Part of the narrative in
CIVIL is my visit to France to research a family member who had assisted the
French Resistance in securing and hiding Allied Airmen shot down in France. In
fact, his whole family was involved in the efforts. Will Walks was a Canadian
WW1 veteran (Veterinarian) who fell in love with a French lady, and they raised
a family in Noyon, France, after the war.
Part of my research,
including going to the home where they hid these airmen, is learning about how they
did so. Reading or listening to an account helps. I found this account
informative. I was along for the journey.
As a commercial
helicopter pilot, any aviation-related stories as such I find humbling. The
author's style and her technique in sharing were enjoyable. I felt various
emotions, including the relief that I wasn't a bomber pilot over Europe in the
war.
A downed B-17 bombardier's unfinished World War II memoir and a box of letters from the French girl who saved him sets a veteran's daughter on a journey, sixty-five years later, to craft their intersecting stories-a true WWII tale of danger, courage, love, and escape
Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father-a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944-when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and…
Flying the Bell 205 helicopter was always a
dream of mine, and this book was part of the reason. I've read it a few times,
and it's a favorite as one who has flown the 205. I had also been interested in
the war in Vietnam, so it checks both boxes.
The way it's written, one can enjoy its
storyline; it's not necessarily aviation or helicopter-heavy.
A true, bestselling story from the battlefield that faithfully portrays the horror, the madness, and the trauma of the Vietnam War
More than half a million copies of Chickenhawk have been sold since it was first published in 1983. Now with a new afterword by the author and photographs taken by him during the conflict, this straight-from-the-shoulder account tells the electrifying truth about the helicopter war in Vietnam. This is Robert Mason’s astounding personal story of men at war. A veteran of more than one thousand combat missions, Mason gives staggering descriptions that cut to the heart of the combat…
I’m a big fan of the book and the movie Black
Hawk Down, but in my view, Mr. Durant’s true story of what he experienced that
day wins; some will say one of the most harrowing in American military history.
Perhaps he’s piloting a Blackhawk, which is
why I found it captivating, or one can read his experiences after watching the
movie and put it all together. He did a good job, both crashing his helicopter
and writing.
In the autumn of 1993, American special forces were dispatched to the famine-stricken land of Somalia. Their intervention in this war-torn country was the most dramatic US military action since Vietnam. A routine mission went horribly wrong when Michael Durant's Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Mogadishu and he was quickly surrounded by Somali troops and taken captive. The brutal torture he underwent was made all too clear to the world when his coerced statements were broadcast on live television and his battered face appeared on the cover of magazines around the globe.
It’s the author's follow up to Appel: A
Canadian in the French Foreign Legion. During a recent return to France, he
shares with you his past in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Algeria as a security
contractor and more.
"The authors honest depictions of the
chaotic blend of high-octane danger, exposed tensions, and constant
improvisation that characterized the period of reconstruction in war-torn Iraq,
immediately paint the picture...
Those years of deployment to Iraq and
Afghanistan seem a world away now but life was lived in a different ‘lane’
then, where death and destruction stalked your every hour. Joel brings this
time into sharp focus, he cuts through the embellished, the fabricated and
self-aggrandizement of so many accounts and captures the complex reality that
existed."
