Catapulting into the Vietnam War

Press, 17 October 1987, Page 22

Catapulting into the Vietnam War

< Flight of the Intruder. By Stephen > Coonts. Sidgwick and Jackson, f 1987. 329 pp. $29.95.

'< (Reviewed by David Clarkson) < Stephen Coonts has packed his first ‘“novel with so much detail that it £ becomes a learning experience. •; It explores a world he knew well: /American carrier aviation during the ? Vietnam War. Coonts himself flew A-6 < Intruders from the deck of the U.S.S. > Enterprise from 1971 to 1973. He was £ later a flight instructor and catapult, arresting-gear officer aboard the ? U.S.S. Nlmitz. v Without seeking to teach, his book ; gives the reader an intimate view of If the aircraft carrier at war, and the ■'■ground-attack pilots who fly its Emissions. Coonts’s detailed knowledge £of that world shows on every-page. The carrier of the book is called the 2 Shiloh, and it is packed with a •*. mightily macho community. That is a £ continuing theme. A man can only £ remain a part of that community >as long as he is willing to prove $ himself. That is no problem for the main i character Coonts has drawn, a flyer £ named Jake Grafton who can take his

Intruder across the North Vietnamese coast into a land populated by flak and surface-to-air missiles and can “fly as low as his skill and nerves allowed,

which was very low indeed.” He can handle the difficult night landings aboard the carrier’s flight deck, in bad weather or with his bombardier-navigator bleeding beside him. But what he cannot handle is the idea that the tacticians seem to be coming up with targets that are not worth the trouble of hitting, that are not worth risking men’s lives. That brings the germ of an idea, that Grafton could run his own private mission to hit a target in Hanoi that yrquld really hurt the enemy. Away’ from his carrier, and the other attack pilots, down low in the darkness where the radar cannot track him in an aeroplane travelling at 700 feet per second, it is possible for the two-man crew of a bomber to mount their own, private war. Grafton is a formidable opponent whether he is at the controls of an Intruder, or conducting himself amid the boisterous times when the flyers are ashore on leave.

The book’s strongest point is the way it captures the exhilaration and acceleration of jet flying. Grafton tells a passenger who has just joined him in a catapult launch: “Next time, be sure to give a war whoop as you go down the cat, it seems to magnify the sensation.”

Coonts himself is no longer in the navy. He believes this is the only novel about naval aviation in the Vietnam era. During his time aboard the carriers he flew 1600 hours in Intruders, and logged 305 arrested carrier landings, more than 100 of them at night He explains those totals as “about average.” He acknowledges he did not carry out any unauthorised missions, and he does riot know of anyone else who did. He also says the missions he recounts in the book, with Grafton tucked into the claustrophobic cockpit, are an amalgam of his own experiences, some that other pilots flew, and some “dreamed up.” But wherever it has come from, the story hangs together with a strong plot, convincing characters and a feel for the amount of risk involved in carrier aviation where “every landing is a controlled crash.”