An Air Force officer's vigorous account of the Vietnam War…Flanagan's memoir is not like Robert Mason's in Chickenhawk (1983), where the naive young officer is transformed into an embittered veteran questioning all wars. Flanagan became a general. His job in Vietnam was to fly close in with small aircraft, to report and coordinate what he saw; sometimes, too, he had to don infantry gear and head into the jungle. Many of his blow-by-blow accounts of battles are drawn from notes…This is the perspective of a veteran who feels we failed because of a lack of resolve, that the news media distorted events or couldn't understand them, that the antiwar movement meant well but was wrong…Splendid tales of combat. Flanagan, a U.S. Air Force pilot in the Vietnam War, describes his experiences as a forward air controller (FAC) working with our allies and with U.S. Army DELTA teams. (A forward air controller flies in a small prop plane and acts as a link between ground troops and larger attack aircraft by providing navigational aid and marking targets.) Flanagan's introduction, describing his deep psychological need to share his war experiences, leads the reader to expect a harrowing study of what war does to people (in the vein of James C. Donahue's No Greater Love: A Day with the Mobile Guerrilla Forces in Vietnam, Daring Bks., 1988; or Matthew Brennan's Brennan's War, Pocket Bks., 1989). Instead, one finds the same set-piece descriptions of ground combat that are standard in Vietnam War books. The author's large ego might make readers think Ehat Flanagan was the best FAC ever to serve in the war. Little depth here, just the diary of a pilot on an unglamorous but important mission. Recommended only for libraries with large Vietnam War collections.
