| Blast From the Past: Stephen Coonts' Flight of the Intruder by Scott Purdy |
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One of the most cherished books in my personal library is a first edition hardback of Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts, a novel about the decidedly un-glamourous A-6A, its pilots, and the war it starred in. I promise I'll do my best to prove the relevance of this statement to my interest in flight-sims, but I'm hoping that those of you in the audience who haven't read this book will accept this reader's testimony that not only does this book enhance one's interest in military aviation (and thereby, in the games we love), but also proves one heck of a good read! Everyone gabs about what a boring aircraft the A-6 Intruder was; there was no flash and dash in its mission: it flew in, it dropped bombs, it went home. Recently the remaining fleet of Intruders was unceremoniously dumped into the Atlantic to help form an artificial reef. In other words, you're not likely to meet an ex hotshot Intruder pilot boasting about his/her past exploits over Vietnam or Libya or the Gulf. (Such nicknames as "The Iron Tadpole" doesn't betoken a slick Hollywood dream plane, and in fact the film based on this novel probably shouldn't have been made; the producers might have paid heed to the old adage that the A-6 pilots themselves champion, "Fighters make movies, bombers make history." The film was terrible, plagued with poor special effects and even worse lines-Willem Dafoe squinting derisively at his radar scope, saying, "I hate SAMs, man," wasn't going to garner him any Oscars that year, needless to say.) However, if you're one of the few who have only seen the movie but haven't read Coonts, I urge you to rid yourself of the notion that that flick even approaches the novel. This is one case where the clichéd statement, "the book was better than the movie," sternly applies.
Flight of the Intruder is the sobering tale of Jake Grafton, a pilot ill at ease with his country's tentative position on how to fight the Vietnam War, locked between the jargon of politicians and an increasingly disenchanted American public. The story sheds light on a U.S. leadership that was, during the time frame of the narrative, still naïve to the mistakes of a limited bombing campaign, and evokes the disturbed cultural climate affecting the rest of the nation. But that's just the atmosphere of the novel: we come to any story about Vietnam with those assumptions in place. What Coonts does brilliantly is present a gritty tale of air combat and the vast knowledge of technical detail that real pilots were required to understand, as a matter of survival. The opening scene alone has you racing along on a low-level attack run, learning such cryptic diminutives as VDI, ECM, ICS, (visual display indicator, electro-counter measures, intercom system) and others. Through the course of this book you really get to know the guts of the A-6A in this pre-HUD era, when the pendulum of technical development had barely begun to advance In those days keeping track of everything going on in the cockpit was quite confusing, let alone dangerous, particularly when the pilots attention was devoted to putting a load of iron bombs onto a mean little AAA battery. (It's worth noting, if you weren't already aware, that Coonts flew Intruders from the USS Enterprise in Vietnam from 1970 to '73, so the guy knows what he's talking about, clearly. But Coonts doesn't ride on his Naval laurels alone-he's also a smashingly good writer.)
Grafton is haunted by the death of his bombardier-navigator (BN) early in the novel, for whom he feels responsible. His buddy was killed by, of all things, by small arms fire during a routine bombing run. Contributing to this sense of inner-conflict is Grafton's struggle with the moral questions he must address with his conscience. He is troubled with the prospect of writing to the BN's widow. |
At one point a defensive Grafton answers the questions of a civilian journalist, who seems perversely interested in the harsh details of his actual bombing, knowing the effects the war is having on the civilian population of Vietnam. In another scene, an intelligence officer reveals to Grafton how many "enemy" were killed on a mission Grafton flew, saying he deserves a medal, and Grafton reacts with anger, cussing the guy out and pleading for an explanation. It's a scary moment, when you realize just what kind of burden these pilots carried during and after the war. But the text doesn't bog down with self-pity; it is more than introspective in the sense that you "fly along" with Grafton on a bewildering array of missions, sending fresh light on these moral questions already looming in the reader's mind, and taking you into the thick of battle. In reading this book you come to realize that the mission of the A-6 over Vietnam was anything but boring, and certainly never glamorous. Coonts' descriptions of going in over the beach on these night attacks at 400-500 feet, unable to see anything but momentary flashes of AAA, give me the heebie-jeebies. The flying and fighting of these Intruder pilots in the black of night are akin to Luke Skywalker's donning a blast shield and "using the force" when he's in training with Obi Wan, blindly flying into danger to bring weapons to bear. There are also wonderful, tense battle scenes that depict an "Alpha Strike" with large numbers of F-4 Phantoms, A-7s and of course the ubiquitous Intruders, and a scene describing the now archaic methods the pilots used to deploy the Shrike missile. Detailed also are some absolutely chilling carrier-landings, like a scene where Grafton is flying the KA-6D tanker in a nasty storm. Its edge-of-the-chair reading, so tense are the (oft failed) attempts to trap aboard the pitching carrier. What really stands out in my mind when I reflect on the book, however, is the feeling of elation this guy had simply from flying - not necessarily in combat, but just the sheer sense of joy he derived from being at the controls of this nimble jet. Now and then, in the book, a kind of lyricism shines through all the technical errata. Jake dropped through a gap between the clouds and descended toward the sea in a series of hard turns, necessary only because he whimsically chose to avoid the cloud pillars. Now they were underneath. Just as the white cloud tops were at a uniform altitude, so were the greyish-blue bases. Here was a darker world, where the pillars cast shadows on an otherwise brilliant sea. From this vantage Jake sensed he had entered a temple without walls, a shrine composed only of shadow and light. The men could never describe, even to one another, the feeling that flying gave them: a sense of perfection that only God-or maybe just bad luck-could take away. They saw the ship when they were ten miles out . . . . Jake could monitor the progress of the planes on deck, their wings still folded, as they moved toward the catapults. He saw the machines on the catapults spread their wings and saw the first two planes, an A-6 tanker on a bow catapult and an F-4 Phantom on one of the waist cats, simultaneously begin their journeys into the sky. At this altitude and distance an observer had no sense of the speed and violence involved in launching. The birds moved slowly toward the deck edge, left it behind, then skimmed across the surface of the sea like low-flying gulls. It's from this God's eye vantage that we see the lush terrain of Vietnam, in Flight of the Intruder, viewing at once the country's beauty and devastation. It's a compelling story on many levels: the sense of time and place that the narrative evokes, the terse, exhilarating action of "going downtown", the phosphorous trail of a SAM lifting off, the smell of salt air sweeping over the deck of the Shiloh in the Gulf of Tonkin.
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Last Updated May 22nd, 1998 |
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