Retired USAF Lt. Col. Thomas R. Waldron so often declared the men with whom he flew in Vietnam to be “heroes” that it is little wonder he made the word the key part of the title: I Flew With Heroes: A True Story of Rescue and Recovery during the Vietnam War Including the Raid at Son Tay (CreateSpace, 172 pp., $13.25 paper; $6.50, Kindle), first published in 2012. Clearly, Waldron himself served heroically in the war.
Few non-aviators would care about the details of flight training, airplane operation, and the Air Force’s way of assigning pilots to different aircraft, but Waldron’s inclusion of these and other details about each stage in his career—including why he switched from large fixed-wing planes to large Jolly Green rescue helicopters—are clues to understanding why he was a great pilot.
Even without anyone shooting at you, there are a lot of things that must work perfectly to keep a helicopter in the air. Pilots must know and understand each one of those things, but they also must check and recheck them every time they take off and land and know instantly what to do if just one of them stops working. That doesn’t even count other factors such bad weather or bullets, rockets, and missiles being fired at you. Waldron’s attention to detail makes his story interesting and awe-inspiring.
I was glad, however, that I joined the Navy and not the Air Force way back when. The thought of being high in the sky in a thin-skinned machine that could drop like a stone if just one thing went wrong combined with flying it into a hornet’s nest of hot antiaircraft shells, was too crazy to imagine. And yet that’s exactly what Thomas Waldron and other helicopter pilots did, mission after mission. Some didn’t survive, and Waldron writes about them, too.
He recounts the events of November 21, 1970, when he was part of a mission to rescue 61 American POWs at the Son Tay Prison camp 27 miles west of Hanoi. More than 12,000 North Vietnamese troops were within five miles of the prison. The mission went according to plan, but the POWs had been removed from the camp days before. The good news was that the only casualty was one American soldier who took a gunshot wound to the leg.
–Bill Lynch
Books in Review II 