John Trotti

Trotti wrote this book as a response to the question "What was it like to fly one of those thundering smokers in combat", and he excels in doing so. With two tours of duty and over 600 missions, Trotti knows his stuff, and he manages a delicate balance between the sheer exhilaration of flight, the mental strain of staying ahead of a twenty ton supersonic war machine, and the overall senselessness of the war itself.

Rather than a day by day diary, Trotti takes a more literary approach, show more focusing in detail on a few exemplary missions. One is a Rolling Thunder strike over Vinh, a precisely timed operation involving aerial tanking, ECM support from Willie the Whale, and dodging SAMs to strike a flak site so the F-105s can hit a truck park. The second is a check-out flight in a fresh Phantom, taking a clean plane out just to see how fast it can go. Trotti also talks about BARCAP, flying guard for Navy ships, and close air support with napalm and snake-eyes for troops in contact just outside Danang.

The F-4 Phantom is my favorite airplane for reasons I cannot explain or justify, and Trotti has written an amazing book that describes what it felt like to fly one of them when it mattered most.

Bonus: Paradise of the Phantoms show less

Soaring through the skies of Vietnam John Trotti did not experience the horrors of the ground war. This is a book about the thrilling bravado and skills of a man trying to control a frighteningly powerful jet fighter aircraft in potentially deadly scenarios and missions. The horrors he experienced were therefore quite different from those experienced by the soldiers below but were frightening horrors nonetheless.

The Phantom was clearly an almost unmanageable beast. The book's main virtue is show more its compelling account of the pilot's skill in battling the enemy and the aircraft. As such, it's insights and its setting are almost unique amongst the personal narratives of the Vietnam War. show less

Trotti served two tours in Vietnam flying Phantom fighters although he spent his trips using bombs and rockets on bridges, gun emplacements, SAM sites and enemy troops and never shot an enemy plane down. Much of the book is about the technology that made up the Phantom and what it was like to fly it. He spends time describing the training that he experienced, detailed description of what the pilot did before and after launch. While Trotti did most of combat flying from a land runway, the show more Phantom was designed to be landed on a carrier so he was capable of doing that as well.

He does describe combat and accidents but much of the book is about the technical details of the plane including the amount of maintenance in terms of time and knowledge to keep such a sophisticated plane in the air. show less