Vietnam Aviation

Have you ever wanted to pull up the curtain and look at what the US Army was really like during the Vietnam War? From enlistment through Basic, Officer, and Flight training, veteran pilot Richard Guay will take you on a journey many have never witnessed… Sit with Richard in the cockpit of the venerable UH-1 Huey helicopter as he maneuvers the sky to accomplish missions, protect his troops, and put to the test his years of training to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. Through a journey from steamy jungles to war-torn skies over battlefields, Richard’s raw and informative ...

Revised and updated version! STEPHEN COONTS, NY Times best-selling author of Flight of the Intruder -- “D. D. Smith's personal memoir of his years in naval aviation is more than a ‘I was there’ tale. He captures the myriad of challenges that was Naval Aviation before the Vietnam War. When I arrived in the fleet, D. D. Smith and his compadres were the squadron execs or COs who led us nuggets into the inferno of Vietnam… A huge tip of the hat to D.D. Smith. This book will appeal to every naval aviator or NFO of whatever era. Highly recommended.” But the book is much more. It is a ...

Robin Moore became one of the first true embedded journalists by training with and fighting alongside the Green Berets in Vietnam. Though fictionalized, his work is an eye-opening exposé of the horrors of the Vietnam War and the basis for the hit John Wayne movie of the same title. Taut, fast-paced, and interspersed with unforgettable accounts of combat, Moore’s novel features an American major who goes "native" with Montagnard tribesmen, a courageous Vietnamese girl who poses as a rabid anti-American Communist to capture a murderous Viet Cong officer, and the unforgettable acts of courage of soldiers in the field.

July, 1993: Pete Yates is in his early 50s, a career airline pilot who went on strike when a rapacious Wall St. financier raided his airline years before. Now he's out of work and out of money, trying to figure out how to make a living, when he encounters his old U.S. Navy wingman, who now owns a huge vintage warbirds air-show and aircraft trading company. Offered a job as a pilot, Yates swallows his pride and takes the job--and his life takes off in a direction he could never have imagined in his wildest dreams (and as a former Naval Aviation attack pilot with two tours in Vietnam, he has ...

This is a collection of short stories of missions I flew during my two years in Vietnam in 1968-1970, or stories about men I flew with in Vietnam. Most are non-fiction and two are fiction based on real life events.

STINGERS One Tour. 362 Days. A Thousand Lifetimes. Stingers is the brutally honest, firsthand account of an 18-year-old crew chief and door gunner thrust into the blood-soaked heart of the Vietnam War. From the cramped, bullet-riddled cabins of UH-1C Huey gunships to nighttime rocket attacks that shattered any illusion of safety, Fred Allen tells it exactly like it was—with no filter and no apologies. Flying with the elite “Stingers” of the 116th Assault Helicopter Company, Allen survived rocket barrages, crash landings, and relentless firefights over hostile terrain. But survival ...

The author, a retired Navy Commander, presents a unique view of the Vietnam War while providing an understanding of the horror, brutality, chaos, and insanity of war. His interviews with 61 members of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1965 who served during the war in Vietnam include candid, first-hand accounts of American action on the ground, in the air, on the rivers, and offshore. Their stories involve Marines fighting bloody battles for hills soon abandoned after being captured; Naval aviators watching their wingman being shot down on missions targeting meaningless targets while Hanoi ...

Echoes Above the Jungle: A Pilot’s Journey Through Vietnam is a gripping, haunting memoir that pulls readers into the cockpit of a Chinook helicopter, revealing the harrowing, adrenaline-fueled life of a combat pilot during one of America’s most brutal wars. For David "D.J." Collier, the Vietnam War was a world unto itself—a landscape of dense jungles, winding rivers, and silent mountains that became both ally and enemy. With raw authenticity and razor-sharp detail, Collier recounts the missions that pushed him to the edge: extracting troops under heavy fire, navigating impossible ...

Second Edition of ACE This latest edition is truly a game-changer. Chapter 28, "The Battle of Phu My," is packed with new material discovered during the exhaustive research for Ace Cozzalio’s Medal of Honor submission. But that's not all - the entire book has been enhanced to create a more captivating and compelling reading experience. With an extra thirty-six pages and ten new images, this improved version is an absolute must-read! ACE is the gripping tale of Ace Cozzalio, a bold and courageous U.S. Army helicopter pilot who flew with Lighthorse Air Cavalry during the Vietnam War. The ...

On his second combat tour, Nick Brokhausen served in Recon Team Habu, CCN. This unit was part of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group), or Studies and Observations Group as it was innocuously called. The small recon companies that were the center of its activities conducted some of the most dangerous missions of the war, infiltrating areas controlled by the North Vietnamese in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The companies never exceeded more than 30 Americans, yet they were the best source for the enemy's disposition.

From March 1965-December 1972 the United States carried out the longest sustained naval aerial bombardment campaign in the history of modern warfare. By the time the conflict formally ended in January 1973 nearly 600 Navy aviators had lost their lives in Southeast Asia. Many of those men remain missing, with their ultimate fates unlikely to ever be known. Every cat shot, every mission, and every recovery aboard the carrier was a roll of the dice on whether they would live, die, or be taken prisoner and brutally tortured or murdered. Even as losses mounted and public support for the conflict...

June 1966. Hollis Caudill, nineteen years old, stands in the open door of a Huey and learns what the valley costs. He is a door gunner with the 227th Assault Helicopter Battalion, flying resupply and extraction missions into the Vinh Thanh Valley during Operation Crazy Horse — one of the bloodiest helicopter operations of the Vietnam War. He has an M60, a crew chief who speaks in facts rather than comfort, and a 1964 Ford Galaxie waiting under a tarp at home in West Virginia. By the time the operation ends, he will have carried the dead from a burning ridge, watched a ship go down in a ...

A Flight Between Duty and Destiny Flying the Lifeline: Marine Helicopter Pilot is a gripping story of loss, purpose, and the unpredictable path of service in wartime Vietnam. Paul Stone’s life changed forever after the death of a close friend who was flying helicopters during the Vietnam conflict. That moment ends his dream of becoming a fighter pilot and redirects him toward a different calling, one focused on saving lives instead of taking them. Determined to honor that legacy, he joins the Marine Corps and earns his wings as a helicopter pilot. But the reality of military service ...

Bloomsbury presents The Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, read by Christopher Ragland. This book tells the full story of the US Naval air campaign during the Vietnam War between 1965 to 1975, where the US Seventh Fleet, stationed off the Vietnamese coast, was given the...

Nineteen days from going home. One night over the Trail. And somewhere on the ridge below, a man with a missile is counting the seconds of their orbit. February 1971. While Lam Son 719 burns on the ground, the AC-130 gunships of the 16th Special Operations Squadron own the night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Major Coltrane has flown 211 missions in the left-bank orbit, the slow circle that turns a cargo plane into the deadliest truck killer in Southeast Asia. He knows the geometry cold. He knows his crew better. What he doesn't know is that intelligence got it wrong. The threat marked with a ...

…Ben Het has tanks in the wire! “Hawk Claw is engaging,” the pilot reports firing the first TOW missile ever from a helicopter in combat. Fire Base Delta had already been over run and Fire Base Charlie was fighting for its life. How much would fall before the North Vietnamese army was knocking on the doors of the key city of Kontum? This was the third phase of the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive Campaign of 1972. Standing across the country between them and the fall of Saigon was a poorly led South Vietnamese Army, brave South Vietnamese soldiers, and US Advisors. How much ground ...

This is part two of a series of true stories about a young helicopter pilot's tour of duty in Vietnam.

Six weeks into his second combat cruise over the Gulf of Tonkin, Navy pilot Doyle knows the math by heart: fly the EA-6B Prowler straight at the missile ring, jam the enemy's fire-control radar, and buy the strike package behind him the seconds it needs to survive. The math says it works. It doesn't say what it costs. Four hundred kilometers north, at a radio post buried in the Red River Delta, a young operator logs every American jamming signal that crosses his headset — patiently, precisely — until a pattern starts to show itself. In Hanoi, an engineer turns that pattern into geometry...

In The Air Force Way of War, Brian D. Laslie examines the revolution in pilot instruction that Red Flag brought about after Vietnam. The program's new instruction methods were dubbed "realistic" because they prepared pilots for real-life situations better than the simple cockpit simulations of the past. In addition to discussing the program's methods, Laslie analyzes the way its graduates actually functioned in combat during the 1980s and '90s in places such as Grenada, Panama, Libya, and Iraq.

Anybody who’s ever flown should read this book. Is the pilot the only person who should concern you? From the moment the pilot leaves the gate until he’s once-again parked at his destination, he doesn’t turn, climb, descend, or even change his speed without ATCs approval. Who are these weird ducks who operate the safest ATC system in the world? What motivates them to play this real life video game with neither a Pause nor Reset button? Follow along with Carl’s career, from tiny radar van in the Central Highlands of Vietnam to some of the nation’s busiest air control TRACONs. At ...