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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Smarter than the average fighter pilot., May 6, 2005
This review is from: War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam (Mass Market Paperback)
When I heard that Fast Eddie had written a book about his flying experiences in the Vietnam war, I had to check it out. He and I were classmates at Air Force Pilot Training, though he went on to fighter-pilot heaven while most of us took up lesser positions, and I wanted to see what he had to say. The day the book arrived from Amazon, I thought I would leaf through it and read it when I had time. No way. It captured me immediately and I read it straight through that night. I remember his being articulate, and, as expected, the accounts of his flying experiences are eloquent, poetic even. The nice surprise is that he is also very thoughtful about the political and personal stresses of that war. I am considering whether to rate the book five stars or four stars. When I saw that he had already reviewed the book and given it five stars (He is, after all, a fighter pilot.), I figured I'll give it four, just to bust chops. But I can't.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What the Captain means is..., August 25, 2006
This review is from: War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam (Mass Market Paperback)
Combat memoirs get written years after the events. During that time the bad gets erased in memory and the glory gets accentuated. It's way too easy to forget the puking at the back of the revetment and remember the John Wayne swagger that you never really had at the time. Heroism comes so easy in retrospect and from the safety of a position in front of a word processor screen that it is rare to really read honest admissions of the things that went bump and bang in those deadly nights. Ed Cobleigh (another Fast Eddie)tells about the war as it was in an assault on all of the senses. Sights, sounds, smells and feels come at you from all of the unusual places of a combat environment with a skill that few aviation writers have brought to the table before. I've been disappointed in way too many fighter pilot memoirs that turned out to be self-aggrandizment coated in public relations hogwash. This book is different. It's real. It's visceral. It's the way it was and the way I remember it as well. It wasn't a good war, but it was the only one we had and Ed Cobleigh went and did what was asked of him and hundreds like him. He shows very clearly what was good and what was bad about the conflict. This is must reading if one is ever going to hope to get a glimpse of the madness of that war. And, it ain't fiction.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Putting Men in the Machines, June 20, 2005
This review is from: War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam (Mass Market Paperback)
Vietnam-era combat pilots are too often overlooked. Their bombing campaign was one of our nation's costliest air offensives. Yet, for most Americans, it's the "grunts" on the ground who remain the face of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. Perhaps that's because so many Vietnam aviation narratives concentrate on technical details at the expense of human experience. In "War for the Hell of It," Ed Cobleigh has given us an arresting emotional account of one pilot's personal war. Forget "The Right Stuff." Cobleigh pierces that popular image and takes us inside the helmet of a USAF fighter pilot, circa 1969. His memoir is much more than airspeed and avionics, operations and ordnance. This is a book about warriors; the author just happens to fight his war from the cockpit of an F-4 Phantom II fighter-bomber. Cobleigh's account is unsentimental and unsparing. He's a relentless veteran, cold and competent. Over two tours and 375 combat missions he makes mistakes, he hates the enemy, he loses friends, and he copes by resorting to denial and detachment. Yet, for all his hard-won cynicism, Cobleigh refuses to surrender his humanity. This is a book about duty. Winners get out alive, and survivors are obligated to tell the truth. One reason why Cobleigh's memoir is so compelling is because it's not a straight chronology. Readers who expect dates and specifications will be disappointed. Instead, Cobleigh wisely chooses to tell his story as a series of vignettes that capture vivid on-the-spot impressions. It so happens that the father of one of my high-school classmates served with the USAF in Vietnam. Navigator in a Phantom, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. When he told us war stories, this is what they sounded like. "War for the Hell of It" resonates with noted Vietnam memoirs like Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War." If you enjoy this book, you might read Ed Rasimus's "When Thunder Rolled," another fine USAF memoir that covers the same period. It's past time that these men told their stories. We're fortunate that articulate writers like Cobleigh and Rasimus have decided to share theirs.
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