A Reluctant Warrior by John Henningson

John Henningson

John Henningson enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1968. He was a high school science teacher at the time, and joined the Army mainly because the draft was breathing down his neck. “I enlisted into the Army just ahead of the inevitable draft,” Henningson says in A Reluctant Warrior: 1968-1974: A Vietnam Veterans Memoir (Henningson Environmental Services, 262 pp., paper).

Henningson says he was, “in my own words, ‘a reluctant warrior,’ but I saw no personally acceptable alternative to answering my Country’s call. I enlisted in order to assure an opportunity to get into the Officer Candidate Program.”

Henningson received his commission in 1969 in the Artillery. During his ten-month, 1970-71 Vietnam War tour of duty, he spent most of his time with infantry units: as an artillery FO with B Company, 1st/52 Infantry, and as battalion artillery liaison officer with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry. Both units were part of the Americal Division.

This detailed memoir covers the author’s tour throughout I Corps. It includes grid coordinates of the locations Henningson talks about, along with his sketches of the landscape, maps, and in-country photos.

The author’s website is www.henningson.net

—Marc Leepson

This Girl’s Life by Michelle Brown

Michelle Brown’s This Girl’s Life: Being the Child of a War Veteran (Dark Planet Publishing, 146 pp., $22, paper) is a short memoir that focuses on the abuse the author underwent at the hands of her father, a Vietnam veteran.

Brown’s father, Kenneth “Rico” Haugabrook, turned to drugs and alcohol after a tour of duty in Vietnam, Brown writes. And that, in turn, led to years and years of physical and mental abuse the father heaped upon the author, her mother, and her siblings.

Her mother, Brown says, “said my father was a good guy until he came back from fighting the war. My mom said he had totally changed when he returned home. She said my dad was more angry. My father told my mom that he was trained to kill in the war, had watched his friends die, and had to live among rats (one rat bit his toe off).”

Her father, Brown writes, “told my mom he couldn’t love his children, because what if we died on him? He said his family looked like the enemy.”

Brown survived the years of abuse, and her memoir has a redemptive ending. Today, she is happily married, has a strong religious faith, and has come to terms with her difficult upbringing.

“I have learned one thing from my experiences with my dad,” Brown writes. “I can do whatever I set my mind to do. I have learned to respect myself and love myself, no matter what my dad thought of me. I was and am a good person who didn’t deserve what happened to me. Even if my dad didn’t love me, God did! God protected me all those years by not letting my dad kill me.”

—Marc Leepson

Flames and Smoke Visible by D.S. Lliteras

After D. S. Lliteras graduated from the U. S. Naval Hospital Corps School in Great Lakes, Illinois, he was ordered to the First Marine Division in Vietnam, and arrived in country in July 1968. Lliteras volunteered to serve with the 1^st Reconnaissance Battalion in the First Marine Division where he was a combat corpsman and a diver (who went under bridges to check for booby traps) until July 1970. Lliteras went on twenty long range reconnaissance patrols into enemy territory during his Vietnam War tour.

Why do I give so much information about Lliteras’ military service in a review of a book about firefighting?  Partly because it answers the question: Why would a man choose to spend a career going into burning buildings?  This man who chose to fight fires is the same man who chose to spend his tour of duty in Vietnam reconning in enemy territory. Often the enemy in Vietnam was unseen, and the dangers of a burning building are also often not seen. In both cases, though, you know that danger is there.

Good books that deal powerfully with men and their work are rare. Fewer still are books written by these men. When the occasional book is written about a man doing a dangerous job, and doing it well year after dangerous year, it’s usually written by an outsider who does a few hours of interviews, some research, and observations. That author is unlikely to accompany a fire fighter into a burning building to stand side by side with a man such as D. S. Lliteras.

Lliteras received a Bronze Star with a V device (for valor) for his recon work in Vietnam. He received the Medal of Honor from the Norfolk, Virginia, Fire and Paramedical Services for “exceptional action in the line of duty in the saving of life.”

His book, Flames and Smoke Visible: A Fire Fighter’s Tale (Rainbow Ridge, 224 pp., $17.95, paper), is exciting and well written. In it, Lliteras takes the reader inside the dangerous job of firefighting with an intensity no other writer/firefighter I have read has done, including the late Larry Brown, author of On Fire. Flames and Smoke Visible is the firefighting book that Brown’s fans had hoped for but did not get.

D.S. Lliteras

This memoir is organized into thirty-seven chapters. The chapters have honest, descriptive headings, such as: First in Engine, Rescue Thirteen, Car Fire, Delivering a Baby, Kitchen Fire, and Third Alarm Fire.  These chapter headings give a good sense of the material that Lliteras covers in his fine book, but you must read the book for the full sense of the drama inherent in fire-fighting.

I read Flames and Smoke Visible non-stop, in a space of a few hours. I got totally caught up in the drama of firefighting. With the authority of experience as a firefighter, and the talent and the skill honed as the author of many brilliant novels, Lliteras has produced a beautifully written, riveting account about this profession that is entertaining and also informs, instructs, and allows the reader access to the human heart.

I highly recommend this book, which is also is available on Kindle. The paperback—which will be published in March, but may be pre-ordered—features a beautiful cover showing firefighters silhouetted against flames and smoke.

I also recommend that you purchase and read D.S. Lliteras’s other fine books. You will be happy you did.

—David Willson

Always the Children by Anne Watts

There have been a good number of memoirs written by women who served as nurses in the Vietnam War. I can’t think of one, though, by a British woman. And that’s what we have in Always the Children: A Nurse’s Story of Home and War (Simon & Schuster UK, 386 pp.), a well-written autobiography by Anne Watts. In the course of telling her event-filled life story, Watts includes long sections on her time as a volunteer civilian nurse for Save the Children in Qui Nhon in 1967-68 and Kontum in 1969-70, and in Thailand in 1979 working with Cambodian refugees. She also relates details of return trips she made to Vietnam in 1990 and 2004.

Watts worked primarily with children in Vietnam, but also volunteered at the U.S. Army’s 67th Evac Hospital in Qui Nhon. In doing so, she had a unique—and not often pleasant—close-up look at many kinds of causalities of war.

After four months in Vietnam on her first tour, Watts writes, she was “coming to terms with the horror of illness, injury and death on a scale that would have been unimaginable to me in what now felt like another life. I had learned to live with the constant uncertainty and chaos that the war brought to our doorstep; to cope with teeming refugees, fear, danger, poverty—a deadly cocktail laced with the oppressive, sapping heat of this place.”

On the other hand, she says, “there were huge rewards in knowing that one’s skills and compassion and love were making a difference to children whose lives had been decimated.”

Nearly a decade later, Watts again came face to face with the worst that war has to offer in the Cambodian Sa Kaeo Refugee Centre in Thailand. The “sight that met me on my first day of work in early October 1979,” she writes, “stunned me almost into paralysis. As I stood there in my loose-fitting white cotton uniform, Manchester Royal Infirmary penny pinned carefully to my chest, it took quite some moments and an effort of will to gather my wits and attempt to process what I was looking at.”

All she saw, Watts, says, “was a mass of blackness on the ground” that turned out to be thousands of people. “They lay there, on the ground, clad in ragged, black pajama-like outfits. Occasionally an arm was slowly raised in silent supplication, only to fall back weakly. What struck me then, and stays with me now, was the silence. There was no sound of talk or laughter; no babies cried, no one coughed or wept. And the stench was overpowering.”

The author’s web site is www.annewatts.co.uk

—Marc Leepson

Year of the Monkey by Gene Hays

VVA member Gene Hays spent twenty-one years in the Marine Corps as an aviation electronics technician. That included a tour of duty in Vietnam where he worked as a Civil Affairs NCO. In his excellent memoir, Year of the Monkey (CreateSpace, 206 pp., $14, paper), Hays refers to his work in the war as “nation building,” teaching the principles of freedom and democracy to the peasant people of South Vietnam.

That’s nice work if you can get it. How did that go? I read his book to find out.

I spent a lot of time scrutinizing the color photo on this attractive book. I even used a magnifying glass, but the photo is so blurred and muddy that I got little out of it. I always try to use a book’s cover as a clue to what will be found inside. But other than a guitar held up high by one of the six Marines on the cover and a tattered flag with a yellow star on it, the cover was not very informative.

The back cover blurb tells us that this book follows “in the footsteps of “ Civic Action, A True Story, an earlier book that Hays wrote. The first pages of Year of the Monkey detail the efforts by Marine Corps Civic Action. It’s a gripping story and well-told, dealing with how the Marines worked hard to win “the hearts and minds” of Vietnamese villagers by providing them with textbooks and school supplies for their schools; teaching them basic sanitation related to their village wells and water supplies; and providing them with cement, manpower, and expertise to make the needed changes.

The Marines in these Civil Action Teams placed themselves at frequent risk when they went out to these villages on their missions. They went lightly armed and without steel pots or flak jackets. They also informed the villagers when they would be coming to show them courtesy and respect.

As the author says, “It was a slow and dangerous process,” which is an understatement. He goes on to state that while the Marines were connecting with the people, obtaining intelligence and trying to prevent attacks and secure the villages, “the enemy was trying to instill fear and subservience through murder and torture.”

The hero of this book is not the author, but Maj. Richard Risner. Another hero is Hays’s friend, Sgt. Dick Petterson. Most of the second half of this engrossing book deals with Maj. Risner’s capture by the NVA on August 20, 1968, when his unit was out in the countryside fighting this different kind of war, traveling to the semi-pacified village of Khoung Quang, considered safe during the day, but hostile at night.

Risner became separated from the rest of his team, and was captured and spirited away in a truck, the intent being to get him to Hanoi. During this captivity by the NVA, a soldier known as “Honcho” tortured him by dislocating his shoulders and beating him with a bamboo stick. Another one one of his captors “smashed all of his toes on both feet with a metal hammer” to make it unlikely he’d escape by running. He was also urinated and defecated on. He had a tether around his neck and his hands were tied tightly as well.

Risner managed to kill three of his captors and successfully escape to link up with Petterson who was looking for him, but then was bitten by a pit viper. This section of the book is very exciting and held this reader’s attention.

The blurb on the back uses the word “harrowing” to describe this story, and it is totally appropriate. But it also says that the ending is a surprising twist.  I read this section several times to find the surprising twist, but did not find it. The only thing that surprised me—actually shocked me—was that I found no evidence that Maj. Risner received any decorations for this brave and unusual escape, nor did he get any further promotions. A Major he was and a Major he stayed.

What was up with that? Admittedly, I spent my time in the Army, and the Marine Corps does things differently, but Risner received a Silver Star for an earlier act of bravery also involving Sgt. Petterson. They both should have received some formal recognition from the Marine Corps for this exploit. That puzzles me, and I don’t like puzzles.

It also should be noted that this section of the book reads like a novel. It is very well written, and there are details of Maj. Risner’s escape and Sgt. Petterson’s attempt to find and free him that only those men could have known.

Hays tells us that he interviewed Risner and was told in detail what happened during his escape and evasion, so that is covered. But I am bothered by the extensive details and dialogue dealing with Gen. Giap, the NVA commander. Where did this information come from?  Hays tell us in his Epilogue that the “book is based on actual events in the lives of Major Richard F. Risner, First Sergeant Richard M. Petterson and Master Sergeant Ronald E. Hays.” He goes on to say that some of the names of characters in the book have been changed.

Maj. Richard Risner

Hays tells us that Rich Risner worked in Hollywood as a stuntman after his Marine Corps career ended and was in The Great Waldo Pepper and The Stuntman.  We are told he was haunted by his military missions and by his time as a POW. The black and white photo of Risner on the back cover of this book displays a haunted and troubled face.

Hays states that Risner’s third wife said her husband was troubled by bad dreams and night sweats “until his last moments.” The sentence from this book that most sticks in my mind is: “He could feel and hear his broken toes squishing in his boots.”

I’ve read a bunch of books about Marine Corps Civic Action Teams, and this one is the most interesting and exciting of the lot. I highly recommend it.

—David Willson

Hostage of Paradox by John Rixey Moore

We are told that John Rixey Moore’s excellent book, Hostage of Paradox: A Qualmish Disclosure (Bettie Youngs, 505 pp., $29.95, paper), is a true story with names changed and that it is based on the author’s experiences.

The short biography in the back of the book tells us lots of interesting stuff about Moore, but not one word about his military career. We are told that Moore can be seen from time to time being interviewed on the History Channel.

My close reading of the text of this monster of a book led me to believe that Moore enlisted in the Army for four years and attained the rank of Sergeant First Class, E-7, which would be some kind of a record based on my short experience in the Army. In the Author’s Note, Moore says that he was a part of the 5^th Special Forces Group in Vietnam, and that he was also a part of SOG, the then-secret Studies and Observation Group.

Moore, that is, served in Vietnam as a Green Beret, aka Army Special Forces. In the book Moore mentions that he rarely wore the actual beret in Vietnam, though. He also states that he headed for Vietnam on July 27 1968, and that he had just celebrated his 25^th birthday. He goes on to say that he had a bit less than a year left on his enlistment in the Army when he went to Vietnam. The back-cover blurb goes on to say more about what he did in Vietnam, which Moore covers in his book in powerful and poetical detail.

The author, John Rixey Moore, in Vietnam

I am now compelled to discuss the title and subtitle of this large paperback. I found them both to be baffling hurdles to get over before I could get to reading the book. I tried to discover what the title and subtitle meant by reading the cover blurbs, the Dedication, the Foreword, the Acknowledgements, and the Author’s note, but got nowhere.

I racked my brain about the word, “qualmish,” but came up with nothing.  Being from the Pacific Northwest, I thought that it had some American Indian connection. The cover photo tends to support that interpretation as it looks very much like a Pacific Northwest rain forest. Eventually I gave up, and looked up the word in the dictionary.

I was embarrassed to find that it related to the word “qualms,” and the notion of being squeamish. Once I began reading the book, I started circling the words ithat were unfamiliar to me. I found many dozens.

Our narrator, John Moore, the Green Beret, is not a typical Army soldier. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. That explains some of it. The only other Vietnam War memoir writer I can think of written by a young man with a degree in philosophy attained prior to war service is Ernest Spencer, author of the classic Welcome to Vietnam, Macho Man.

The only other author I’ve read where I had to look up the meanings of so many words was some book by Alexander Theroux. The authors I was most reminded of while reading Moore’s book were Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and T. E. Lawrence.  All of them wrote great, huge books of adventure, and they also used a lot of big words.

Is that all that Moore has in common with these classical authors?  No, not at all. He also has written a fine book, one that ventures deep into a heart of darkness. John Moore is a smart, witty guy, with a fine classical education and a huge appreciation of history, which is not typically displayed by most Vietnam veteran authors published by small presses.

Moore states in his Author’s Note that the 5^th Special Forces Group in Vietnam took part in the infamous Phoenix Program. According to William Colby, the head of the CIA’s Far East Division of Clandestine Services who head Phoenix, it was responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 suspected Viet Cong. Moore says this process often was accomplished by a bullet in the head while the target was sleeping.Moore further states he was part of SOG, and that this group was used “in the conduct of small-unit long range reconnaissance, interdiction and/or assassination missions into Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam.”  That is the subject of this massive book—specifically, Moore’s role in this program.

One of the great delights of this book is the ability that Moore has to coin phrases or to pluck them from somewhere and use them. I’d intended to include a huge list of these wonderful phrases in this review, but when I took stock, I realized I had several pages of them amassed.

Someday, when I write an essay on Green Beret books, I’ll use that material there. I will mention a couple of them here just to give a flavor.  I especially enjoyed encountering “scented bosom of illusion” to describe McNamara’s little group back in Washington D. C.  Also I loved “sweltering pteridophyte ooze” for the field Moore slogged through in Vietnam’s jungles. Moore also refers to the jungle as the “Mesozoic wilds,” and as the “Mesozoic boonies,” which was my favorite. I could picture this ooze stuck to the soles of Moore’s jungle boots.

Hostage also contains one of the best John Wayne references I’ve read in any Vietnam War book, even better than those in Born on the Fourth of July. There’s no mention of my favorite Vietnam War expression—“ham and mother fuckers” though, as Moore and his team ate a different type of ration, the freeze-dried sort.

These Special Forces teams slogging in that ooze usually consisted of two American sergeants and a few Nungs, Chinese mercenaries. These few men often were kept in the dark as to what their agenda was, and I enjoyed reading Moore’s paranoid speculation about what he and his team were really being sent to do. Sometimes he figured they were being sent out to disappear, never to be heard from again, which is what happened to some of the teams.

The Americans had no language in common with the Nungs, so they relied on hand signals and pidgin English of a rudimentary sort. This lack of clear communication added to the horror and confusion of the situations they often found themselves in when they encountered bad guys out in the middle of the vast tracts of wilderness where they were the aliens.

As a reader, I got a powerful sense that Moore’s narrative was entirely written from his own experience, not heard second hand. The book is filled with suspense and sudden bloodshed, and it seems a miracle that Moore survived the events he describes with so much powerful, evocative details  forty years later.

Throughout the book, I was impressed by Moore’s humanity and consideration of others, especially for the members of his team, the Nungs, but also for the Vietnamese who cleaned the hootches, polished the boots, did the laundry, and the like. Perhaps being raised in various countries around the world prior to his time in the Army explains this, or maybe Moore is just one of those very few Americans who are not ugly to those who are different from him in appearance and culture.

Whatever the reasons, this humanity sets this book apart. I grew to like the narrator a lot, especially his self-deprecating attitude and his honesty about everything, even about getting rank. As he states, rightly, in the highly stratified life of the military, rank does count.

John Rixey Moore

I also loved his recounting of his two R&R’s in Hong Kong. He spent his time in Hong Kong about the same way I did. Very quietly. He didn’t spend the time in bookstores as I did, but he did spend a lot of time riding the ferry.  He doesn’t mention the sign that advised against spitting and the penalty for doing so, but I totally believe he put in a lot of time on the ferry.

Only once in this book of incredible derring-do, did I doubt the narrator and wonder what went wrong.  That is in the passage when he enters the clubhouse and says he heard Jeanie C. Riley yelping “Ode to Billy Joe.”  Riley’s hit was “Harper Valley P.T.A.”  Bobbie Gentry had the hit on “Ode to Bill Joe,” and she did not yelp it.  Also it is “Jeannie” not Jeanie” and “Billie Joe,” not Billy Joe.”

I apologize for being such a nit-picker, but there it is. Either or both of these songs could have been on that jukebox in Vietnam when Moore was there.  I suggest that his memory conflated these two songs. Memory can do that forty years later.

A reader can become drunk with the words in this book as they leave the page and enter the mind. It is so densely written and packed with action that it demands multiple readings. I’ve read many of the pages several times to savor the writing and the suspense.

I am going to buy multiple copies of this book and give them to friends as late Christmas presents. Moore’s prose envelopes the reader and takes him out of his world into a scary one, “a sclerotic black festival of brutal unknowns,” where dead men rise up out of “feculent excremental sludge.”

Read this book, you’ll be, as John Moore puts it, “transfixed, like kittens in a box.”

The author’s website is johnrixeymoore.com

—David Willson

A Hellish Place of Angels by Daryl J. Eigen

The subtitle of Daryl J. Egen’s A Hellish Place of Angels (iUniverse, 222 pp., $18.95, paper) is “Con Thien: One Man’s Journey,” which gives a better sense of what the book is about than the poetic title. Eigen served as a U. S. Marine in the 3/26 and 2/9 Infantry Battalions in the Third Marine Division in Vietnam. He was awarded three Purple Hearts. He has a PhD from Northwestern.

His memoir deals with the Battle of Con Thien in September 1967. The letters Eigen wrote home during that period, combined with quotes from published records, form the basis of this powerful and engrossing book.

Eigen has composed a brutal book and an honest one. He was eighteen when he joined the Marines with the goal of becoming a man. Forty-five years later he is retired in Oregon and deals with Parkinson’s disease, which a VA doctor attributes to Eigen’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Eigen also has been diagnosed with PTSD.

Daryl Eigen went through training and became a radio operator in 81 mortars. As a radio operator, he became part of the forward team attached to line company Kilo. He and the forward observer reported to the CO. Eigen took part in a good number of combat ops, including Operations Chinook, Chinook II, Prairie, Big Horn, Hickory, Shawnee, Cimarron, and Golden Fleece. There’s a Western movie flavor to most of those names.

The former Marine effectively tells the reader of his time in Vietnam, using excerpts from eloquent letters he wrote home at the time, reflections written now, and facts gleaned from such publications as Sea Tiger, Pacific Stars and Stripes, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times and U. S. News & World Report. This powerful pastiche did the job for this reader.

Hellish Place is a well-designed book, with a cover photo by David Douglas Duncan taken in the fall of 1967 showing a group of anonymous Marines at Con Thien. It very much captures the mood and sense of Con Thien.

Daryl Eigen

This memoir is organized in short, punchy sections. This reader found the book a joy to read, even though I have read dozens of Marine Corps memoirs.

A few of the chapter headings give a good feel for this readable and accessible book: “Xmas Cease Fire,” “Free Killing Zone,” “Mortar Fights,” “Ham and Mother Fuckers,” “Incoming,” “Booby Traps.”

The section on Ham and Mother Fuckers gives the best and most complete explanation of that subject that I have read anywhere, including in scholarly reference books. Eigen explains that this nickname is for ham and lima beans, a C-ration meal, but he goes much further than that. He explains how to cook C-rations, and tells a little story about how C-rats can be fatal. This fine book is worth buying for this section alone.

If a reader is looking for a Marine memoir about how it was in the mud and smoke and carnage of Con Thien in Vietnam in 1967, this is the book to buy and read.

The book’s website is www.ahellishplaceofangels.com

—David Willson

The Escapes and My Journey to Freedom by Du Hua

Du Hua is no friend of the communist government of his home country of Vietnam. “Communism has imprinted evil images in my brain since I was a little boy,” he writes in his memoir, The Escapes and My Journey to Freedom (AuthorHouse, 236 pp., $27.95, hardcover; $16.95, paper). “I have witnessed many and I can’t say enough about the pernicious and horrific acts of the Vietnamese Communist regime.”

The government, he says, “continues to take the core principles of humanity away from the people of Vietnam.  Absolutely no freedom of any kind exists in the beautiful country of Vietnam. Suffering and darkness continue to spread all over the sky of Vietnam.”

The “escapes” of the book title refer to the ten attempts that Du Hau made trying to flee his homeland in the 1970s and 1980s following the communist takeover in 1975. Du Hua finally succeeded on his eleventh try in June 1981. A little more than a year later he arrived in the United States. In 1987, Du Hua joined the U.S. Navy, but his naval career was cut short in 1993 after he suffered a severe lower back injury.

Du Hua today lives with his family in Florida where he is a pharmacist. “Because of my own medical conditions,” he says, he has “a lot of compassion for my patients. I always wanted to do what I could to help my people.”

—Marc Leepson

1966: The Year of the Horse by Robert K. Powers

Bob Powers, who was born and brought up in Chicago, tried to join the Army Reserves in September of 1965. He was working as a newly minted journeyman electrician with a newly bestowed 1A draft classification. “I had a new 421 Pontiac Bonneville coupe and a Corvette powered cherry ’56 Chevy,” he writes in 1966: The Year of the Horse (Dog Ear Publishing, 215 pp., $14.95, paper), his war memoir. “I loved muscle cars and drag racing. My love life was great and my future was looking good.”

Powers’s future did not look so good after he failed the Army Reserve physical—and it looked much worse when his draft notice came in January of 1966. Strangely, Powers passed his draft induction physical, and was inducted into the Army on March 30. Then came Basic Training at Fort Polk in Louisiana, followed by Infantry AIT at Polk’s infamous Tigerland, and then the inevitable assignment to Vietnam.

Powers put in an eventful nine months with the 1st Cavalry Division’s 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry in the Central Highlands. His tour of duty was cut short after he was severely wounded following a day of humping the boonies when a trip wire booby trap went off as Powers and his unit were waiting for a helicopter.

“All of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion to my right,” Powers writes. “It felt like I had been hit in the head with a rifle butt. My ears were ringing and there was dirt everywhere. I slipped my left arm out of the straps on my rucksack and I went to do the right and I couldn’t move my arm. I extended my left arm across my chest and my hand into my right armpit and I could feel a large wet hole in my back. My hand was covered with blood.”

Powers was medevaced out and operated on at the 15th Medical at LZ English. He recovered at the 85th Evac Hospital in Qui Nhon, the 7th Field Hospital in Japan, at Clark Air Force Base Hospital in the Philippines, and at Ireland Army Hospital at Fort Knox.

His readable memoir, filled with much reconstructed dialogue, is told chronologically, beginning with Powers’ Army Reserve physical and ending with his honorable discharge in March 1968.

The author’s website is www.1966theyearofthehorse.com

—Marc Leepson

I Flew With Heroes by Thomas R. Waldron

Thomas R. Waldron graduated from Clemson University in January of 1962 with a degree in civil engineering. He also had completed Air Force ROTC, and upon graduating was commissioned a USAF 2nd Lieutenant. Then came flight training at Vance AFB in Oklahoma. After more USAF training, including survival school, Waldron’s first duty assignment was as a KC-135 Stratotanker co-pilot with the Strategic Air Command flying out of Columbus, Ohio.

In his memoir, I Flew with Heroes: A True Story of Rescue and Recovery During the Vietnam War, Including the Raid at Son Tay (CreateSpace, 172 pp., $14, paper), Waldron concentrates on describing his 1969-70 Vietnam War tour of duty in which he flew K-135s, and then HH-3 and HH-53 Jolly Green rescue helicopters in Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos out of Udorn Air Force Base in Thailand.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Waldron took part in the celebrated November 1970 joint Army-Air Force raid on the Son Tay prisoner of war camp outside Hanoi in North Vietnam. During the raid Waldron flew on Apple 3, the mission gunship. When he landed at Son Tay, Waldron writes, “my heart was still pumping and the adrenaline machine was on maximum output.”

He and the three other Apple 3 crewman received the Silver Star for their actions during the raid. Even though there were no U.S. prisoners at the camp, the assault force killed scores of North Vietnamese troops and returned without losing a man.

The author is donating a portion of the profits of book sales to the Wounded Warriors Project.

—Marc Leepson