From F-4 Phantom to A-10 Warthog by Steve Ladd

During his 28-year Air Force career Steve Ladd spent 25 years in flying squadrons and fighter wings. He held command positions, but did not allow those duties to keep him on the ground. Even in his final job as Commander of the 549th Joint Training Division (Air Warrior) at Nellis AFB Ladd “managed to saddle up and fly [A-10 Warthog] missions three or four times a week,” to teach close air support tactics, he writes in From F-4 Phantom to A-10 Warthog: Memoirs of a Cold War Fighter Pilot (Air World/Casemate, 220 pp. $24.95, hardcover; $16.99, Kindle).

Commissioned through ROTC at the University of South Carolina, Ladd earned his wings in 1968. Shortly thereafter, he landed at Ubon RTAFB in Thailand and piloted 204 Vietnam War missions in the F-4D Phantom. He volunteered for a second tour, but the Cold War trumped the Vietnam War and the Air Force sent Ladd to Spain for F-4E Victor Alert nuclear weapon delivery duties.

That brief background marks the beginning of Ladd’s memoir, the engaging story of his 4,400 flying hours equally split between the title’s two aircraft.

Ladd describes almost no air war action in this memoir. Instead, he briefly tells a couple of combat stories, then explains: “I’m much more interested in providing an insight into behaviors and experiences which make this noble profession unique, rather than providing an autobiographical portrayal of my own year in the combat zone.”

Nevertheless, Ladd’s ego is evident throughout the book. Suffice it to cite that he believes that if “you never met a fighter pilot, you missed one of life’s great experiences.”

The book contains a wealth of anecdotes about the peacetime adventures of fighter pilots. Ladd primarily speaks from the heart, which makes recollections significant. He praises his fellow pilots, but also finds fault with them, particularly their flying ability. And he calls out questionable behavior related to maneuvering for leadership positions and competing for promotions. He also accepts a role as the butt of a joke. Above all, Steve Ladd’s devotion to the U.S. Air Force is flawless.

Steve Ladd

The best among the book’s many eye-opening reminiscences is Ladd’s account of transitioning from flying the F-4 to the A-10. In that regard, he says, “Dogfighting makes movies. Close air support wins wars.” His descriptions of flying the A-10 and firing its huge gun made me feel as if I were in the cockpit.

He also provides an excellent account of a trip he and his wife took to Berlin before the Wall came down. And his account of heading an accident investigation is a lesson in complete thoroughness.

Ladd’s military career had great depth. Beyond Thailand, his overseas assignments included sojourns in Spain, Iran, England, and Germany. Stateside, he flew from Moody, MacDill, Homestead, Nellis, and Davis-Monthan AFBs in eight different jobs. Ladd was relegated to sitting behind what he calls a “Big Gray Desk” for a few years in the late 1980s, performing what he calls “shoe clerk duties.”

Sixteen pages of mostly crispy color photographs of Ladd, his wife, airplanes, and patches highly personalize this memoir.

The book’s website is phantomtowarthog.com/the-book

—Henry Zeybel

Little by Slowly by John P. Maloney, Jr.

When I first picked up John P. Maloney’s Little by Slowly: From Trauma to Recovery (Lotus Design, 222 pp. $21.95, paper), I did not know what to expect. As a former educator, I have always been interested in the human condition. Why do some people adapt, adjust, and overcome when faced with adversity? Why do others succumb to their plight and seek to escape their pain through alcohol and drugs?

In this book Vietnam War veteran Jack Maloney takes us on his own personal Magical Mystery Tour in the form of a vivid first-hand account of alcoholism and its exacerbating effects on those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Actually, the book is more like a detour from reality that many of us have experienced following shock and trauma.

Maloney has a compelling story. As you read, you get a sense of the suffering and pain he continues to deal with. He presents a clear picture of the alcoholic father who abused him verbally and physically. He give us a vivid look at the psychological demons that alcoholics possess, including their pompous superiority and pretentiousness to the point of being so self-absorbed and wrapped up in their own arrogance that they cannot empathize with others who are suffering—unless they do so superficially because there is something in it for them. 

Being raised in an alcoholic environment, brought periodic explosions of anger and rage from Maloney’s father, followed by remorse. I would guess that Maloney had reached a fork in the road at the ripe old age of sixteen: become an alcoholic like his father or pursue a more-sober path. Like most people suffering from the disease, he really didn’t have a choice. If you do not deal with the disease, it will deal with you.

Maloney faced several traumatic events as a Marine in the Vietnam War, and portrays himself in the book as being overly sensitive. This was a conundrum for me. After growing up in a household with an abusive alcoholic father, I expected he would be well and truly desensitized to any emotions, especially empathy.

Jack Maloney

In one passage Maloney recounts how he felt after seeing a young Vietnamese boy crushed beneath the deuce and half truck he rode escort on: “Even though I did not actively knock the kids off the trucks, one of them fell under the truck tires and was killed instantly,” he writes. “The sight and sounds remain, at times, as an indelible memory that I will always carry in my heart and cause nightmares to this day.”

Jack Maloney endured through one traumatic event after another and kept climbing back up. His story is truly remarkable, and one I would recommend to anyone dealing from PTSD who chooses alcohol or drugs to self medicate.

Little by Slowly shows that there is another way. Another choice. I would also recommend this memoir to all of Jack Maloney’s family and friends, especially his grandchildren.

—Charles Templeton

The Girl to His Left by Stephen P. Learned

The Girl To His Left (Bermondsey Books, 318 pp. $9.99, paper; $2.99, Kindle) is an entertaining novel about the military and the antiwar movement in the Sixties written by Stephen P. Learned, who says he didn’t serve in the military or take part in the protests against the Vietnam War. Learned is a retired U.S. Justice Department trial attorney who has been a long-time volunteer at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

We meet the title character, Shawn, on the first page as she takes a seat next to Paul Bondra at a pizza place. It’s the spring of 1966 in Pittsburgh and the two strike up a conversation. Paul is about to join the Marines and they bond over the next month, deciding to write each other while he’s gone in hopes they can maintain their relationship. They promise to be faithful to each other. “As long as you’re alive,” Shawn tells Paul, “I’m yours. But don’t come back a different person.”

After his first military haircut Paul says he looks “like one of those Mormon guys who knock on your door.” With Paul on active duty, Shawn transfers to the University of Wisconsin and becomes involved in the antiwar movement. She keeps it a secret from most people that she has a boyfriend in the Marine Corps.

In February of 1967 Paul’s plane lands at DaNang and he is quickly bused to Hill 327. While he is setting up security and night ambushes, Shawn is engaged in antiwar activities, including attending draft card burnings.

Soon Paul finds himself in the thick of things. He “felt the change in pressure caused by bullets snapping overhead,” Learned writes, coming from the “nasty clap of a Russian SKS semi-automatic carbine.” Paul notes that an after-action search of a hamlet bombed by Americans uncovered dead bodies. “Bad guys, good guys, who knew?”

As a platoon leader, Paul decides he “wasn’t going to kill anyone until his men killed first. Sure, he was a killer. But his job was to lead killers, not be one.”

Stephen Learned

Paul learns that he can get an early out if he extends his tour in Vietnam for six months. He considers it, but remembers that Shawn made him promise he would return as soon as he could.

He writes to her, spelling out his reasons for extending. She writes back saying she’s completely opposed to the idea. What’s more, she suggests that if he does extend his tour it would be a selfish act and she would end their relationship.

As you would expect of a good novel—and this is a very good one—bigger-picture historical moments are personalized through the eyes of the characters. This gives the reader a better understanding of exactly what those events meant to those who lived through them.

–Bill McCloud

Elsewhere Than Vietnam by David Schwartz

Elsewhere Than Vietnam: A Story of the Sixties (261 pp. Sticky Earth, $11.99, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is a quite enjoyable novel. The author, David Schwartz, served as a U.S. Army Czech language intelligence interrogator in Germany from 1969-72. The title comes from a 1971 Armed Forces Journal article by Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. in which he wrote that the morale of U.S. troops in Vietnam was lower “than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.” The colonel then added: “Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.”

It’s the “elsewhere” that this story is concerned with, mainly antiwar protests on college campuses and underground resistance in the active-duty military, both in the U.S. and on bases abroad.

Schwartz’s main character Steven Miller is a student at Yale University in 1968 and, along with all the other young men on campus and around the nation, he finds that he is constantly thinking about the military draft.

“We knew the war was wrong,” we learn from Miller, “and we didn’t want to be involved in it.” Before long, though, he loses his student deferment and receives a draft classification of I-A, fit for service. “Fit to shoot people,” Miller thinks, “and fit to be shot at in return, simply because their ideas were not our ideas.” He begins attending meetings on resisting the draft. And then he gets a letter to report for induction.

Miller realizes he’s not brave enough to flee to Canada and wonders if his new girlfriend will wait for him for a couple of years. At Fort Dix he passes the stockade and hears another GI say, “The Army had to invent something worse than Vietnam to get people to go there.”

He begins “learning how to soldier. The soldier was the opposite of the student. The student should engage in critical thinking; the soldier should not question what he is told.” Miller’s goal is to avoid being sent to Vietnam. So he agrees to extend his service time a year in exchange for being sent to the Army’s Czech language school. Whenever possible, he goes off base to a local coffeehouse, the headquarters of a local radical newspaper and the scene of frequent antiwar discussions.

Miller graduates from language school and is sent to Fort Holabird in Baltimore for interrogation training. Here he learns that “it is a misconception that you need a cruel streak to excel as an interrogator. You just need to be a good actor.” Nothing is said about physical torture.

Miller’s then shipped to Germany where he works on developing intelligence reports. A German girl tells him that Americans are always immediately recognizable because they “all walk around loose and relaxed, like cowboys.” He continues to lead a double life: being a good soldier on-base while getting involved in resistance activities outside the gates.

The subtitle, A Story of the Sixties, is certainly accurate and everything in this novel rings true. This is a book about an honorable, conflicted man who gives his body and mind to the military, but not his heart and soul. It is a good story about a good man.

–Bill McCloud

Feeding Victory by Jobie Turner

Lake George in the eighteenth century. The Western Front in Europe in 1917. Guadalcanal in the Pacific and Stalingrad in Russia during World War II. Khe Sanh in the Vietnam War.

With case studies of these five battlegrounds, retired U.S. Air Force Col. Jobie Turner examines logistic support advancements from preindustrial times to the modern era in Feeding Victory: Innovative Military Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh (University Press of Kansas, 400 pp. $39.95). The depth of Turner’s research is the foundation for the highly informative framework he uses to analyze modes of transportation and materiel delivery under bitterly contested combat conditions.

Turner holds a PhD in military strategy with an emphasis on logistics. During his twenty-four-year USAF career he served mostly in airlift operations as a pilot and commander of C-130J Super Hercules squadrons. During that time he logged 3,200 flight hours. Today he works for NORAD’s U.S. Northern Command as a J8 Program Analyst.            

Improved modes of transportation have brought about great changes in logistics, Turner says. The military has benefitted from advances in technology ranging from wooden wagons and ships in the French and Indian War, to railroads and aircraft in the industrial age, and nuclear weapons and computers today. Across sea, land, and air, logistics have experienced a 165-fold expansion in cargo capacity since the late eighteenth century, thereby altering the critical relationship between logistics and warfare—and, ultimately, geopolitical dynamics.

Better transportation also has increased economic activity between nations. Following World War II, American technological dominance and a robust economy supported by a vast industrial base allowed the nation to dominate logistics worldwide—and made the President of the United States the leader of the free world, according to Turner.

Each of his five studies in the book emphasizes the advantages gained by the side that best controlled the period’s dominant mode of transportation. Turner’s analysis of the 1968 Siege of Khe Sanh, for example, reveals a turning point in logistical theory. The United States supplied the base primarily (totally at times) by aircraft; the NVA relied on 2.5-ton trucks or materiel moved on foot. Both sides managed to fulfill their troops’ basic needs.

“What the North Vietnamese Army lacked in technology,” Turner notes, “it made up for in sheer numbers of soldiers and support groups.”

Turner thoroughly explains the thinking of logisticians from the U.S. and North Vietnam and how geopolitics influence them. At Khe Sanh, the deciding factor was that “the line of communication through the air equated the capacity of land and water,” Turner reports. Air then became an equivalent mode of transportation in war.

Although Khe Sanh was a tactical victory for the United States, it became part of a geopolitical setback at home among the American population.

Troops awaiting Medevac helicopters at Khe Sanh
(Dana Stone/United Press International)

Feeding Victory leaves its reader somewhat stranded in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, over a half century ago. More-recent cases, such as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, could have made Turner’s arguments even more conclusive. He suggests the idea, but does not pursue it.

The book is not a casual read. It provides many facts and history lessons that provoke questions. Occasionally, I had to reread a section to fully understand Turner’s reasoning. He includes a dissertation-like density of material on all sides of each study. Nearly a hundred pages of tightly packed notes, a bibliography, and an appendix support the text, which contains many figures and tables.

Although logistics are the book’s primary theme, Turner also includes detailed accounts of military tactics and strategies, particularly in the last three studies.   

Above all, Turner’s work proves the timeless value of studying the past.

—Henry Zeybel 

The Last Brahmin by Luke A. Nichter

Very few people know the burden of being born with a famous name. Some struggle with unfair expectations. Some shun the public and seek anonymity. Of those who enter the same field as their legendary predecessors, few reach the same levels of accomplishment.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-1985) was a three-term U.S. Senator, the longest-serving American Representative at the United Nations, as wall as U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam (twice), West Germany, and the Vatican. He also advised five presidents and was continuously in public service for nearly five decades. As a young man with wealth, looks, and a Harvard degree, he made a curious choice to join the Army Reserve when the military was at its post-World War I nadir. He would serve his entire adult life in the Reserves before retiring with the rank of Major General.

Lodge, out of now-antiquated notions of probity, wrote two autobiographical sketches of his life, but no memoir. Luke A. Nichter’s The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 544 pp. $37.50, hardcover;  $22.99, Kindle) is the first complete biography of this consequential American statesman. Nichter is a History professor at Texas A&M University–Central Texas and the co-editor of The Nixon Tapes, 1971-1972. In The Last Brahmin Nichter mines the wealth of secondary scholarship and Lodge’s archived material, as well as those of all the presidents from Eisenhower to Ford. The exhaustive nature of his research is evidenced by the book’s ninety pages of endnotes.

Lodge was the grandson—not the son—of Henry Cabot Lodge, the contemptuous Massachusetts Senator notorious for his stand preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations after World War I. The Cabots and the Lodges were the epitome of the Boston Brahmin aristocracy. Their forbearers gained wealth in shipping before turning to public service. Lodge’s forefathers included a Secretary of State, a Secretary of the Navy, and six U.S. Senators.

At age 42, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. became the first sitting U.S. Senator since the Civil War to resign his seat and enter active military service and fight in a war. As it did for a generation of Americans, World War II changed Lodge from an isolationist (like his grandfather) to a zealous internationalist. He was re-elected to a third term in the Senate in 1946, but continuously clashed with the conservative Republican Old Guard. Determined to prevent another Republican loss in 1952, he convinced Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to run. Lodge spent so much time working as Ike’s campaign manager that he neglected his own re-election campaign and lost his Senate seat to a young Congressman named John F. Kennedy.

After eight years at the UN, Richard Nixon tapped Lodge to be his running mate in the 1960 presidential election. They narrowly lost to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. After the election Lodge considered himself too old to run for political office, but too young to retire. He crossed party lines and agreed to become Kennedy’s Ambassador to South Vietnam in the summer of 1963. It would seem a curious move for the patrician politician—working for a man who had defeated him twice in a remote, violent land with a fledgling government.

Lodge & Ngo Dinh Diem, 1963

Despite an impressive career, the first three months Lodge served as Kennedy’s ambassador in Saigon are the most renowned of his life and the rightful cornerstone of Nichter’s work. A secretly recorded conversation implies that JFK gave Lodge approval to support a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Politically, Lodge was a nationalist in the best definition of the word; he valued loyalty and discretion, and did as well as he could in an extremely volatile situation. Lodge never explained his actions in Vietnam, but Nichter’s work is an important contribution in understanding America’s early involvement in what would become the nation’s most controversial overseas war.

In his effort to include as much as detail as possible, Nichter’s prose, though consistently accessible, can periodically be uneven. This is minor problem, though, given the scope of Nichter’s important work.

hgjkThe Last Brahmin is an impressive and authoritative account of a leading figure of the Cold War.

–Daniel R. Hart

The Adventures of a Narrative Gardener by Ronald Lee Fleming

Ronald Lee Fleming’s The Adventures of a Narrative Gardener: Creating a Landscape of Memory (GILES, 158 pp., $39.95) is a unique, delightful, large-format book about one man’s desire to create a natural place to hold human memory. Fleming, who served as a Special Forces intelligence officer in the Vietnam War, made a career change late in life from law to urban planning. Over the past two decades he raised three children on his own while creating a full-scale memory garden at his home in Newport, Rhode Island.

Fleming visited and studied narrative gardens around the world—gardens designed to invoke a landscape of place memory. Places to explore (and possibly come to grips with) different facets of human history. He decided he wanted to create his own place that would engage the mind as well as the eye in anchoring and honoring family memories. He tells that story—about family and place—in this book

While Fleming was inspired by historical gardens in England, Scotland, Italy, and elsewhere, he knew his was going to create an American garden “reflecting the experience of an American family.” He began to include artifacts of the American experience, such as a cloth cap of an ancestor killed in the Civil War and the image of a buckboard from the Oklahoma land rush.

Fleming says he designed the garden in a manner intended to tell stories. “We aspired,” he writes, “to tell stories that demonstrate what had shaped our very desire to create a garden realm.” He uses objects to enrich the story of a place, eventually creating a garden in which physical structures become part of a larger mental landscape populated with lost friends and war memories.

The garden includes two teahouses, a cabana, a guest room, a gazebo, and a library. And it evolved into a space that could be open to the community. Along with 15,000 daffodils, the garden includes groups of trees, a waterfall, and carved stonework that combine to create balance and symmetry. This was all the result of twenty years of planning and building.

There are powerful images in the garden that tell Fleming’s family’s story, including vignettes depicting ancestors that connect his family to experiences from colonial days to the Vietnam War’s 1968 Tet Offensive. That includes an overturned automobile representing a near-fatal accident.

Fleming and his garden at his Newport, R.I., house in 2013

Fleming was originally drawn to garden making partly as therapy as he continued to deal with difficult memories from the war. One especially troubling experience was witnessing a “picturesque and tranquil Vietnamese village transformed by an American bomber into a shattered ruin.” An area of the garden contains a tribute to Vietnam War veterans whom Fleming considers to be “delayed casualties” of the war.

Most of those who visit his garden don’t come to connect with his family memories—or even their own—but to make music, dance, and otherwise engage in general merriment.

Fleming hopes his beautifully illustrated book will encourage readers to create their own historic gardens. Assuming you have the property, if this book doesn’t inspire you to do so, then nothing will. Take some time with this one.

–Bill McCloud

Berserkley by Robert Roth

Many years ago through a haze that wasn’t particularly atmospheric in nature or origin, someone said to me, “If you can stand there, flat-footed, and tell me you remember the Sixties, man, you weren’t really there.” Turns out he was correct, on several levels.

Speaking of the Sixties, Robert Roth’s novel, Berserkley (The Periphery Press, 620 pp. $25, paper; $9.99, Kindle) begins and ends with the word “Unbelievable.” That just about describes this offering, which is constructed like a huge, feverish Jack Kerouac story—after being loosely introduced to Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.

There are no chapters, per se. Roth, instead, gives us lots of words, separated by rows of five asterisks. We move from scene to scene, with the breaks coming just when the reader needs to take a breath. A series of cinematic scenes dissolve as we wade through the story. What a rush!

Roth has very skillfully assembled a covey of characters right out of central casting who personify, almost eerily, every type that we had on the scene at UC Berkeley in the mid-nineteen sixties. We get the dweeb from Cleveland (our erstwhile protagonist); the drug-addled Vietnam veteran; the effete snob from a waspish New England family; the oblivious Santa Monica cutie; the self-hating Jewish restaurant owner; the Chicano wanna-be radical; the wide-eyed rural Nebraska farm boy; the grizzled, old, radical newspaper publisher; the kidnapped newspaper heiress; the Hare Krishna background singers; and a huge herd of supporting weirdos.

Throughout the book I read about little things here and there that I’d forgotten over the decades. And I found myself thinking, “Oh, yeah, I remember that.”

The story propels us through a time-warped narrative that seemingly is unanchored. Roth rarely bothers to mention a day or time as the story just seems to waft along—kind of like the ever-present cloud of pot smoke that was Berkeley in those days. Roth presents more fiction on the back-cover blurbs, including words from the late Truman Capote calling the novel “far superior to To Kill a Mockingbird.”

I began reading Beserkley with a bit of trepidation, but was pleasantly surprised. It offers up memories of the Sixties, along with the love, hate, and angst that went with them.

I strongly recommend it.

–Tom Werzyn

The Gopher King by Gojan Nikolich

Gojan Nikolich’s new novel, The Gopher King (Black Rose Writing, 358 pp. $20.95, paper $5.99, Kindle), is not quite Alice going down the rabbit hole chasing the White Rabbit. But a few chapters into the book and you might think it’s Coraline going down a gopher hole with an M16 on full auto and a K-Bar in her teeth.

The story centers around Stan Przewalski, a weekly newspaper publisher in Bull River Falls, Colorado. Stan suffers from a severe case of PTSD after surviving a hellacious tour of duty in the Vietnam War, and Nikolich—a U.S. Army veteran—paints a verbal portrait of PTSD suitable for hanging in any VA hospital.

Stan, like many veterans who experienced combat, came home with the demons of war firmly in control of his life. He soon depends on therapy and pills to keep those demons in check. The healing process for Stan materializes in the form of a gopher—and not just any gopher. He is the Gopher King. Soon, Stan and the Gopher King, appropriately named Chaz, embark on an odyssey of mutual self-exploration. Chaz is an anthropomorphic literary device Nikolich uses to deftly to probe the depth of Stan’s problems and alleviate his PTSD.

On a sightseeing trip to Vietnam, Stan realizes that he cannot be redeemed. But he also discovers that facing his fears and the hidden places in his mind amounts to true bravery. And that the times he allowed himself to suffer at the hands of his demons actually were opportunities to face his fears.

Nikolich effectively plumbs the depths of PTSD through the magical world he creates that Stan enters. It’s a world populated with camouflaged gophers toting M16s and fighting to save their homeland. It’s full of misunderstandings, meaninglessness, pompous characters, reminiscences without purpose, and characters who make absolutely no sense and are based on vanity and cluelessness.

The residents of Chaz and Stan’s world mainly just want to get by and survive and maybe have a good time. Their world isn’t actually that much different from the real world, although the real world may be less exaggerated with its arbitrary rules and adult nonsense, crookedness, cowardice, and sordidness. Still, it contains those traits in equal measure—and in many ways the cruelty of the real world is more incredible.

Gojan Nikolich

Nikolich’s writing style drew me in immediately. He ticked all the good-fiction boxes for me: a good story, entertaining and creative descriptions, and mesmerizing dialogue. To the extent that a good novel entertains and enlightens, The Gopher King masterfully achieves both goals.

Nikolich’s portrayal of the characters is realistically accomplished. The humor and the story could provoke unwanted memories for the initiated, but they also can be of tremendous educational value for those with little knowledge of PTSD.

I highly recommend putting a velveteen gopher on the desk of every VA shrink and The Gopher King on your reading list.

–Charles Templeton

Vietnam by Chinook by Edward Corlew

During his year as a Ch-47 Chinook crewman in the Vietnam War, Edward Corlew grew “distressed, depressed, and plagued by guilt.” He had joined the Army after his freshman year of college, and became a man and matured faster during his tour of duty than he had planned, he says.

Raised in a strong Christian family from a farming community, Corlew enlisted for an assignment in helicopter maintenance with the assurance that he would safely serve behind the battle lines. Instead, he ended up working as a crew chief/gunner and flight engineer on CH-47 Chinook helicopters during the entire 1968 Tet Offensive.

Corlew crewed with B Company of the 228th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion of the 1st Air Cavalry Division at Red Beach and LZ Sharon. B Company Chinooks flew every day in support of 1st Cav, 101st Airborne, ARVN, and Marine Corps units in I Corps. 

The Chinook’s primary tasks were rescue and resupply, but its crews reconfigured the aircraft into weapon platforms by adding machine guns that gave them a 360-degree field of fire to counter the masses of North Vietnamese troops who attacked during Tet ‘68.

“For several months, I saw more destruction of life, equipment, beautiful cities, and innocent Vietnamese people than I can explain or expect anyone to understand,” Corlew says. He clearly describes those and his other experiences in Vietnam by Chinook: A CH-47 Crew Chief During the Tet Offensive (McFarland, 191 pp. $29.95, paper; $17.99, Kindle), a well-told memoir.

Corlew survived three shoot-downs. The semi-miraculous outcome of one defies imagination. Whatever the situation, though, he had his stuff together. His accounts of many missions he flew during the fighting at Hue, Khe Sanh, and in the A Shau Valley provide insights beyond the norm. Crew chiefs and flight engineers played vital roles in determining the capabilities of damaged but possibly flyable aircraft, and Corlew clearly explains the dynamics of their interactions with pilots. He vividly portrays the frantic, yet controlled, reactions of crewmen during crashes.

His story of action in the A Shau Valley amounts to one long description of losses and near disasters because the territory had been heavily fortified by the NVA, which had controlled the area for years. At one point, enemy antiaircraft weapons and Chinook mechanical failures depleted the company’s usable aircraft from sixteen to four in a matter of days.

B Company flew and got shot at every day. They also endured mortar attacks and infiltration by the NVA practically every night at LZ Sharon, a desolate, primitive landscape fifteen miles south of the DMV. Sandbagged tents were the only hint of civilization on the LZ. Crews provided the base’s defense and prolonged sleep was a rarity.

Paperwork was haphazard, but Corlew guesstimates that he put in a thousand hours of combat flying. His seventeen Air Medals indicate a helluva lot of time in the air. In two years of service, he attained the rank of Spec. 6.

Corlew writes about the necessity of killing people—armed, unarmed, or any possible threat. Doing so, a desire to survive took over his psyche and dominated his actions. “We had no choice but to fight in order to survive,” he says.

Occasionally, Corlew questions the purpose of war and a Christian’s role in it. He left the Army in 1969 and was emotionally troubled by what he had gone through for decades. Despite that, he earned a college degree and married. In 2005, with help from old friends and VA counselors, Corlew finally learned to put his emotional demons to rest. He closes the book by harshly criticizing antiwar activist Jane Fonda, Navy Lt. John Kerry, and Congress.

Vietnam by Chinook reconfirmed my belief that helicopter missions amounted to the most dangerous flying of the Vietnam War.

—Henry Zeybel