Lendle

This book is the "rest of the story" of jet fighter pilot life as introduced by Tom Wolfe in his best seller, "The Right Stuff." While Wolfe's book concerned test pilots, this one provides an inside look at the very hazardous life of jet fighter pilots during the 1950s and 1960s; a period during which the author served. As the stories show, it was an interesting and challenging era, interspersed for some by long periods of great anguish, and sudden death for many others. You'll read how the F-4 Phantom, with its sophisticated equipment ended the era of mano-a-mano dog fighting and ushed in electronic and missile air-warfare. There's also the story of defective bomb fuzes that were causing the bombs dropped by Phantoms in Vietnam to explode shortly after release. This cost the Air Force eight F-4E Phantoms and sixteen aircrew -members, before the cause was identified and corrected. Included too is the heartbreaking revelation of our airmen captured in both the Korean and Vietnam wars, but never repatriated. Some were kept for intelligence exploitation and others for "$4 billion in reconstruction and unconditional assistance." Included is the revelation of Fidel Castro's April 1972 visit to his engineering battalion tasked with maintaining the road near the border of North and South Vietnam. Folowing this 17 American airmen POWs were transfered from Hanoi to Havana for medical experiments in torture techniques. For obvious reasons, none of these were repatriated. Included is the story of a promising young Air Force test pilot school student who was killed in a zoom-climb maneuver to the edge of the earth's atmosphere. With his entire TPS class watching on closed circuit TV as he passed through 63,000 feet the glove his space suit disconnected and the suit depressurized, killing him almost instantly. Finally you'll read the story of " Warrior-General John L. Piotrowski. This son of Polish immigrants started his career and an airman basic electronics technician and retired as the Commander of USAF's Space Command.