Duty. Honor. My country, right or wrong, drives the young fighter pilots of Dusty Squadron, from flack in the face above the A Shau Valley to the canned hellfire of napalm in the jungle to midnight gunfights over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Top Gun F-100 pilot John Ellsworth, the impetuous "Son of Thunder", is the most zealous of the lot...and he pays dearly. This is a character driven action-adventure story with big themes-redemption, accommodation and the awful price of heroism in a war that changed the American culture.
Welcome to my author page! These days I write fulltime and travel this beautiful country fulltime with my bride of 43 years in a travel trailer. We call it the Isaiah 6:3 Tour (if you look that up you will understand) and we intend to keep it up until the wheels come off the RV or one of us.
America is so beautiful. We prefer campgrounds in national and state parks and national forests far from big cities and crowds. If your read my Tour travel blog at www.jdwetterling.com, you will get an idea of just how inspirational I find God's glorious creation. I signed off on the third and final proof of my third book, No Time To Waste, while sitting on the banks of a white water stream high up in the Bighorn Mountains of north central Wyoming. As I write these words we are parked under a colossal cottonwood tree in an oxbow bend of the Belle Fourche River at the base of the Devils Tower, a magnificent National Monument (same as a national park)in northeast Wyoming. No Time... just went on sale today at Amazon. With each book Amazon's procedures get easier and better for authors. What an amazing company!
I've had an extraordinary life, for which I am eternally grateful to God Almighty, and it just seems to keep getting better. It began on a farm in western Illinois and a grade school education in a one-room country school house where I was the only kid in my class all eight years. I went to the University of Illinois and then to pilot training in the USAF. The Vietnam War was on and I became a fighter pilot, a lifelong dream, and by grace alone survived 268 combat missions in an F-100. After three years stationed in Europe following Vietnam, where I got an MBA attending night classes offered by the University of Utah, I became a businessman in Chicago and travelled most of America and Europe. God was gracious and I retired early at age 57 and took a retirement job as resident manager of Ridge Haven, a church retreat, camp and conference center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. That, too, was an inspirational place to write. "No one..." was born in my brain at the Holy Spirit's direction while walking the trails of those mountains. And of course Son of Thunder, like all first novels, is semiautobiographical based on my experience as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. If you read No Time To Waste you will find out which parts of that novel were not fiction.
I am a blessed soul, utterly unworthy of such a joyful journey or the happiness I have found, which is but a shadowy type of the divine promise of bliss awaited. The Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah (20:9b), my namesake, speaks for the motivation of my heart: "...his word is in my heart like a fire, I am weary of holding it in; indeed I cannot." Thus I write and thus I'm continually amazed at God grace and his creation, all made for his glory and my enjoyment.
