Customer Reviews

Afterburner: Naval Aviators and the Vietnam War

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Once again, John Darrell Sherwood has taken us back to Vietnam. In "Fast Movers" we saw the air war through the eyes and recollections of Air Force pilots, systems officers and other members of the support team.

"Afterburner" is the story of the US Navy's contribution to this most difficult time in our history. It makes no claims to being the definitive account of this aspect of the war, but it does make the observation that the Vietnam War offers many helpful insights to Navy war fighters currently engaged in the global war on terrorisim. It would be my opinion that the book scores well in that regard and it also offers many cautionary tales for naval aviators, those who plan these wars and those who find themselves in a political position to influence the war's conduct.

Vietnam is very far in the rearview mirror to many of us and while it was front and center in the nightly news reports, many of us found it easy to let the scenes wash over us as the prosecution of the war became ensnared in the politics of the day.

Lost in the war protests and the POW stories and frustration of watching the greatest millitary power in the world be held at bay by an inferior force were numerous stories of heroisim and frustration that deserve to be told and listened to.

This is an appropriate place to do that. It is sobering, educational, sometimes uplifting and some times maddening. However, it is worth doing.

With access to huge volumes of official and un-official historical information, and numerous interviews with those who participated, Dr. Sherwood has written a definitive and thrilling account of Naval Aviation's contributions to the war in Southeast Asia, post-1968. As a Naval Aviator whose participation in this theater's air operations occurred pre-1968, I found this book to be an informative and exciting read. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Viet Nam air operations, and/or Naval Aviation. It brought back lots of memories.

I "wish" I had bothered to read a few of the reviews prior to purchasing this book. I wouldn't have spent the money. in fact, the book's being returned as we speak.

As someone who's intimately familiar with many of the aircrews mentioned in the book, though they weren't a good representative sample to be honest, I've heard the stories before - their reliance upon reality versus what "makes" a good story, etc. Here the author has presented a significantly biased and slanted view of a few people's opinions (but that's been said before, not just here). What bothered me from the very first page that I read was 1) many of the significant enemy encounters had not been presented, what's more even mentioned, and 2) the author had apparently never heard the correct terminology for what one half of the Navy's F-4 flight crew was named - the Radar Intercept Officer (RIO). Instead, he calls them NFO (Naval Flight Officer) throughout the book. That closed the book permanently for me.

Don't waste your money. I can name a half dozen other books about the subject matter whose content is far more in-depth at covering virtually the same people (though many more, too) and the same exploits.

The author is an official naval historian, and may have had access to a vast number of official records, but his sparse footnotes do not reflect this. He principally relies on interviews with former naval aviators, and diaries they wrote at the time. So, this book is really about the 21 people he interviewed (out of the many thousands who participated), what they did, and how they viewed the war. As a result, this book is ultimately anecdotal, and cannot be considered the definitive history of the naval air war in Vietnam.

If we compare Afterburner to the official Air Force history of the war over North Vietnam - Wayne Thompson's "To Hanoi and Back" - the deficiencies of Afterburner seem all the more glaring. Thompson's work is quite simply head and shoulders above Sherwood's, and it is a shame that Sherwood didn't follow Thompson's model. Indeed, I hope the Naval Historical Center someday does write the "naval version" of "To Hanoi and Back". I would certainly recommend reading Thompson's book or Marsall Michel's outstanding "Clashes" before reading Afterburner. In either of these books you will find the comprehensive discussion of technology, doctrine, strategy, and tactics that you will not find in Afterburner.

To be fair, the author states that writing a definitive official history was not his intent. He wanted to write a popular history that is about "real people" and to avoid "dry statistics". He certainly achieves these goals. This book is enjoyable enough per se, and we learn some things about what it was like to be a naval aviator in Vietnam. But, it falls short in the realm of analysis of the big picture. The definitive account of the naval air war in Vietnam remains to be written.