Customer Reviews

Taxi Dancer

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This novel offers a welcome change from similarly themed books. In most novels telling of the VN air war, we have a heroic core of brilliant fliers flying against both the enemy up north and "the politicians". Closer by, the heroes must deal with careerist and typically unscrupulous superior officers. These rear-echlon types care nothing for the infamous "rules of engagement" which Washington used to severely restrict pilots during the war in Vietnam, but exploit them anyway as a weapon against the honest and brave fighter pilots. "Taxi Dancer" (I didn't even know what that meant until after I'd read this story. Honest!!) has the war as more of a backdrop to a more local war between a younger F-105 pilot and his commander - a vet who passed up his chance for greatness after the Korean war. Our young hero has just become USAF's newest fighter ace (no small feat - the lovely F-105 was one of the fastest planes in the war, but it's dogfighting performance was marginal at best) but already wants out of the war. Though set during a time when the war still looked "winnable", the heroes of "Dancer" are savvy enough to see where the tide of victory is heading.

So why doesn't this uncommon story soar above the others? Because it's still preposterous. Heywood hints that the craven wing commander isn't at war so much with his hero as with an academy competitor (always referred to as "Brown III") who alwasy seems one step ahead (instead of the flying flack magnets like the F-105, Brown III commands a unit of Phantom jets; The gap stands to widen further as Brown III is expected to receive internal cannon-armed F-4E's). Set between these two conflicts, Heywood fails to flesh out either of them. Instead, Heywood clothes his characters as hyper-tough, but it feels forced (like when the more seasoned pilots intimidate the newbies with their scars - "Just because you're in the clubhouse doesn't mean you're in the club!") and quite fake. Even the title - linking combat aviation with prostitution - seems a forced metaphor. Heywood ludicrously wraps things up when the evil commander sends his younger antagonist on a single-ship mission against the most impregnable target in Hanoi (itself, the most heavily defended city in the world), faking Washington's authroization for the attack, with the idea that it'll be a one-way mission, an idea that never seems to occur to the hero.

In every other respect, "Dancers" seems to fall into the same holes as almost every other VN air war novel - we never get the war from a single, forceful perspective, and the author never really convincingly conveys how hard it is to fly one of those monsters normally referred to as "tactical aircraft".

A Vietnam tale written by someone that was there. As a Air Force Officer serving in the Thai theatre during the mid 60's when it was a war and a circus, when the politicans back in Washington called the shots and the guy at the trigger was just a necessary evil. Having been there, during those times, his story rings so, so true. It's a good tale, well written, that gives the reader a flashback to those times where the protestors often had more impact on the war than the participants did. Good book-- been there-- did that!

Save your pittance and put it into something like Mark Berent's "Rolling Thunder", which also has the advantage of 4 sequels.

Give it 100 pages to get started, and 99%-on you will be looking for the first sequel Steel Tiger for sale on Amazon.

There is no comparison, Dancer is a cardboard war comic in novel-form