One of the most cherished books in my personal library
is a first edition hardback of Flight of the Intruder, by
Stephen Coonts, a novel about the decidedly un-glamourous
A-6A, its pilots, and the war it starred in. I promise I'll
do my best to prove the relevance of this statement to my
interest in flight-sims, but I'm hoping that those of you
in the audience who haven't read this book will accept this
reader's testimony that not only does this book enhance
one's interest in military aviation (and thereby, in the
games we love), but also proves one heck of a good read!
Everyone gabs about what a boring aircraft the A-6 Intruder
was; there was no flash and dash in its mission: it flew
in, it dropped bombs, it went home. Recently the remaining
fleet of Intruders was unceremoniously dumped into the
Atlantic to help form an artificial reef. In other words,
you're not likely to meet an ex hotshot Intruder pilot
boasting about his/her past exploits over Vietnam or Libya
or the Gulf. (Such nicknames as "The Iron Tadpole" doesn't
betoken a slick Hollywood dream plane, and in fact the film
based on this novel probably shouldn't have been made; the
producers might have paid heed to the old adage that the
A-6 pilots themselves champion, "Fighters make movies,
bombers make history."
The film was terrible, plagued with poor special effects
and even worse lines-Willem Dafoe squinting derisively at
his radar scope, saying, "I hate SAMs, man," wasn't going
to garner him any Oscars that year, needless to say.)
However, if you're one of the few who have only seen the
movie but haven't read Coonts, I urge you to rid yourself
of the notion that that flick even approaches the novel.
This is one case where the clichéd statement, "the
book was better than the movie," sternly applies.
Flight of the Intruder is the sobering tale of Jake
Grafton, a pilot ill at ease with his country's tentative
position on how to fight the Vietnam War, locked between
the jargon of politicians and an increasingly disenchanted
American public. The story sheds light on a U.S. leadership
that was, during the time frame of the narrative, still
naïve to the mistakes of a limited bombing campaign,
and evokes the disturbed cultural climate affecting the
rest of the nation.
But that's just the atmosphere of the novel: we come to any
story about Vietnam with those assumptions in place. What
Coonts does brilliantly is present a gritty tale of air
combat and the vast knowledge of technical detail that real
pilots were required to understand, as a matter of
survival. The opening scene alone has you racing along on a
low-level attack run, learning such cryptic diminutives as
VDI, ECM, ICS, (visual display indicator, electro-counter
measures, intercom system) and others. Through the course
of this book you really get to know the guts of the A-6A in
this pre-HUD era, when the pendulum of technical
development had barely begun to advance
In those days keeping track of everything going on in the
cockpit was quite confusing, let alone dangerous,
particularly when the pilots attention was devoted to
putting a load of iron bombs onto a mean little AAA
battery. (It's worth noting, if you weren't already aware,
that Coonts flew Intruders from the USS Enterprise in
Vietnam from 1970 to '73, so the guy knows what he's
talking about, clearly. But Coonts doesn't ride on his
Naval laurels alone-he's also a smashingly good writer.)
Grafton is haunted by the death of his bombardier-navigator
(BN) early in the novel, for whom he feels responsible. His
buddy was killed by, of all things, by small arms fire
during a routine bombing run. Contributing to this sense of
inner-conflict is Grafton's struggle with the moral
questions he must address with his conscience. He is
troubled with the prospect of writing to the BN's widow.
At one point a defensive Grafton answers the questions of a
civilian journalist, who seems perversely interested in the
harsh details of his actual bombing, knowing the effects
the war is having on the civilian population of Vietnam. In
another scene, an intelligence officer reveals to Grafton
how many "enemy" were killed on a mission Grafton flew,
saying he deserves a medal, and Grafton reacts with anger,
cussing the guy out and pleading for an explanation.
It's a scary moment, when you realize just what kind of
burden these pilots carried during and after the war. But
the text doesn't bog down with self-pity; it is more than
introspective in the sense that you "fly along" with
Grafton on a bewildering array of missions, sending fresh
light on these moral questions already looming in the
reader's mind, and taking you into the thick of battle.
In reading this book you come to realize that the mission
of the A-6 over Vietnam was anything but boring, and
certainly never glamorous. Coonts' descriptions of going in
over the beach on these night attacks at 400-500 feet,
unable to see anything but momentary flashes of AAA, give
me the heebie-jeebies. The flying and fighting of these
Intruder pilots in the black of night are akin to Luke
Skywalker's donning a blast shield and "using the force"
when he's in training with Obi Wan, blindly flying into
danger to bring weapons to bear.
There are also wonderful, tense battle scenes that depict
an "Alpha Strike" with large numbers of F-4 Phantoms, A-7s
and of course the ubiquitous Intruders, and a scene
describing the now archaic methods the pilots used to
deploy the Shrike missile. Detailed also are some
absolutely chilling carrier-landings, like a scene where
Grafton is flying the KA-6D tanker in a nasty storm. Its
edge-of-the-chair reading, so tense are the (oft failed)
attempts to trap aboard the pitching carrier. What really
stands out in my mind when I reflect on the book, however,
is the feeling of elation this guy had simply from flying -
not necessarily in combat, but just the sheer sense of joy
he derived from being at the controls of this nimble jet.
Now and then, in the book, a kind of lyricism shines
through all the technical errata.
Jake dropped through a gap between the clouds and descended
toward the sea in a series of hard turns, necessary only
because he whimsically chose to avoid the cloud pillars.
Now they were underneath. Just as the white cloud tops were
at a uniform altitude, so were the greyish-blue bases. Here
was a darker world, where the pillars cast shadows on an
otherwise brilliant sea. From this vantage Jake sensed he
had entered a temple without walls, a shrine composed only
of shadow and light. The men could never describe, even to
one another, the feeling that flying gave them: a sense of
perfection that only God-or maybe just bad luck-could take
away.
They saw the ship when they were ten miles out . . . .
Jake could monitor the progress of the planes on deck,
their wings still folded, as they moved toward the
catapults. He saw the machines on the catapults spread
their wings and saw the first two planes, an A-6 tanker on
a bow catapult and an F-4 Phantom on one of the waist cats,
simultaneously begin their journeys into the sky. At this
altitude and distance an observer had no sense of the speed
and violence involved in launching. The birds moved slowly
toward the deck edge, left it behind, then skimmed across
the surface of the sea like low-flying gulls.
It's from this God's eye vantage that we see the lush
terrain of Vietnam, in Flight of the Intruder, viewing at
once the country's beauty and devastation. It's a
compelling story on many levels: the sense of time and
place that the narrative evokes, the terse, exhilarating
action of "going downtown", the phosphorous trail of a SAM
lifting off, the smell of salt air sweeping over the deck
of the Shiloh in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Well, you ask, why is this guy bothering to rehash a novel
that was published twelve years ago? I happen to feel that
most simmers have quite literary minds; one need only creep
around the web for a while to see some of the glorious,
creative pages filled with illustrations and even
"war-stories" that have sprung up around the games we
enjoy.
Think about it: basically what we're doing when we load up
a game is constructing a fiction, like a writer, entering a
vivid and continuous dream in which we play out the role of
a pilot of one of these slick death-machines, aircraft with
so much thrust and bristling with so much weaponry that
they reduce a grown man to patriotic tears. Plus, with all
these bugs included free with sims these days, it takes a
healthy imagination to stay immersed in our virtual worlds!
If you like flight sims, my guess is this novel will appeal
to you.
On a more personal note, I treasure this book because I was
lucky enough to get one of the early first-edition
copies-no kidding! I was at the time living in Colorado and
my mother heard on the radio that this obscure Stephen
Coonts guy, a former Naval aviator who was then living in
Denver, was signing copies of his (still unknown) Flight of
the Intruder at a local bookstore. We went over to the
store and there was Coonts himself at a table full of
first-edition hardbacks, absolutely alone. No one was
paying any attention to him; he was still just an unknown
writer, but he was nice enough to strike up a conversation
with me about Navy flying.
I must admit I didn't know anything about the A-6 at that
point-I was twelve years old. It would be a couple more
years before I was up to absorbing all the Clancyesque
descriptions in this novel of technical data pertaining to
the A-6. (Now, certain movies popular during that time
period had put the idea into my head that, upon graduating,
I was going to Annapolis and I was going to fly the F-14
Tomcat into the face of our erstwhile enemies, the
Russians. Heartbreaking, isn't it? I even got up every
morning and did a little set of push-ups, pretending I was
in a cramped cabin aboard the U.S.S. Eisenhower.)
You remember that time: Reagan was still in power-there was
a kind of majesty in the air over the sheer power of the
U.S. Navy-tension was high with the Soviet Union. Little
did I know back then that the closest I would ever come to
carrier qualification was with the bored-sounding LSO of
Jane's ATF, telling me to "Go left, go right . . ." as I
shamelessly over-corrected on my great lumbering approach
to that dangerous heap of graphics, floating in the
disturbingly planar ATF ocean.
Anyway, Coonts was kind to me and he inscribed on the first
page of my book, "To Scott Purdy - hope a young aviation
enthusiast like you gets a kick out of this little Navy
flying story. Best Wishes, Stephen Coonts." Hey, people,
tell me that's not pretty cool- this was all before Coonts
knew he had a bestseller on his hands.
We're not talking prose on the order of F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Gogol, here; this is just a good compelling tale of air
combat over Vietnam. It's a patriotic text on certain
levels, and also manages to throw some light on the
mistakes our leaders made in that war. Beyond all that,
it's a pilot's story: the fear in waiting for the next
mission, the adrenalized rush of a low-level attack, the
moral uncertainty these guys faced, the bitter knowledge
that they might never come home. If you haven't read this
gem-an aviation classic-do yourself a favor.
