Customer Reviews

So Many Ways To Die: Surviving as a spy in the sky

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This book describes some of the very little known but very important aspects of the Cold War. These highly classified missions were the "front lines" of the Cold War. I had the privalege of participating as an Army Crew member with the Army Security Agency 1st Special Activities Detachment assigned to the Navy's Fleet Air Reconnaissances Squadron One(VQ-1) which the author has described. The author has given an accurate description of what we were doing and what it was like. The Navy pilots and crews who fly and who flew these missions are and were the cream of the crop. If you are interested in little known aspects of the Cold War, this book is a must.

This is a book which should never have been published. It is a very poorly written self promoting account which gives a disjointed and warped view of life as a midshipman at the Naval Academy and later as a Naval Aviator flying the SkyRaider (AD) and jet powered SkyWarrior (A3D). The book is full of typos and gross errors such as the caption for the photo of Admiral Hyland pinning a medal on Lieutenant Commander Scoot Beat with the Admiral's name spelled "Highland" or stating that all nuclear weapons had been removed from the aircraft carriers in 1963 which of course they were not and in fact each of our deployed aircraft carriers had an inventory of about 100 nuclear weapons.

I should disclose that I was a classmate of Scott Beat at the Naval Academy but did not know him ( which was not unusual with a class size of 1300) and was a naval aviator but cannot ever recall meeting Scott during my 24 years of active duty.

The most striking feature of the book is his account of flying the U-2 and in particular a mission over the North Pole. Clearly he had help writing that chapter because it is quite literate, even poetic in places. But the problem (embarrassment) is that he never flew that high flying spy plane. The association of U-2 pilots, needless to say, were enraged when someone brought their attention to this book and the false claim of Beat's that he was one of them. According to Beat's roommate from the Academy Scott has apologized, said he was sorry etc. and would remove the book from the bookstores (or words to that effect).

The wife of his roommate has suggested that perhaps Scott Beat has an aging mental problem, he is now 82, and that, in my opinion, is the kindest view of this sad spectacle.

Thomas W. Schaaf Commander U.S. Navy (Retired)