hankrausch
Pre-takeoff checklist
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2008
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GoodbyePOA
subtitle: "the Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi MInh Trail"
Just finished this & recommend it, besides being an engaging book about about combat flying it gives a pretty good synopsis of the Viet Nam war and puts things into place for me that I had always caught in snippets.
Dick Rutan features prominently in it too, had met him at Oshkosh one year and it was nice to read about someone who is so accessible to this community.
I had just finished a trip to Viet Nam & was interested hence picked up the book, and having been to most of the sites mentioned in the book made it that much more interesting. My brother & I just took a trip there and retraced my Dad's steps along the DMZ, Don Ha, Con Thien, Da Nang. It surprised me how small an area they fought in, I had the impression it was much larger.
The Misty pilots were "Fast FACs" (forward air controllers) who used F100's to spot the trucks and materiel coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for fighter bombers that waited for the cue. But in the end they could not stop the flow of men and materiels, partly due to halfhearted measures and partly due to the flow was just too large to be stopped by intermittent bombing.
Just finished this & recommend it, besides being an engaging book about about combat flying it gives a pretty good synopsis of the Viet Nam war and puts things into place for me that I had always caught in snippets.
Dick Rutan features prominently in it too, had met him at Oshkosh one year and it was nice to read about someone who is so accessible to this community.
I had just finished a trip to Viet Nam & was interested hence picked up the book, and having been to most of the sites mentioned in the book made it that much more interesting. My brother & I just took a trip there and retraced my Dad's steps along the DMZ, Don Ha, Con Thien, Da Nang. It surprised me how small an area they fought in, I had the impression it was much larger.
The Misty pilots were "Fast FACs" (forward air controllers) who used F100's to spot the trucks and materiel coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for fighter bombers that waited for the cue. But in the end they could not stop the flow of men and materiels, partly due to halfhearted measures and partly due to the flow was just too large to be stopped by intermittent bombing.