War for the Hell of It; A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781523680726)

Fighter Pilots aren't known for their literary aspirations and only a few, Richard S. Bach and James Salter come to mind, have produced books beyond the "There I was..." genre. Fighter pilots are also undeterred by the prospect of abject failure, an unshakable belief in one's innate capabilities being a firm job requirement. So, fearlessly I launched two sorties into the rarefied air of books; War for the Hell of It: A fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam, an account of all the fun I had losing the Vietnam War, and The Pilot; Fighter Planes and Paris, a literary aviation/adventure novel. My qualifications? As a fighter pilot, I flew the Starfighter, Phantom, Skyhawk, Jaguar, and the Viper. I did this with the US Air Force, the US Navy, the Royal Air Force, the French Air Force, and the Imperial Iranian Air Force, including 375 combat missions. After my flying career, I served as an Air Intelligence Officer, working with the CIA, FBI and Mi6 on a variety of intelligence actions. My background notwithstanding, it is a task best left to the reader to judge my literary chops. War for the Hell of It is a free-association flow of combat and Southeast Asian memories. It was relatively easy to write, as history doesn't have to make sense or feature a sensible plot. My intelligence work took me to most of the great cities of the world, Paris most often. Thus, I was able to describe Parisian scenes accurately from first-hand knowledge. A shop-worn cliché instructs an author to write about what he/she knows best. I tried to put on the page what it is like to be a fighter pilot, how we think, what we feel, the women we love, not just retell what fighter pilots do in the air. Even pilots spend most of their time firmly on the ground. My books include this "down" time with emphasis on how a pilot's life, and sometimes death, in the air is affected by events on the ground, and vice-versa. If you write about what you know, you are being true to yourself, and that makes looking in the mirror much easier, even if it makes looking at your book sales totals less enjoyable. I have always tried to write books that I would be proud of, not necessarily what the market seems to dictate.