look into the aircraft development process on the tac airlift side:

STOL Pregenitors: The Technology Path to a Large STOL Aircraft and the C-17A -- Bill Norton (yeah, lets see if anyone else is geek enough to have read that beast!)

[pawnman]

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Nothing to do with flying, but plenty to do with modern economics and politics. He's the guy that proposed the "McDonald's theory of conflict prevention" (no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war with each other), and he expands it to the Dell theory of conflict prevention (no two countries who are part of the same supply chain, including China and Taiwan, will go to war with each other).

Agree or disagree, he says alot of things that make alot of sense of the current climate.

Another good pair, both by Robert Wright, are The Moral Animal and Nonzero. The Moral Animal is about evolutionary psychology, how our behavior in our everyday life is shaped by the survival traits that allowed our far ancestors to survive. Things like making friends, lying, anger, jealousy...he shows how they all have survival value. Nonzero is about how we gain more from working together than in competition...both on the biological and societal levels.

[Bdc866]

Sorry if this is a repeat, but "John Warden and the Renaissance of American Air Power" by John Andreas Olson.

Obviously it's for anyone into the bigger picture and how air power is/should be used at strategic and tactical levels. Pretty recent, written in 07.

[brickhistory]

"One Square Mile of Hell" by John Wukovits. Non-fiction story of the battle of Tarawa, November 1943.

I have to hand it to the Marines. Tiny island, no place to go but straight ahead.

A 700 yard slog through the water under hellish machine gun and mortar fire.

35 percent casualty rate out of about 5,000 jarheads.

Japanese Naval Landing Forces (Japanese Marines) of about 4000-ish dug in well with reinforced pillboxes, etc. 14 prisoners.

Three days from start to finish.

Guts.

Related but fiction is an older book called "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris. Uris was a Marine at Tarawa; good tale of enlisting, boot camp, training in New Zealand, then Tarawa, Saipan.

[Stuck]

"Without Remorse"

-Tom Clancy.

Almost too righteous to pass up.

Cheers!

-Stuck

[pedaler]

Prodigal soldiers - James Kitfield - Must Read

War & Destiny - James Kitfield

Clash of Wings - Walter Boyne

Fire From The Sky - Ron Greer and Mike Wicks

When Thunder Rolled - Ed Rasimus

Bury Us Upside Down - Rick Newman and Don Shepperd - Must Read

I know some of these have been mentioned already. All are great books. My two favorites noted.

[Insubordinate & Churlish]

"3" on "Lone Survivor"

I was talking with a CCT student-in-training and he said that they are very strongly encouraged to read it. Just by coincidence, the next day, the book was given to me by a family member. What a powerful story Luttrell has to tell.

Closely related to "Black Hawk Down," I read "In the Company of Heroes." It's CW4 Mike Durant's account of "Black Hawk Down." After reading that, any ideas I had entertained of being a helo dude were dismissed. to those of you who do helo work.

I was only able to read a little bit of "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War," but what I read was very good and had some good lessons in it, i.e. if you know you're right, stuck to your guns and don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

Edited July 7, 2008 by Port Dog